Former Councillor slammed for comparison full of caveats
BY LUCAS BAIRD
A Senior Lecturer at the UTS Institute for Public Policy and Governance has labelled a former Leichhardt Councillor’s attack on the NSW Government’s approach to local representation as a “radical misnomer.”
One-time Councillor and current member of the Leichhardt Local Representation Advisory Committee, John Stamolis, attacked the Department of Local Government’s “arbitrary” approach to the number of councillors in Local Government Areas on Wednesday 4th January.
In a written statement, Mr Stamolis compared the NSW system to London, and said Sydney would benefit from higher voter engagement if the number of seats in Council were uncapped, and represented a smaller portion of the area.
However, Dr Bligh Grant from the UTS Institute for Public Policy and Governance said while he could sympathise with Mr Stamolis, “from a former Councillor’s perspective,” there were many red flags in his analysis.
According to Dr Grant, the main problems stemmed from an “irrelevant” comparison to the UK because of many differences between their system and NSW’s.
For example, NSW has two houses of state parliament where the UK has none; making elected members more accessible to the public in this state, and the compulsory voting laws for local elections which are not in place in the UK.
Dr Grant also took issue with the opinion that high voter apathy in local government was a problem, “because local government isn’t that important in the grand scheme of things.”
The Department of Local Government also focused on the differing nature of the UK and Australia in response to Mr Stamolis.
“Any comparison does not really reflect the specific roles and functions of local councils, which differ greatly between jurisdictions.
“For example, in London there is no ‘State’ tier of government and local government plays a role in the provision of things such as education and emergency services and the council representation is designed to reflect that,” a spokesperson said.
The Department’s spokesperson also claimed that there was no intention to change the Local Government Act to allow more councillors than the current cap of 15.
“There is clear evidence in both NSW and other jurisdictions that consolidation has increased councils’ strategic capacity.”
“The NSW Government believes that councils need to be positioned to deliver high quality services and infrastructure now and in the long term. Strategic consolidation can help them to achieve these results, which is evident in council mergers in NSW, across Australia and internationally,” the spokesperson said.
Dr Grant is also against upping the cap, claiming “a massive council would not solve this problem [local representation],” but could instead pose a new one in “unwieldy” and “vexing” councils that struggled to get jobs done.
