Social activist, Rev Tim Costello, challenges the managerial approach that is permeating Local Government, particularly in regard to human services delivery and community development. He believes using words such as business units, markets and stakeholders, with citizenship being replaced by customers or consumers, is a big mistake.
“By benchmarking everything according to the bottom line, our communities are losing their soul, values are being lost,” he said.
He questions the widely held premise that economic growth leads to happiness, pointing to the fact that surveys show, in spite of greater spending power, people feel less secure and have lost their sense of locality or place.
“Local Government is about governance and citizenship where people have a connection through rights and responsibilities,” Tim Costello said. “Customers only have leverage in terms of purchases and their wallets.”
He asserts that privatisation and ‘user pays’ causes us to forget we are communities, that there are things we can and need to share. Privatisation magnifies individualism, and the belief we cannot own things together because public ownership is wasteful.
“Public spaces are shrinking,” he continued. “Only if you have the spending power will you be able to use these areas.
“This leads to people only valuing private things. If you cannot pay your way, you cannot have a share, means the poor are becoming more and more marginalised.”
Tim Costello believes that with globalisation and the growing focus on community, Local Government must think about the soul of its community, how to encourage and nurture it.
“‘Is it just about the lowest price?’ is the profound question facing Councils,” he said. “Governance is about much more than service delivery at the cheapest unit cost, values must be weighted in. Competitive individualism has undermined our sense of cooperation, leading to a loss of duty to society. Everything we do is only what is in our own personal best interests.”
