Despite winning an award for efficiency, and despite many years of Labor majority, most Illawarra residents feel there is something wrong with Wollongong City Council.

We feel it is unresponsive and remote. We feel it is not 'ours' - that it responds more to the needs of developers and insiders than citizens. We sense that it defines citizens as having only two needs. Firstly, for efficient services. Secondly, for 'jobs at any cost' - when 'jobs' means that council is widely seen as a developers' council, and communities are affronted by imposed, ugly and short-sighted developments.

This is a very narrow view of local government. It has at least two important elements missing -

• an exciting and inclusive vision for the future of the Illawarra; and
• ways citizens can actively contribute their energy and intelligence to creating a better Illawarra.

The consistent theme has been about the need for more 'democracy'.

There are very few ways Illawarra citizens can become involved in the government of their communities and neighbourhoods.

There are technocratic 'public consultations' - always after council has made up its mind. There are elections - at four yearly intervals. And there are neighbourhood committees whose purely advisory role convinces most residents that participation is a waste of time.

Although there are many complaints about the personalities on council, I believe that the real problem of local government will not be solved simply by electing a new set of councillors, because the real problem is structural.

The structural problem is that the 'level of government closest to the people' has evolved into a disastrously unbalanced kind of government.

Local government consists of two parts - the managerial part, properly concerned with efficiency. And the democratic part, which should be concerned with defining and acting on the public good. The relationship between these two parts is now out of balance. A hundred years ago a typical council would have a dozen councillors and a dozen administrative staff. However in 1999 Wollongong City Council still has has about a dozen councillors - but it has over 900 staff. Further, most of these staff are now professionals engaged in complex managerial functions - each with it's own technical jargon and weighty body of systematic knowledge. Yet we have the same 13 amateur councillors we probably had a century ago. Most of these councillors are volunteers with busy day jobs (except the Lord Mayor who has a full-time position). Yet they are supposed to oversee the business of this immensely complex bureaucracy, as well as representing the needs and problems of 180,000 residents.

In other words, over the last hundred years the managerial side of local government (where efficiency rules) has swelled to huge size and complexity, while the democratic side (where the public good should rule) has withered to, by comparison, almost inconsequential size - a proverbial pimple on a pumpkin.

(Many people would argue that simple numbers don't matter - that the problem is more complex than just the number of councillors versus the number of managers. That's true - it is not just the number of people that counts. What matters is the amount of intelligence they bring to bear to the business of government. But if you consider the balance of intelligence, the problem is even more acute, because councillors have at most only a few hours a day to think about their decisions, and these decisions often involve very difficult judgements about complex interests. Figuring out the public good lies in these matters is much harder than administering a system because the public good is different in every case and it requires lots of information, plus delicate care and imagination to fairly balance complicated human interests in ways which are fair. So getting the public good right should require more intelligence than simply administering a system.)

This relative withering of the democratic 'public good' side of local government is actually made worse by party politics. In Wollongong City Council, actual decisions are made in secret by a 7-member ALP caucus. No wonder people feel their local government is unresponsive and remote.

I believe that the reason we seem to have 'lost' our local government is because of this imbalance between the managerial and democratic sides of council.

The obvious solution is to beef up the democratic side by increasing the amount of intelligence available to consider the public good. There could be many ways to do this and the best way to discover good ideas is to look around the world and see what actually works.

Cities in the USA have much stronger democratic traditions than cities elsewhere in the developed world and demonstrate successful models of local democracy at work, so they are a clear starting point.

US models of neighbourhood democracy

In most US towns and cities there are elected levels of government below the 'city council' level. American citizens elect a surprising variety of their officials and representatives - including judges, police chiefs, fire chiefs, school boards, parks boards, and district or neighbourhood councils.

The district council model is most relevant here. Here are five good examples -

In Birmingham, Alabama, there is a three-tiered system in which neighbourhood officers in over 95 neighbourhoods are elected every two years. The neighbourhood associations form the base of the system. Broader 'communities' encompass several neighbourhoods apiece, and a Citizens Advisory Board is composed of representatives from each of these communities. Each association communicates with all households in its neighbourhood through a monthly newsletter, decides how its federal community allocations are spent, and works with community resource staff to find solutions to neighbourhood concerns. This structure was the first to bring blacks and whites in Birmingham into a common vision for the city.

