Each edition we feature the views of a Local Government Association President. The following is from Mayor Brian Hurn, OAM, President of the Local Government Association of South Australia.
Signing a five year agreement which secures $75 million of State Government funding for Council libraries in South Australia is perhaps one of the more important events of my presidency.
To many SA Councils, the signing in early May of the agreement may be taken for granted – after all, we are used to having medium term written agreements on funding negotiated between the Local Government Association (LGA) and the State Government. Apart from the obvious financial benefits to public library services of this support, there are many less obvious benefits.
While Councils and others have looked closely at the content of the agreement, I would like, in this publication, to focus some attention on the benefits of ‘agreement’ itself. Perhaps the greatest benefit to Councils of such agreements is the level of certainty it brings to the task of planning future service arrangements.
The reality is that trust is not a hallmark of intergovernment relations. On one hand this may be frustrating, but on the other it is an element of our pluralist democracy which protects communities from ‘monopolistic’ government action.
What we – and in this instance, the Minister for the Arts, Diana Laidlaw – have done is to significantly increase the level of trust by ‘putting it in writing’ for five years.
Vying with that however is the significant benefit to both State and Local Government of applying expertise to negotiations once, rather than to have all Councils (68) directly involved. In SA, this would not be possible without effective communication and trust between Councils and the LGA, and without a highly effective professional body networking Council library professionals – the Council of Library Administrators of SA (CLASA).
It is also important that such agreements are not inflexible barriers to reform. In SA we have built in appropriate review arrangements and the agreement provides a structural incentive to find efficiencies in central support services.
Our central purchasing, interlibrary loan and central collection arrangements in SA – the envy of other States – are funded from the same funds which provide operating and materials grants to Councils.
This means that if we find ways to streamline, improve or reform those central services, the benefits will flow to libraries and hence library users, and while State Treasury does not get the financial benefit this time – it does achieve its ‘greater efficiency’ aim.
Another important facet is that the agreement sets up a joint process to identify how we are achieving the objectives which justify the State funding, not to measure how Councils choose to manage their service locally (which is and should be a local and Local Government sector responsibility) but to ensure the equity and support aims of the State are being achieved.
The sorts of benefits which derive from such effective management of State/Local relations are enormous and warrant greater attention. A reverse example is the Food Bill 2001 which entered the SA Parliament in March.
It is the first to be derived from the COAG agreement on food safety reform and it is very apparent that these reforms have suffered greatly from a lack of Local Government involvement at the national level.
The COAG agreement’s inclusion of the ALGA as an ‘observer’ in the new Ministerial Council on Food is a small and overdue step in the right direction. Perhaps those involved in food reforms nationally could benefit from looking in SA’s public libraries?
