KNOW YOUR ENEMY: WALGA

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.

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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