Dayton, Ohio, has a system of seven Priority Boards whose members are elected by precinct through mail ballot. Each Priority Board area is divided into neighbourhoods, which overlap the precinct boundaries. The system is seen explicitly as a two-way communication channel between government and citizens. Through leadership training; a monthly council meeting of each board and representatives of major city agencies; annual neighbourhood needs statements; and a wide range of neighbourhood-oriented planning initiatives and self-help programs, citizens learn how to make their voices heard. In return, the city communicates its plans and progress to all neighbourhoods through a Priority Board staff based in a neighbourhood office and makes its case for needed change on a wide range of matters.

Portland, Oregon, has a city-wide system of autonomous neighbourhood associations, with seven District Coalition Boards pulling together more than ninety neighbourhood representatives. Each Board, hiring its own staff and working out of its own office, is under contract with the city to provide 'citizen participation services' to its own community. The administrative budget alone was more than US$1.2 million in 1986-87. The system consciously balances the coalition advocacy, annual neighbourhood needs reports, crime prevention teams, and individual neighbourhood issues with a wide range of city-wide participation initiatives. These initiatives include Budget Advisory Committees (BACs) for every major agency plus the 'big BAC' for the city as a whole, comprehensive neighbourhood based planning, self-help development grants, technical assistance, and citizen mediation program. City officials take pride in the multiplicity of participation routes.

St Paul, Minnesota, is divided into seventeen District Councils, each elected by residents of the council area. Every council has a city-paid community organiser and neighbourhood office, but virtually all other efforts come from volunteers or additional funds raised by the council staff. The District Councils have substantial powers, including jurisdiction over zoning, authority over the distribution of various goods and services, and substantial influence over capital expenditures. A city-wide Capital Improvement Budget Committee, composed solely of neighbourhood representatives, is responsible for the initiation and priority ranking of most capital development projects in the city. Community centres, crime prevention efforts, an early notification system for all major city agencies, and a district newspaper in virtually every council area help to make the system one of the most coherent and comprehensive in the United States.

(All examples from The Rebirth of Urban Democracy, J.M. Berry, K.E. Portney and Ken Thompson, The Brookings Institution, Washington, 1993, p12-13.)

Compared to Wollongong City Council, the capacity for citizen participation in these US cities is impressive.

These cities have not developed strong citizen participation over many years simply because it seemed like a good idea. It delivers healthy social and political outcomes.

In the above study these cities (with what the authors call 'strong democracy') scored better than other US cities on factors such as sense of community, racial tolerance, community confidence in government, increased respect for government institutions, and enhanced civic skills and knowledge, especially amongst low-income people.

These are all big deficits in the Australian system of government, where local councils are universally treated with cynicism and suspicion, and where the community as a rule lacks the 'democractic skills' of effective and positive civic participation.

In Wollongong, I believe that this type of civic participation could also be explicitly linked to economic prosperity and employment. It is clear that the 'globalist' style of economics (where communities compete - often ruinously - to lure overseas capital) has specifically failed the Illawarra for the reason that Sydney is a vastly more attractive magnet for capital. A place like the Illawarra cannot afford to wait around to be saved by investors. We have to remake our own society and be responsible for ourselves. The essential ingredient in this alternative style of economic development is to build the capacities of individuals and communities to affect their own destinies. Part of the capabilities needed are business skills, and capital will always be essential. But confidence is also vital and this can be discovered through the experience of civic participation. Confident communities can take control of issues like crime in ways that government alone cannot. Stable healthy communities are also more attractive places for investment.

A model of the Illawarra

We already have a precinct committee system - the result of a hard-fought campaign in the early 1990s.
The logical step is to build on it. This could be done in quite a simple and straighforward way ­

• elect the committee positions;
• appoint a full-time secretary for each committee;
• align the precinct committees with the Wards to make a stronger linkage with responsible councillors (therefore reducing the number of committees from 10 to 6);
• allocate significant budgets (e.g. a dedicated 1% of all rates would give $100,000 for each of the six precinct committees - these could be increased by grants from state and federal governments);
• make the committees compulsory first stops for major development applications;
• incorporate the committees into council corporate planning, so they influence priorities for council spending;
• permit the committees to spend their rates allocations on any matter which council could legally spend money on.

Where to from here

The first step is to consider more carefully the benefits of local democracy and decide if this is a goal worth the effort of pursuing.

The next step would be to discuss and agree on general model. Tthere are so many possible variations of local democracy so the important thing is to agree on local democracy of this type, rather than the exact details ­ the details could be decided in a public consultation process by a sympathetic council prior to enactment.

If this general model is worth pursuing, then we need to write it up and obtain endorsements from every active community group prior to the September local government elections.

- Les Robinson  8/3/99
 
 

Back to Reforming Local Government