Professor Joseph Drew

This book is a bold prescription for local government reform that moves well beyond the old arguments regarding consolidations (also referred to as amalgamations) and co-operation (sometimes referred to as shared services) to paint a picture of an efficient, effective tier of government that strikes a balance between the right of persons to pursue their existential ends and the need to promote the common good. The book presents a system of local government that balances human dignity with the common good, restrains Leviathan, provides a voice for the disenfranchised (and even the disinterested), and delivers goods and services efficiently and effectively. Ironically, what is often argued to be the weakness of local government in many jurisdictions - the fact that it is merely a creature of statute - is also the best hope we have of making the oft cited rhetoric about how ¿local government is the closest to the people that serves the people best¿ become reality.

This book offers a general introduction to and analysis of the history, theory and public policy of Australian local government systems. Conceived in an international comparative context and primarily from within the discipline of political studies, it also incorporates elements of economics and public administration. Existing research tends to conceptualise Australian local government as an element of public policy grounded in an ¿administrative science¿ approach. A feature of this approach is that generally normative considerations form only a latent element of the discussions, which is invariably anchored in debates about institutional design rather than the normative defensibility of local government. The book addresses this point by providing an account of the terrain of theoretical debate alongside salient themes in public policy.

There has been a recent trend towards the use of performance indicators-often predicated on financial data-to enhance accountability and transparency of local government both in Australia and abroad. However, performance management also brings with it a range of risks including unintended and intended performance distortions. This chapter reviews the substantial scholarly literature on government performance management before applying the concepts to a particular instance of high stakes performance management: the New South Wales Fit for the Future programme. Fit for the Future required councils to self-assess against seven ratios drawn from financial statement data. Councils which failed to achieve the prescribed benchmarks were subject to forced amalgamations. Empirical evidence is provided which suggests significant levels of distortion in the performance management data. It is argued that careful design and testing of ratios-in order to avoid deleterious outcomes-is extremely important in any performance management regime, irrespective of whether accounting data from audited financial statements is used.

Population growth exerts an impact on both sides of the local government accounting ledger¿expenditure and revenue. Despite this fact, the vast scholarly literature on local government finance has been myopically focussed on expenditure functions. This apparent neglect to also consider the revenue side of the ledger is problematic because many regulators across the globe have exhorted local governments to pursue growth according to the assumption that it will promote fiscal health. In this article, we first set out a number of propositions that combine to cast some doubt on the common wisdom dispensed by local government policy-makers. Following this, we empirically explore the effects of population growth on revenue by making recourse to a comprehensive 10-year panel of revenue and population data. We conclude our work with some important public policy recommendations arising from the need to mitigate the prima facie surprising results that we obtain. Points for practitioners: Public policy architects have exhorted local governments to pursue population growth as a way to mitigate financial sustainability problems. However, this advice has been based on assumptions only and not subjected to empirical investigation. Econometric estimations demonstrate a negative association between unit revenue and population growth which means that the policy advice is likely to exacerbate financial distress. A number of changes could be made to local government taxation, pricing, and grants that would mitigate the deleterious effects of population growth on financial sustainability.

Deteriorating financial sustainability of local governments internationally has resulted in increased implementation of structural reform programs as a potential solution. However, the lack of a coherent framework to evaluate policy success has resulted in a myriad of approaches being applied by scholars, sometimes with conflicting results. This inconsistency is problematic given the importance of ex post analyses to the learning process, needed to ensure better decision-making and more efficacious interventions in the future. To address this gap in the literature, we employed the policy success framework along with a number of difference-in-difference analyses to assess the impact of amalgamation following a recent large-scale program. Moreover, in cognisance of the policy success literature, we also introduced a new innovation whereby we conducted empirical estimations on the disaggregated elements of total expenditure. We conclude with an enumeration of important lessons for policymaking and scholarly analysis.

Many local governments across the globe are facing financial sustainability challenges. Notably these challenges have emerged under extant democratic political institutions where the voice of the wider citizenry is often muted, and only heard at infrequent intervals and then in the context of assessing potential representatives according to a bundle of issues. Fiscal institutions such as balanced budget legislation and debt brakes may mitigate some of the financial sustainability problems faced by local government, but are often less than entirely effective owing to the acts of clever politicians who circumvent the spirit, if not the letter, of constraints. We propose a concurrent change to political institutions ¿ specifically the addition of a bi-cameral sortition chamber ¿ which we argue will inter alia enhance the efficacy of fiscal institutions implemented to arrest waning local government financial sustainability by introducing greater accountability, closer monitoring, and a more expedient pathway for censure and enforcement.

Natural Law philosophy asserts that there are universally binding and universally evident principles that can be determined to guide the actions of persons. Moreover, many of these principles have been enshrined in both statute and common law, thus ensuring their saliency for staff and institutions charged with palliative care. The authors examine the often emotive and politicized matter of (non-voluntary) euthanasia ¿ acts or omissions made with the intent of causing or hastening death ¿ with reference to Natural Law philosophy. This leads us to propose a number of important public policy remedies to ensure dignity in dying for the patient, and their associates.

While the bulk of the empirical evidence shows that municipal mergers do not improve the performance of local authorities, Australian policy-makers nonetheless continue to impose council amalgamation, as illustrated by the current New South Wales Fit for the Future local government reform process. This paper first critically examines the empirical evidence employed by the Independent Local Government Review Panel on the impact of the 2004 council mergers. We argue that this evidence is flawed. We then provide an empirical assessment of the municipal mergers, which occurred over 2000-2004 with our sample drawn from Group 4 councils in the New South Wales variant of the Australian Local Government Classification System. Group 4 councils represent a group of significant regional cities and town councils with similar operational activities. We demonstrate that merged councils have not performed any better than their unmerged peers over the period 2004 to 2014. The paper concludes with some brief policy implications for local government reform in New South Wales and elsewhere.

Local government plays a vital role in providing infrastructure, services and employment to rural and regional communities. Indeed, threats to the fiscal viability of regional councils may well jeopardise the sustainability of an entire community. In December 2013 the New South Wales (NSW) Minister for Local Government suspended Central Darling Shire (in far-western NSW) and appointed an interim Administrator in response to an unprecedented liquidity crisis. In October 2014 a public inquiry recommended extension of the period of administration until September 2020. This paper considers the processes leading up to this extraordinarily lengthy period of financial administration. In particular, we examine the claim that an inequitable allocation of Financial Assistance Grants (FAGs) was a major factor in bringing about the Shire's liquidity crisis. We conclude our analysis with some recommendations for changes to FAG allocations which will help ensure sustainable futures for rural communities.

Structural reform of local government through forced municipal mergers has occurred in a number of countries, including Australia, with mixed success. We argue that shared services arrangements by groups of voluntarily participating councils represent a superior means of securing the advantages of scale and scope in local government, without the heavy costs of the blunt instrument of compulsory council consolidation. However, in practice, the success of shared services has been inhibited in small regional, rural and remote local authorities by the costs of establishing and running shared service entities, which can swamp any savings from shared services. Taking into account the special characteristics of small non-metropolitan councils, we present a Common Service Model tailored to minimise establishment and transactions costs, maximise flexibility, and generate transparency.