Geographies of local government

1 INTRODUCTION

The geographical study of local government is fundamental to understanding how questions of power, politics, and public services play out across individual places and communities within a nation or state. Because of the contingent nature of local government in Australia, its study also provides a window into the power and politics of state governments. 1 For much of Australia's history as a nation, local governments have existed only because of legislation enacted by the states and territories. Local governments are not now recognised in the Constitution of Australia nor were they ever recognised in any state constitution until a wave of amendments between 1979 and 1989—recognition that was “inserted by ordinary legislation and can be repealed in the same way” (Roth, 2013, p. 3). In short, they remain without constitutions of their own. As a result, local governments continue to rely on state governments for their existence, revealing along the way much about certain whims at that larger jurisdictional level.

Geographies of local government continue to evolve. Local governments in all mainland states have undergone rounds of amalgamations over the past 30 years—the most recent being in New South Wales in 2016—and there are calls for amalgamations in Tasmania. In 2014, several local governments in Queensland underwent a round of deamalgamations unprecedented in Australia. The Australian Government began to play a more direct role in funding local governments across the country from 1973 (Walmsley, 1984) and has become more active in collaborating with local governments since around 2015. This increased activity has included the creation of a federal ministerial portfolio for cities in 2015, and the establishment of city deals and regional deals that provide agreements between all three levels of government administering chosen cities and regions to coordinate and develop infrastructure and social policies for those areas, for example, Geelong, Townsville, Western Sydney, Albury–Wodonga, and Hinkler (Bundaberg and Hervey Bay). These changes in the administrative geographies of local government will have impacts on social, economic, and political geographies throughout Australia that should be the subject of new research. In the meantime, it is useful to take stock of existing research on geographies of local government, as this virtual issue seeks to do.

There have been continuous academic discourses in Australia on various questions of governance at the local level—such as those on neoliberalism, state government, local planning, local inequality, and community participation. Yet, the specific subject of local government as a type of administrative entity has rarely been the central focus of a continuous strand of scholarly discourse, appearing instead as an occasional tangent to those other discourses. As a result, arranging the studies that make up this virtual issue in chronological order would have revealed little about the structure of scholarly thinking on local government. Instead, this introduction seeks to give structure to the existing research by selecting and grouping studies by a thematic framework, which may then be used to identify gaps in the literature and opportunities for future research.

The thematic framework is formed by three guiding questions. First, what are the geographical extents of local government entities in Australia, how have those extents changed over time, and what determines those extents? In other words, what shapes the administrative geographies of local government in Australia? Second, what are the social, economic, and political impacts that result from those administrative geographies? Third, what are the structural relationships, notably between the different tiers of government, that shape the system of local government overall, both the administrative geographies and their impacts?

The scholars whose studies make up this virtual issue have investigated several aspects of these questions. In response to questions of administrative geography, many have reflected on the intentions and impacts of state governments' decisions to alter their internal administrative geographies of local government areas, such as through council mergers and amalgamations. In response to questions of economic impacts, several have considered questions of inequality in the provision of local government services or local differences in state government services. Finally, in response to questions of structural relationships, other scholars have interrogated the power dynamics between state and local governments and the populations they serve. In each of these three groupings, there are one or two late 20th-century studies mentioned in passing that indicate broad preoccupations within the theme, one key recent study that provides important findings that help structure current thinking about the theme, and a number of other recent studies that flesh out other areas of thinking around those key studies. These studies are all introduced in more detail below, before a discussion maps out opportunities for new research.

2 ADMINISTRATIVE GEOGRAPHIES

The most fundamental power that Australian state governments hold over local governments is the ability to create, abolish, divide, and merge them; that is, to reshape their administrative geographies. Throughout the country's European history, colonial and state governments have evoked this power frequently for various purposes. An early study by Logan (1966) describes how local governments grew in number during the period of colonial self-government (1850–1900) as Australia's settler population increased and dispersed across relatively isolated parts of the continent. The trend since federation has been for state governments to steadily reduce the number of local governments through council mergers—from 1,067 councils in 1910 to 826 councils in 1991 (Dollery, Crase, & O'Keefe, 2009) and to 537 councils in 2019 (Chivers, 2019). Reductions have often been achieved in rounds of amalgamations that involve comprehensively reviewing the number of units across an entire state and implementing dozens of mergers at a time.

Dollery et al. (2009, p. 269) describe amalgamations as “the main policy instrument of local government structural reform programmes in Australia for well over a century.” With physical barriers to effective communication across the continent substantially mitigated by technology, state governments have ostensibly sought to produce economies of size by creating larger and purportedly better resourced administrative units and by reducing replication of similar functions. Dollery et al. also provide an important assessment of evidence for or against the capacity of amalgamations to produce the outcomes sought and find that many arguments in favour of amalgamations are not supported by experience. For example, they establish that anticipated cost reduction figures of 20% and 17% put forward by the Victorian and South Australian governments, respectively, amounted to just over 8% and just over 2%. Even those reductions were either caused by other policies implemented simultaneously—such as the introduction of competitive tendering practices—or were offset by the one-off costs of implementing the amalgamations.

On that basis, Dollery et al. then discuss the main factors inhibiting the success of amalgamations, two of which are highly instructive for geographies of local government. The first factor is the heterogeneity of services provided by local governments and the differences in the appropriate spatial intervals at which they can be efficiently provided. As they point out in ways that recall the spatial hierarchies of central place theory, “it is most improbable that the optimal service district for libraries will coincide with, or even resemble, optimal service districts for domestic garbage collection, public parks, or sewage treatment services” (p. 273).

