First published in yesterday’s Sun Herald.
G’day. As we head towards NSW local council elections, has anyone else pondered the total disconnect between the behaviour of the Carr government and Mark Latham’s promise to help rebuild our communities by handing power back to the people?
Maybe it’s because I’ve been holed up at home for three months writing a book that this obvious problem for Labor in NSW has stuck out like a sore thumb as I’ve skimmed the papers.
Great speech in February, Mark, the one where you reported to the powerful what the people had been telling you during your travels as leader. “Governments need to create the space and opportunities by which civil society and community politics can thrive. To some extent, this means giving power away,” Right on!
“There’s a strong feeling in society that too much power has slipped from the people’s grasp and has been concentrated in the hands of big corporations and big bureaucracies. I want to see greater devolution of government power to the community.”
“In many cases, government needs to act as a junior partner to community effort, backing local initiatives and civil society. I also want to see greater public participation in the decisions of government.”
“For too long, the political system has been talking at people, instead of with them. It looks more like an elected aristocracy than a genuine democracy. Only by deepening our democracy can we encourage more people to get involved in civic life, rebuilding communities and social capital. I want this to be the hallmark of a Labor Government.”
Meanwhile, the NSW Labor government rips power away from the grassroots against the wishes of communities. Carr didn’t say a word about council amalgamations before the March 2003 election, although if you read the Australian Financial Review property section, you’d have known that’s what he planned as a reward to his Labor’s big developer donors. The plan was explicit – do forced amalgamations in the first year of a new term and hope the people’s anger would dissipate by the next election!
So after the election, Carr told voters they could not elect their local representatives as scheduled in September 2003, but would keep the old lot for another six months while councils considered amalgamations. No compulsion, we were promised. Another lie. There’s just been a forced amalgamation on the NSW north coast, and in Sydney the government ran a sham consultation over the summer holiday before forcibly amalgamating Sydney City Council and South Sydney Council in the dead of night to head off a legal challenge to its validity. The reason? To get a Labor controlled council, and thus State government control over development.
For all its faults, local government happens where we live, and we meet the decision makers on the streets and can look them in the eye. We can intervene when we’re unhappy by rocking up to the council meeting and having our say, and organising local campaigns and meetings.
Not only that, but local government is streets ahead of State and Federal governments in accountability terms. A councilor must declare any conflict of interest – and the nature of the conflict – before a decision is made. In State government, Carr and his ministers announce decisions without disclosing that the beneficiary is a big Labor party donor, and even sells access to companies wanting a favourable decision for thousands of dollars, again without disclosure.
The Carr government has a long history of stripping powers from local government and overriding them to suit itself. Only the Cape Byron Trust has survived as community land run by the community with profits ploughed back into the community. All the rest has been taken by the Sate Government to snatch revenue and rip it out of communities. It also starves local government by not letting it increase rates, and mandates that councilors get only $13,000 a year for what is often a 60 hour a week, desperately stressful job, guaranteeing that many people who want to contribute to their community can’t do so.
Each local government has to have a four year management plan setting out its objectives and its expected budget, which is reviewed quarterly to track how programs and budgets are going. The State government could have done with something like that, as we’ve seen in the year since Carr won office for a third term, when the results of top down government dominated by spinning perception instead of dealing with reality has become shockingly clear.
The trains are in disrepair after years of underinvestment. Our public hospitals are in crisis. Our water is running out, and Sydney is choking on population growth in the absence of any decentralisation planning.
My point is – how is Latham going to counter a Howard attack along these lines in NSW come the federal election? His pledges are intoxicating, but the reality of NSW Labor is toxic.
Maybe Latham hopes that NSW voters fully vent their spleen at Labor at the council elections, and elect non-Labor councils to protect themselves against a rapacious, power drunk, irresponsible State government.
Otherwise, Latham will have to hope Carr cleans up his act in the next few months, or tell NSW voters how he’ll take on the NSW Right if he wins office and give power back to the people despite Bob Carr.