Amalgmation saves money

• The quotation cited above is from a well-established body of research on prior amalgamations in other states and overseas. Such research has conclusively established that amalgamations produce increased expenses and poorer service delivery. One of the many books about this is Reshaping Australian Local Government: Finance, Governance and Reform by Brian Dollery, Neil Marshall and Andrew Worthington (eds), UNSW PRESS, Sydney, July 2003, 288pp

• Wendell Cox of Demographia (www.demographia.com), an internationally known public policy firm, reports the following on local council amalgamations he has studied the United States and Canada:

  “The only ‘economies of scale’ in larger governments are for special interest groups, which are able to exert control over larger government organisations with less effort and expenditure.”

  He goes on to cite how amalgamation of six local councils into a Toronto ‘super council’ dramatically increased costs, reduced efficiency, and is now producing a $600 million deficit. In summation, he states:

  “The move to ‘super councils’ is based on the false premise that we actually know how to plan large systems and that the bigger the entity the better the planning.  If this were so, the  Soviet Union would have been a raging success. All human experience shows the opposite is true.”

• The councillors and mayors that are eliminated through amalgamation are simply replaced with far larger council staffs and layers of state government bureaucracy. Councillors with double or triple the number of constituents expect larger paychecks, more staff, bigger offices for those staff, and more office equipment.

• Finally, even if this myth were true, government does not exist to force “efficiency” on us for its own sake, especially at the expense of democratic representation. Private industry can be quite efficient, but it is most emphatically not democratic.

Economies of scale

Like the previous point, this aspect of local government has been very well studied. The specific services of local government that benefit from larger sizes and those that benefit from smaller sizes have been analysed and catalogued. Check online, at your local library, or do a literature search at university for the wealth of information on this topic.

Noosa’s town plan

One of the first tasks of a ‘super council’ of the Sunshine Coast will be to come up with a new planning scheme. Noosa will have, at best, a one-sixth vote in that. To see what the other five-sixths will be, just look at the development philosophies enacted in Maroochy and Caloundra.

Yes, the local government minister at the time, Andrew Fraser (now Warren Pitt), has talked about preserving “some aspects” of Noosa’s planning scheme, “until they expire”. But under the state’s amalgamation laws, councils can ignore these retained planning schemes if there are “sufficient grounds” to do so. Those grounds are not defined...

Furthermore, we have learned not to trust much that Andrew Fraser says. At a meeting with Noosa residents on 10 July, he said that if all councils were as well-run as Noosa, no amalgamations would be necessary and that he would not support plainly unfounded amalgamations. He then rubber-stamped the LGRC’s recommendation to amalgamate Noosa.

For more information, see http://qld.greens.org.au/media-releases/greens-fight-noosas-noose.

Bigger councils are stronger

The challenges of effectively managing large organisations that span formerly different cultural, functional, demographic, or economic realms frequently defeat even the very best management teams. The Coles–Myer fiasco mirrors that of the Daimler–Chrysler merger, Viacom–CBS, Hewlett-Packard–Compaq, Glaxo–SmithKline, and many, many others. A number of the councils merged in Victoria in the 1990’s fared similarly and had to be de-amalgamated.

The best estimates are that three-quarters or more of mergers fail. If those multi-nationals’ management teams can’t get it right, what chance do merged councils have? Let’s learn from the mistakes of others rather than repeating them.