Making Corruption Disappear in Local Government

Abstract

Local government corruption is a phenomenon across the world. This article draws upon survey work in Victoria, Australia, to show that citizens believe that corruption exists in local government and experience it, but rarely report it to an anti-corruption agency or elsewhere. Even when reported, tracing the outcome from state-level authorities to the local government becomes an exercise in futility, because the corrupt act is dealt with in policy frameworks that make it effectively disappear. As a result, corruption as perceived or experienced in the everyday life of citizens is different from what is defined in law and dealt with by public bodies. While the data here are Australian, the lessons and principles can be applied in many other countries.

Keywords:

• corruption
• local government
• bribery
• independent commission against corruption

Notes

The ANUpoll is conducted for the Australian National University by the Social Research Centre, Melbourne. The survey is a national random sample of the adult population aged 18 years and over conducted by telephone. In this survey, 2,020 people were interviewed between August 13 and September 9, 2012, with a response rate of 43%. The results have been weighted to represent the national population. The survey’s margin of error is ± 2.0%. Full details of the survey can be found at http://tric.anu.edu.au/sites/default/files/documents/ANUpoll_ethics_corruption.pdf.

Many street-level bureaucrats in Australia are employed at the state level—police, teachers, court officials, nurses, and so on. There is no clean division, as even the federal government employs street-level bureaucrats (e.g., Medicare), but the accessibility of council employees and elected council officials to the public places them all in this categorization for the purposes of this article.

While cemetery administration in Victoria is not technically part of local government administration, it is a very local activity.

The council is unnamed.