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In
Tasmania, our 29 councils represent about $2Bn of misspent monies. Elected reps
defend their positions so as they attend the bank and withdraw their ill-gotten
gains. Most/many are little more than lead-swingers of the highest order.
As
for the bureaucrats, they are increasingly unaccountable and are enabled to
operate in the dark. Moreover, typically they lack the expertise they claim for
themselves while they are paid to- much to do too little.
FROM THE DAILY NEWS
“So there I was, driving down
one of the busier stretches of bitumen in my neck of the woods, dodging
potholes that grow larger by the day, swerving to avoid piles of uncollected
rubbish, steering through large puddles of water because the drains have been
clogged for months and giving a wide berth to an unregistered dog weaving its
way through the traffic, when I was suddenly distracted by a new roadside sign.
Couldn’t miss it, actually.
It was one of those big-screen digital displays that often warn you to slow
down because of serious problems ahead.
But this was a sign from my
local council carrying a much more important community message.
This council, it read, “SAYS NO TO DOMESTIC VIOLENCE”.
It was at that moment that I
had a rare epiphany. It’s time to get rid of local government.
We pay rates to our local
councils so they can fix the potholes, collect the rubbish, clean the drains
and catch unregistered dogs roaming the streets.
We don’t pay them rates so
they can act like a Miss Universe contestant whose ambition in life is to foster
world peace while humming a couple of bars of Kum-Bah-Yah.
No one disputes the sad fact
that Australia is surely the most over-governed country in the world.
Not only that, but we are
increasingly governed by collectives of virtue-signallers
– people who have the need to loudly proclaim their moral values and preach
them incessantly until everyone else understands just how morally superior they
are.
And so we have a succession
of federal and state governments spending hundreds of millions of our dollars
every year on advertising crusades – sorry, “public safety awareness campaigns”
– imploring us to drink wisely, eat healthily, walk regularly and drive safely.
Sure, you can argue some of
those campaigns might have raised awareness about important issues.
Now I think about it, I’m
certainly seeing fewer fat people driving drunk on the wrong side of the road
while eating salt-laden hamburgers and washing them down with full-strength
Coke.
But it’s a bit rich when
local government bodies – always crying poor to justify regular rate hikes –
decide it is their turn to make public motherhood statements.
Of course domestic violence is an enormous problem
facing this country.
No one disputes its hideous
impact on victims, or that we need a united approach to stamping it out that
will involve an offensive on the cultural, gender and psychological fronts.
A lame sign on the side of a
road already cluttered with too many hoardings isn’t just simplistic.
It demeans a topic that
demands depth and courage, not flippancy.
But then, that is the
standard we have come to expect from many of our local councillors.
All of you surely know by now
that this is also the time of the year when the nation plays its annual game of
“Which inner-city council of hand-wringing virtue signallers will try and
ban/shift/rename Australia Day?”
In Melbourne, the City of
Port Phillip has passed a motion to mark Australia Day with a “morning of
mourning” before going ahead with an Indigenous welcome and citizenship
ceremonies.
In Sydney, the Inner West
Council has voted to scrap its Australia Day celebrations, including planned
fireworks and a “Citizen of the Year” presentation.
Again, Australia Day is a
fraught issue for many indigenous and non-indigenous Australians who quite
justifiably resent its presence as a day of national celebration.
It’s a view that all of us
should take into consideration.
But it’s not the sort of topic with which our
thousands of trumped-up, power-lusting local government representatives should
be concerning themselves.
The timing and tone of
Australia Day – and even more importantly, a greater appreciation of the
generational trauma experienced by the First People of this country since
settlement – is a national issue that should be debated and recognised by all
Australians.
Potholes. Bins. Footpaths.
Those are the priorities for our councillors across the more than 500 – yes,
500 – “cities” and “shires” that make up our third tier of government.
When they finally achieve
some skill in that area – and there is no sign yet of any proficiency gains
despite more than a century of Federation – then perhaps our councillors could
bestow their incredible insights and powers of reasoning on a subject quite
close to the hearts of all ratepayers and concerned citizens.
Their task? To examine the three bloated layers of
government in this country.
To tally up the billions of
dollars it costs us because of all the duplication and bureaucratic waste.
To understand that a great
nation is the sum of its people, not those who govern them.
Given their confidence in
their intellectual powers and ability to reason, it shouldn’t take them long to
conclude that the best motion they could ever pass would be to vote themselves
out of existence.
And that, surely, would be a
declaration worthy of any roadside sign.
Garry Linnell
was director of News and Current Affairs for the Nine network in the mid-2000s.
He has also been editorial director for Fairfax and is a former editor of The
Daily Telegraph and The Bulletin magazine
