As most readers will know, WALGA is an
acronym denoting the Western Australian Local Government Association.
If you are a ratepayer concerned about incessant
annual rate hikes resulting from increasing local government expenditure in
your neck of the woods, you may opine, with good reason, that WALGA is
emphatically not your friend.
According to its website, WALGA is an organisation
‘working for Local Government’ and which ‘advocates on behalf of 138 WA Local
Governments and negotiates service agreements’ for them.
I think the term ‘service agreements’ may
relate in part to WALGA’s
‘preferred suppliers program’, which among other touted advantages
relieves local governments of the need to call for tenders when procuring goods
and services.
WALGA offers assistance to local
governments in making CEO, Acting CEO and other senior executive
appointments.
The organisation’s involvement in that exercise
appears designed to ensure that senior ranks are often recruited from an assortment
of avaricious hacks—some having no formal qualifications of any kind and/or of
dubious reputation—who without regard to probity or efficiency are recycled
interminably at great expense most notably through WA’s rural shires.
Transparency
The draft of a WALGA submission dated
December 2015 to a parliamentary select committee describes the organisation as
‘the united voice of local government in WA’.
A cynic might see that as indicating there is
little or no room in WALGA’s deliberations for a significant diversity of
opinion, especially where the extra-contractual compensations of office are
concerned.
At WALGA’s annual conference in 2015, then
mayor of Vincent John Carey moved proposals to improve transparency and
accountability in local government affairs and procedures.
One of his proposals would have compelled
local governments to maintain an online register of gifts, travel expenditure
and hospitality.
Predictably, secrecy won the day. Mr Carey’s proposals were voted down.
Mr Carey expressed
his consternation "that the sector would not even consider an open
discussion and debate about future reforms for transparency”.
He
added: “Local government leaders
may think they can hide and run from transparency reform, but ratepayers deserve
this information, they have a right to it and we should make it as accessible
as possible."
Amen to
that, but the majority of WALGA’s members—including, I believe, the deputation
from our very own Shire of York—seems to have considered being open and honest
with the people they are elected or appointed to serve an unwelcome, probably
dangerous, intrusion on their privacy.
À propos of Mr
Carey’s remarks, WALGA’s president Lynne Craigie said: “I think you'll find local governments
are extremely good financial managers”.
Obviously,
she had had very little if anything to do with financial and asset management as
practised in the chaotic Shire of York.
Best practice?
In 2016, Mr Carey hotly disputed WALGA's
claim that it had ‘best practice’ policies on transparency and governance,
saying that WALGA’s values and aspirations were out of touch with those of
ratepayers.
He described
the local government sector as having “a long way to go in terms of
transparency and accountability”.
Mr
Carey—once characterised by senior WA journalist Paul Murray as a ‘metrosexual
lefty’—is now MLA for Perth and a minister and parliamentary secretary in the
McGowan Labor government. As
such, he will no doubt take part in framing the government’s forthcoming revision
of the Local Government Act—paying special attention, we should hope, to transparency
and accountability issues.
Let’s hope Minister
Carey and his colleagues give WALGA’s membership something to think hard about
in the years to come—or ‘going forward’, as our political and bureaucratic
overlords these days prefer to say in order, so it seems, to foster an illusion
of progress.
Attitude
The draft submission mentioned above was
the work of Paul Schollum, WALGA’s economic policy manager. It deals with issues of infrastructure
financing.
The submission accurately reflects WALGA’s
attitude to the funding of local government projects and services.
That attitude may be summed up as ‘Don’t
worry if you run short of money—just rip more cash from the pockets of
ratepayers. Squeeze them until the
pips squeak, they’re too stupid to care and much too lazy to vote’.
Such an attitude leaves little space for
unfashionable ideas like restraint in spending, ‘user pays’ and cutting your
coat according to your cloth.
Instead, it encourages the belief that
ratepayers are like Norman Lindsay’s Magic Pudding, an endlessly self-renewing
resource for local governments to tap copiously and at will.
‘User
pays’
This, as an example, is what Mr Schollum
wrote on the topic of ‘user pays’:
While charges are used for community infrastructure such as swimming
pools and recreation centres, the charges are typically set well below cost
recovery levels. This is because
Local Governments choose to subsidise these facilities due to their spillover
benefits such as improved social cohesion and better health outcomes for the
community.
To avoid misunderstanding, let me declare
plainly that I’m not one of those self-centred individuals who believe that
taxation of any kind is theft.
There are services and facilities provided by governments at all levels from
which everybody benefits and for which everybody ought to pay.
There’s no need in making that argument to
fall back on fashionable idiocies like ‘social cohesion’ that—unlike ‘better
health outcomes’—have no readily demonstrable existence and are therefore virtually
impossible to measure except perhaps at the extremes (for example, by the
absence of sectarian outrages, which is what most people would think of when
the phrase comes up in casual conversation).
Mr Schollum goes on to say that even with
regard to such facilities as car parks, regional airports and waste management,
where local governments rely increasingly on customer charges,
…there should not necessarily be the expectation that these services
should be fully funded by users.
Local Governments should retain the capability to use rates revenue to
subsidise certain services to achieve certain economic development,
affordability and equity of access issues according to the preferences of the
community.
