Structural Reform of Local Government in Australia: A Sustainable Amalgamation Model for Country Councils

Abstract

Abstract. Council amalgamation has always been the major policy instrument for structural reform in Australian local government. While the Australian literature has spawned taxonomic attempts at classifying models of structural change in local government, a serious deficiency in this body of work has been the specification of amalgamation as an undifferentiated category embodying the unconditional merger of many small local authorities into a single larger entity. This paper seeks to remedy this problem by developing a model of sustainable amalgamation and contrasting it with unconditional amalgamation in using a stylised example derived from four existing Western Australian country shires contemplating consolidation.

Notes

This is evident from the findings of numerous public inquiries into local government. At the state level, the South Australian Financial Sustainability Review Board's (FSRB) (2005) Rising to the challenge, the Independent Inquiry into the Financial Sustainability of NSW Local Government's (LGI) (2006), the Queensland Local Government Association's (LGAQ) (2005) Size, shape and sustainability project, the Western Australian Local Government Association's (WALGA) (2008b) systemic sustainability study Inquiry, as well as the Local Government Association of Tasmania's (LGAT) (2007) A review of the financial sustainability of local government in Tasmania, all found that forced amalgamation was not the panacea for the ills of local government. Similar conclusions were drawn at the national level in both the Hawker Report (2003) and PriceWaterhouseCoopers' (PWC) (2006) National financial sustainability study of local government.

A useful literature exists on specific Australian ‘case studies’ of alternative models of local government, which includes the New England Regional Alliance of Councils (Dollery, Burns and Johnson, 2005), joint board models (Dollery and Johnson, 2007), the Walkerville model (Dollery and Byrnes, 2006), the Gilgandra model (Dollery, Moppet and Crase, 2006) and the Riverina East Regional Organization of Councils (Dollery, Marshall, Sancton and Witherby, 2004; Dollery, Johnson, Marshall and Witherby, 2005).