President’s Comment
In each edition we feature the views of a Local Government Association
president. Our November issue features a comment from Councillor Damien
Ryan, President of the Local Government Association of the Northern
Territory (LGANT).
The August 2012 Northern Territory election resulted in a Country Liberal Party government, bringing with it the prospect of change, particularly for shire councils in the Northern Territory.
Unlike previous Northern Territory elections, where the outcome was usually decided in the northern suburbs of Darwin, this election was ‘won in the bush’ with seats previously held by Labor falling to the Country Liberal Party.
Some commentators said the change was solely due to people’s dissatisfaction with the amalgamation of councils in 2008 (from 63 to 16) and the perceived loss of community input and control once the new shires came into place. However, I believe there is a lot more to this election than just the performance of the shires and that there is a combination of factors at play, some of which have nothing to do with shires. In the following sections, I outline some of these factors.
Firstly, the accountability measures in place for shires are stronger than they were before amalgamation and some people have not liked the more stringent regimes and have therefore spoken out against them. Others are still coming to grips with the whole aspect of change in the larger shires.
There are also some who say that, since amalgamation, communities no longer have a voice. The reverse, however, is the case. There are elected members in place; the ratio of shire council elected members to residents is approximately one to 478 persons (which compares to one to 4268 persons for municipal councils in the NT), and most remote towns have one or more councillors.
Another contributing factor, in my opinion, is that the Commonwealth’s Northern Territory Emergency Response occurred at the same time as the shire reforms and people had difficulty separating local and Commonwealth government issues and responsibilities.
The rise in the use of social media has also meant that more people are airing their grievances online, particularly to newspapers, which have then tended to criticise shires and municipal councils.
A critical issue is that telecommunications and connectivity of information systems between multiple towns in a shire has been problematic, making it more difficult to implement customer service systems in relation to complaints, requests and enquiries.
Additionally, shires have been performing functions on behalf of other spheres of government, and those governments have often delayed implementation processes. This has caused significant angst within communities and the shires have suffered the bulk of public criticism as a result of their direct involvement and local presence.
The 2012 report commissioned by Desert Knowledge Australia, Fixing the hole in Australia’s heartland: How government needs to work in remote Australia, suggests that people in regional, rural or remote areas often feel ‘disconnected’ from and ‘disregarded’ by seaboard Australia, and that they suffer as a result of under development.
The report also says that the implementation of the ‘Royalties to Regions’ program in Western Australia is a good example for reversing this trend, as the benefits are spread more widely, as opposed to the norm, where people only ever hear about developments occurring in the major cities.
People living outside Darwin often use the term ‘the Berrimah line’ (Berrimah is on the boundary of the City of Darwin), largely due to the reasons outlined above.
As we move to a new phase in local government development in the Northern Territory, it is pleasing to note that the NT Government will have financial sustainability as a prerequisite for any new structural reform. While there are always matters of performance and improvement to pursue in local government, I am confident that some of the matters discussed above, in relation to shires and the Northern Territory election, will be considered in the changes.
