{"id":8,"date":"2007-09-06T16:45:11","date_gmt":"2007-09-06T06:45:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/?p=8"},"modified":"2015-02-23T15:54:52","modified_gmt":"2015-02-23T05:54:52","slug":"queensland-government-plan-to-amalgamate-some-local-councils","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/queensland-government-plan-to-amalgamate-some-local-councils\/","title":{"rendered":"Queensland Government Plan to Amalgamate Some Local Councils"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>John Howard made the point that he hears constant whinging from states complaining that the federal government rides slipshod over state rights. Yet as he pointed out, here is the Queensland Government doing to local government, exactly what they complain about having done to themselves (and don&#8217;t they buck and squeal themselves whenever anyone mentions abolishing state governments).Western shires are huge and clearly should not be amalgamated. For further information visit Local Democracy.<\/p>\n<p>If you would like to read the Queensland State Government&#8217;s public spiel on &#8216;local government reform&#8217; visit their website.<\/p>\n<p>I read a transcript of an ABC interview with the CQU&#8217;s Professor of Regional Economic Development, regarding the proposed Queensland Local Government Reform.<\/p>\n<p>Professor Rolfe says there are 3 main benefits of amalgamating local councils:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8216;It&#8217;s like any business operation, the larger the scale the more efficient it is&#8217;<\/li>\n<li>Larger organisations have more bargaining power<\/li>\n<li>They&#8217;re short of specialist staff<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I fell about laughing when I read this list because it&#8217;s completely based on false assumptions. Professor Rolfe must have spent too much time locked up in the hallowed halls of universities, isolated from the real world. Because:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>As anyone in business knows<\/strong>, the biggest organisations are often the most IN-efficient. The benefits of economies of scale are very often counterbalanced by increased inefficiencies. Bigger doesn&#8217;t automatically = more efficient, it can sometimes mean the reverse, so it&#8217;s not good enough to simply state that bigger will be more efficient. In actual fact small-medium organisations are usually the most efficient.What the professor seems to not understand is that most local councillors in rural areas are very dedicated people who are already sacrificing a great deal of their own family and business time out of a sense of community duty. This is time that they are not paid for.To increase the size of rural councils would add to an already very large personal sacrifice because instead of travelling around 100km to attend the numerous community functions and council meetings, councillors would be required to travel many hundreds of kilometres each time.So whether or not councillors would be paid for all this extra travelling time and extra expense incurred by being away from their own livelihoods for longer, is really irrelevant. Increased travel time, an unavoidable effect of western council amalgamation, would instantly cause a reduction in numbers of people willing to serve on local councils.<\/li>\n<li><strong>You could amalgamate<\/strong> all the western Queensland councils and you&#8217;ll still only have a tiny population relative to what&#8217;s located on the coast, so no, amalgamation will mean diddly squat when it comes to real bargaining power. To suggest otherwise is laughable. These councils have joined forces to fight the proposed changes &#8211; so let&#8217;s see how their &#8216;increased bargaining power&#8217; works on this issue.<\/li>\n<li><strong>If a council needs a full time engineer<\/strong>, how does amalgamation with a neighbouring council that also has enough work for a fulltime engineer, actually help the problem if they still only have one engineer between them, but enough work for two?I would be very surprised if there were any middle managers currently employed on councils that did not already have sufficient work to keep them busy for standard working hours. Councils in less well settled areas have never had that sort of money to squander. Clearly if a council only has enough work for a part-time specialist then jobs should be shared with neighbouring councils, but otherwise, amalgamating the councils won&#8217;t fix the problem.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>There is a hint of a patronising tone, suggested by comments that there are objections just because &#8216;people are worried that things are going to be different&#8217; and that they&#8217;re worried they won&#8217;t be represented etc.<\/p>\n<p>Certainly there is a good case for examining altering circumstances in coastal regions where the population is growing. Amalgamation would obviously result in many benefits for joined cities such as Townsville and Thuringowa. But amalgamating councils in the regional areas away from the coast would lead to less efficiency, not more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>John Howard made the point that he hears constant whinging from states complaining that the federal government rides slipshod over state rights. Yet as he pointed out, here is the Queensland Government doing to local government, exactly what they complain about having done to themselves (and don&#8217;t they buck and squeal themselves whenever anyone mentions [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,8],"tags":[82],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4059,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8\/revisions\/4059"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}