Crossing Boundaries: Action Networks, Amalgamation and Inter-Community Trust in a Small Rural Shire

Abstract

Local government reforms introduced throughout the mid-1990s radically altered the face, institutional form and structure of local government in the state of Victoria, Australia. In rural areas, where shire boundaries often reflected deeply ingrained notions of communal interest and identity, the forced merger of previously independent and fiercely parochial councils into larger unified political and administrative units was particularly contentious. Drawing on a survey of 649 residents from the rural Shire of Buloke, this paper examines attitudes towards local government amalgamation, levels of inter-community trust and reciprocity, and how these vary across different parts of the municipality. Social network analysis is then used to explore the relationship between these attitudes and trust levels and the structure and orientation of respondents’ inter-community networks. The paper finds that despite the passage of more than a decade, significant residual resentment surrounding the impact of the forced amalgamations remains evident across most communities in Buloke Shire. There is a widespread perception that the reforms have undermined rather than improved the operation of local government across the municipality, and that post-amalgamation political structures have largely failed to effectively reconcile the diverse and sometimes disparate interests of Buloke's constituent towns and communities. The network analysis also suggests that much work remains to be done to develop a meaningful sense of community based on the new administrative boundaries, with very little evidence of cross-community cooperation, coalition building or issue-based interaction detected.

Key Words:

• Local government amalgamations
• social networks
• inter-community trust
• reciprocity
• rural shire

Notes

 1. It may be argued though that similar benefits in expertise could be accrued through the pooling of resources via cooperative institutional arrangements such as Regional Organizations of Councils (ROCs) or Shared Service Agreements. See for example, Dollery, Grant and Akimov (2008).

 2. As Allan (2003) points out, despite the Kennett Government promising savings of 20 per cent as a result of its extensive amalgamation program, only 8.5 per cent were realised, the majority of this attributable to the introduction of compulsory competitive tendering (CCT). In South Australia, despite promising savings of 17.4 per cent by the government, only 2.3 per cent were realised. It should also be noted that the indirect costs of restructuring such as the loss of local knowledge in decision-making, the erosion of social benefits such as volunteering and participatory democracy, and the diminishing of citizens sense of place are rarely factored into these savings estimates (Dollery and Crase 2004).

 3. As Van Gramberg and Teichner (2002) note, nine of the 14 councillors on the MAV's management committee were appointed as paid commissioners in the newly amalgamated councils effectively sidelining them from debate on the issue. The appointment of CEOs to the new councils was also centralised with terms restricted to yearly contracts.

 4. As an indicator of the continuing salience of the amalgamation issue, in November 2006, simmering intercommunity tensions and competition over resources culminated in three of the eight elected councillors supporting a motion to approach the Minister for Local Government to request that the Shire be dissolved (Buloke Shire Council 2006). This motion was defeated. A 2007 review of electoral representation in the Shire carried out by the Victorian Electoral Commission also ensured that the amalgamation debate remained a live issue (See Victorian Electoral Commission 2007 for an overview of this process).

 5. As a comparison, a recent meta-analysis of response rates for mail versus web-based surveys (Shih and Fan 2008) reported a mean response rate of 45 per cent for the former. It is nevertheless worth noting that more than a quarter of the 39 studies examined in the meta-analysis reported mean response rates for mail-based surveys lower than the 24 per cent reported in this study.

 6. Initial testing revealed no significant differences in results across the five smaller communities. For this reason their results were aggregated.

 7. Because of their prior dominance, residents from the larger centres of Donald, Charlton, Wycheproof and Birchip arguably experienced a greater sense of diminishing autonomy, representation and local control over services as a result of the amalgamation process Responses to item 9 seem to support this conclusion with respondents in Sea Lake and the smaller communities more likely to agree that amalgamation had had little impact on their towns (See Table 3).

 8. The small community of Culgoa is the exception with local farmer Reid Mather serving as Buloke's Mayor.

 9. As a point of comparison, in this study 64 per cent of respondents across Buloke agreed that most people can be trusted. This is significantly higher than the Australia-wide figure of 54 per cent recorded in the Australian Bureau of Statistics 2006 General Social Survey.

10. The location of the council administration and the distribution of service functions across Buloke's major towns in the immediate aftermath of the reform process provide a useful study in how competition over resources has caused mistrust between communities in the post amalgamation era. Early indications from the appointed local government commissioners were that Shire services would be centralised at Wycheproof, the geographic heart of the new Shire. This initial commitment was overturned by a state-government imposed directive calling for a devolved model of service distribution to ensure that no one town bore the brunt of job losses associated with the reforms. Working within these parameters, a new plan which would have seen administrative offices remain open in all five major centres was formulated by the commissioners, only to be rescinded following a meeting to which community representatives of Donald, the largest community in Buloke, were not invited. (See Buloke Times, 1995: ‘Buloke decentralises services’, 30 May, p. 1; ‘Commissioners explain deployment of services’, 2 June, p. 8; ‘Donald on the outer’, 9 June, p. 1.) Perceptions that a loose alliance of three councillors from the Mount Jeffcott Ward and two (including the Mayor) from the Mallee Ward consistently controlled the council agenda in the decade following amalgamation also served as a continuing source of tension and mistrust, particularly between the communities of Donald, Wycheproof and Charlton.

11. Further analysis conducted across individual communities showed an almost identical polarisation on the amalgamation items based on network orientation. This suggests that the effects identified are independent of the influence of respondents from smaller towns who were generally more positive than the survey cohort as a whole regarding amalgamation and who happened to have more externally focused networks.

12. While research by Keeter et al. (2000) suggests that the impact of selection bias is likely to be marginal given the nature of the subject matter, further refinement of the research instrument aimed at minimising response burden and increasing the response rate is warranted. Such refinements might include shortening the questionnaire by removing sections on civic engagement and associationalism and reducing the number of name and resource generators used. More importantly, future research should consider incorporating a qualitative component to develop a deeper understanding of what drives or motivates citizens’ networking behaviour. Extending the social network approach used here to incorporate not only who individuals go to for help with a local issue, but also why these individuals and not others were chosen, represents a difficult but potentially valuable avenue of exploration for future research in this area.

13. These findings mirror those reported by Kushner and Siegel (2003) in their study of community attitudes towards local government boundary reform in Elgin, Chatham-Kent and Kingston, Ontario. This study, conducted two years after the reforms, reported significant levels of residual negative feelings about the amalgamations across the majority of communities. As far as the author is aware, it remains the only other study directly addressing the issue of post reform attitudes towards amalgamation.