Wipeout: Role of Forced Local Government Amalgamation Debacle

The count of the WA state election is not yet finalised, but it is clear that the Liberals have taken a hammering - so much so that, as Jessica Strutt has observed, hardly any (actually 3) of their lower house MPs have any experience of being in opposition. And of those, one has experience in Victoria not WA and another (Colin Barnett) is unlikely to stay very long.

There is already a lot of soul-searching among Liberals and comment (not really analysis) in the media, with common targets for blame being:
- the 'it's time' factor, coupled with Barnett's personal unpopularity
- the One-Nation preference deal
- the state's financial situation
- Roe 8/Perth Freight Link
- end of the mining boom
- Australia's highest unemployment
- failure of Barnett/Turnbull to address WA's GST return

All of these are important, but one thing has barely rated a mention and yet the decline in Liberal/Barnett fortunes can be traced back to it - that is the debacle of Barnett's local government so-called reform.

The duplicity of Barnett, having stated in the lead-up to the 2013 WA election that there would be no forced local government amalgamations and, moreover, forcing Tony Simpson into an embarrassing backdown after he stated that forced amalgamations were Liberal policy, kick-started a grass-roots protest that
- spread like wildfire across much of the metropolitan region, comparable to but more widespread than the Roe 8 protests;
- forced the Local Government Advisory Board to abandon all but one of the Minster for Local Government's proposals;
- resulted in three proposals being subject to binding polls that all resoundingly rejected forced amalgamations; and
- saw Barnett forced to backdown on all the amalgamations and, to use his words, "fly the white flag".

I attended many community meetings during that time and one common reaction was people's saying they had voted Liberal all their lives but would never vote Liberal at state level again.

And that is exactly what happened. As Antony Green has pointed out, a very large part of the precipitate fall in the Liberal primary vote went, not to protest parties such as One Nation, but directly to the ALP.

Look at the areas where the grass-roots protest movement really took hold (Kalamunda; Serpentine-Jarrahdale, Mundaring) and you will see a litany of seats previously held by the Liberals falling to Labor. From holding all of the hills seats, the Liberals now hold none.

Other areas (eg Cockburn; Kwinana) were already Labor but now look to be impregnable.

The seat of Perth (which includes most of the City of Vincent) has fallen back to Labor with a bang, no doubt mobilised by the highly-effective 'one-in, all-in' campaign initiated by then Mayor Alannah MacTiernan and strongly followed up by her successor (now member for Perth) John Carey. Barnett's intention to split the City of Vincent between Perth and Stirling and the strong community reaction against it no doubt put the seat of Perth from marginal Liberal to safe Labor.

DAPs To Start Feeling The Heat

Further to the previous post on the South Perth successful court action on DAPs (http://ianrker-vincent.blogspot.com.au/2016/02/david-slays-goliath-again.html), Vincent Mayor John Carey is moving a motion at tonight's briefing meeting that Council work actively to reign in the DAPs. Tonight's meeting is a briefing and the actual decision will be made next Tuesday (8th March). You can address either tonight's briefing or the Council Meeting on 8th March.

Councillor Elizabeth Re, City of Stirling, has emailed the dapaffectedcommunities group to say:

I am sorry I cannot attend the Tuesday council meeting tonight at the Town of Vincent as I will be attending the City of Stirling meeting whereby I have put forward a similar notice of motion to stop the DAP’s  at the City of Stirling  council meeting tonight.

The more Councils formalise their opposition to the DAPs (or at least the way they currently over-ride local communities and planning schemes), the more likely action to reign them is - especially with the next state election being just 12 months away. So lobby your own Council, if you can, to pass similar resolutions and make the DAPs a central issue in the next state election.

Remember, the DAP debacle comes on top of failed forced local government reform, reneging on MAX light rail, the contentious Perth Freight Link, failures of hospital programs and out-of-control state debt.

Roe 8 Decision Highlights Deeper Malaise

No doubt many words will be written and spoken (and cartoons drawn), and rightly so, about the Supreme Court decision invalidating the environmental approvals for the contentious Roe 8 highway project across the Beeliar wetlands.

For those who want to find out more, the judgment can be downloaded from http://decisions.justice.wa.gov.au/supreme/supdcsn.nsf/judgment.xsp?documentId=4DC12FEF66845A8248257F1D00095F93&action=openDocument&SessionID=EA3F2IOG9F.

The Editor of the West Australian is increasingly isolated in supporting Roe 8 and the broader Perth Freight Link, which flies in the face of decades of bipartisan freight planning for Perth and WA - and was cobbled together only to 'replace' MAX light rail funding when then-PM Tony Abbott said the federal government would only help fund road infrastructure, not public transport.

In finding that the Environmental Protection Authority ignored its own policies, Chief Justice Wayne Martin highlights the politicisation, incompetence or worse that has infected too many important decisions of public service and so-called independent agencies. Even now, Barnett's response is that Roe 8 will go ahead because he'll find a way around the Supreme Court's judgment.

There is another court case in progress that highlights precisely the same issue - this one about the Development Assessment Panels (DAPs) ignoring the requirement to have regard to local Town Planning Schemes. Wayne Martin's judgment will give great heart the many who are aghast at the DAPs' riding roughshod over long-standing community expectations that have been enshrined in their local town planning schemes, which have the status of law under the Planning and Development Act, 2005.

Why is it that we can no longer trust our governments or agencies that supposedly represent our interests to do so impartially, intelligently and with integrity? Why do we have to resort to the courts to ensure that they do the jobs they were elected (no mention of the PFL in the 2013 WA election) or employed to do?