Here, Mr Schollum, speaking for WALGA, has
unwittingly put his finger on the main reason why local government in WA is
essentially a gigantic empire-building, social-engineering rort with its tentacles
reaching out to embrace a bewildering spectrum of human activity.
Time was when a local government’s legislated
function was to deliver specific services to people living in the district for
which it was responsible. In
popular parlance, those services were usually summarized by the admirably
concrete phrase ‘roads, rates and rubbish’.
Of course, there’s always been more to
local government than that. From early days, the sector’s other
responsibilities have included town planning, public health, libraries, and caring
for parks and open spaces.
In our climate, it made sense to add
swimming pools to the list and to subsidise entry charges. This is one area where ‘equity of
access’ actually matters. Another
is the provision of libraries and support for community resource centres.
The focus was as it should be on services
available to everybody from which everybody—young or old, able-bodied or
disabled, straight, gay or optionally gendered— can benefit in a tangible way.
‘Economic development’ is the job of industry
and commerce working with state and federal authorities. It is not something local government is
likely to do responsibly and well or with proper regard to the interests of
ratepayers.
Nor is ‘community development’, which
whatever it means is best left to members of the community acting on their own
initiative rather than to local governments, which tend on the whole to spend
too much on it or stuff it up altogether.
Recreation
centres
Mr Schollum mentions recreation
centres. In York, we have a
recreation centre that has cost many irrecoverable millions of dollars and
gobbles up a hefty slice of the ratepayer dollar every year.
The centre houses a bar and restaurant that
offer subsidised grog and grub—subsidised, that is, by ratepayers most of whom
don’t eat or drink there—and runs at a considerable loss, with ratepayers
picking up the tab.
It forms part of a sports complex with
artificially turfed tennis courts and bowling greens that cost ratepayers a
fortune to replace and maintain.
The Shire has invited the sporting clubs to
take over the management and operation of the centre. That was supposed to have happened several years ago. However, the clubs have declined to
accept that invitation with the feeble excuse that they can’t drum up the
requisite volunteer labour—an objection that does them very little credit.
In consequence, the Shire has decided to
add to the ratepayers’ financial burden by employing a batch of new staff to do
the jobs that sporting club volunteers ought to be doing but can’t or don’t
care to do.
In effect, the Shire is running the centre
as if it were a business in competition with local private enterprise, except
that it will never make a profit and will have to be bailed out year after year by
the hapless York ratepayer. This
is most obviously true of the bar and café, which if privately owned
would have long ago slid into liquidation.
Expectations
Most of us don’t expect the community at
large to fund our hobbies and pastimes. The sporting clubs used to manage their own premises
and activities, with an occasional leg-up from the Shire. My impression is that many club members
look back nostalgically on those days.
These days the clubs have well-founded
expectations that the Shire will foot the bill for their recreational
activities and expect little or nothing in return.
‘User pays’ was once the default position,
subject when necessary and justifiable to degrees of variation. Not any more, thanks in no small
measure to the backstairs lobbying of organisations like WALGA that see extorting
money from taxpayers and ratepayers as the answer to all the world’s ills.
And
now, on a lighter note…
Every year, WALGA holds a conference or
gabfest where councillors and senior executives from local governments meet to
exchange inspiring thoughts and discuss challenges and opportunities
confronting the local government sector.
This year’s conference will be held from
Wednesday 1 August to Friday 3 August at the Perth Convention Centre.
Conferences usually have a theme, and this
one is no exception. This year’s
theme is ‘Ready and Relevant’, though at present ready for what and relevant to
what is not entirely clear.
However, the list of keynote speakers may
give us a clue.
The list comprises a comedian (of course);
a former ambassador to China; a ‘research based futurist’ (figure that out if
you can); a woman from New Zealand who founded a hip-hop group consisting of
persons of very much riper years (ages 73-90), some of whom may soon find themselves hip-hopping down Cemetery Road; and a speaker from Canada who will
wrap up proceedings with an ‘insightful and hilarious outsider’s take’ on what
participants experienced (in other words, another comedian).
None the wiser? Well, the proceedings will include a panel session. The panel will
comprise a former Tasmanian senator who resigned her seat on discovering she
had dual nationality; a former NSW premier and foreign minister in the closing
days of the ill-fated Gillard/Rudd government; another former senator, recently
named as ‘one of the Top 100 Global Influences on Gender Policy’ (from ‘Safe Schools’
to ‘Safe Town Halls’?); and a prominent WA journalist and media personality who
allegedly declined when invited to assist the York community in its drawn-out
battle against a multinational landfill corporation.
A cricketer who specialises in left arm wrist spinners, otherwise known
as ‘chinamen’, will host the conference breakfast. (I suppose it may have been confusion resulting from that which prompted the invitation to His Excellency the former ambassador.)
Still puzzled? #MeToo. We’ll just
have to wait and see.
Meanwhile, I’m told that the conference
will open with the WA Symphony Orchestra playing a selection of works by the contemporary Italian composer Giuseppe Masturbani.
*******
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
People of the same trade seldom meet
together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a
conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776), Ch.X Part 2