In relation to this problem of heterogeneous service, another article in this virtual issue is also noteworthy. In it, KC, Corcoran, and Chhetri (2018) apply a maximum coverage location model to the spatial distribution of Queensland Fire and Rescue Service stations in the Brisbane Statistical Division, incorporating Statistical Area Level 2 (SA2) population forecasts to identify areas likely to experience either excessively overlapping or insufficient levels of coverage in the future, and where fire stations might be opened or closed for maximum efficiency. That study is not explicitly concerned with a service provided by local government—it is provided by the Queensland government—but it is a prime example of the efficacy of applying quantitative spatial methodologies to the study of local administrative geographies and local government service provision. It is also a powerful form of critical investigation into the value of state government interventions into those geographies.

The second factor working against the success of amalgamations identified by Dollery et al. is that they are a relatively blunt instrument with which to reorganise local government spatially to create efficiencies of size when compared with forms of reorganisation such as regional groupings or commercial alliances of local governments. Formed by groups of local governments rather than imposed on them by state legislation, regional and/or commercial alliances have the political advantage of being voluntary rather than coercive. They may also be more economically rational approaches to the optimisation of districts for the services local governments provide, since they may enable councils both to identify the optimal spatial units of service delivery relevant to each service and to pursue multiple alliances with different groupings of other councils in each alliance, each aiming to optimise the service districts differently for different services. Such an approach would create a more graduated spatial hierarchy of service districts, closer to expectations in central place theory than any attempt to deploy the same administrative geographies of local government units to provide all local services, as amalgamations do. Interestingly, for Dollery et al., “the threat of amalgamation” (p. 269) is a more effective way for state governments to push local governments to reform than forced mergers are, which may imply that voluntary mechanisms are more effective than coercive regimes in identifying and realising opportunities for efficiency. 2

The authors of two other articles in this virtual issue did appear more sceptical about regional and commercial alliances between and among councils, specifically because of the ideology behind the presumed economic rationality of this policy alternative and the manner of its implementation in Australia. Fifteen years ago, Beer, Clower, Haughtow, and Maude (2005) argued that neoliberal approaches to encourage councils to organise themselves into such alliances were accompanied by reduced funding. State governments may have viewed the increased voluntarism of local governments resulting from such alliances as an opportunity to reduce the amount of funding provided to local governments overall, potentially undermining the economic efficiency gains being sought. This kind of strategy has also included the creation of mechanisms of competition where councils and associated alliances must compete for available funding, undermining the weakest councils with the least capacity to compete, at a time when arguably they have required strengthening. In the same year, Pritchard (2005, p. 105) added to this kind of critique an observation that introducing neoliberal competitive mechanisms into the administration of rural areas allows state governments to be “insensitive … [to] issues of space and scale” and to show favour to those areas of rural Australia that already have greater administrative and economic capacity to compete, and entrenching regional inequalities.

Together, these studies appeal to governments and researchers to stop seeing administrative geographies as “the main policy instrument of local government structural reform” as Dollery et al. observed above and to distinguish operationally between geographies of service provision and geographies of local government entities, seeing both as operating and interacting at multiple scales. As KC et al. (2018) illustrate, it is up to geographers to develop better analytical tools to enable these distinct geographies to be identified and to improve how local government services are organised spatially. It is while armed with such tools that geographers can then effectively evaluate recent evolutions in administrative geographies, such as pushes towards regional and commercial alliances, and novel phenomena, such as the deamalgamations that have taken place in Queensland, as well as the changes to funding arrangements that accompany changes to administrative geographies.

3 LOCAL INEQUALITIES

Several articles in this virtual issue address questions of inequality in the execution of local government and the provision of local services in Australia. Earlier generations of geographers argued about whether the country's state and local government arrangements ensured equality of service provision across local government areas or instead sustained patterns of inequality (Adrian, 1983; Walker, 1979). An important contemporary study on such matters is that by Wiesel, Liu, and Buckle (2018), which investigates geographic patterns of state government infrastructure and services funding across metropolitan Sydney from 1988 to 2016. Wiesel et al. geolocated 11,860 expenditure projects into suburbs classified by decile from most to least disadvantaged and found both that the most disadvantaged suburbs received significantly less investment than the average and that the types of investment they received were likely to entrench disadvantage—such as public housing—as opposed to economically stimulating investments or investments that improved access to economic opportunity—such as roads, public transport, and other infrastructure projects. Disadvantage was further entrenched by New South Wales government funding policies that targeted economically productive areas likely to provide high returns on investment in terms of economic growth.

Similar observations had been made by O'Neill (2010) also included in this virtual issue. In a critique of state governments' use of public–private infrastructure financing, he has argued that the states' increasing reliance on private sector financing for public infrastructure projects has fuelled an ideological shift in policy circles that moves away from understanding infrastructure as a social and economic leveller to an understanding of it in terms of business models selectively deployed to profitable parts of metropolitan areas where they are likely to generate growth or where higher income users are more likely to be able to increase consumption to support new infrastructure.

Inequalities also arise between local government units for less apparently ideological reasons. In another study in this virtual issue, Astill (2017) has surveyed older residents in two adjacent council areas in far north Queensland, drawing out their lived experience of local government service provision and local disaster management during two recent cyclones, and has also considered the impacts those cyclones had on the evolution of local economies and the two councils. She paints a portrait of a larger region struggling to maintain capacity to withstand such disasters, with councils developing inconsistent response policies that undermined economic resilience and carrying unreasonable expectations for the role of care organisations in shouldering the burden of disaster response.

These studies begin to demonstrate that administrative geographies have impacts on inequality and other economic attributes, though there is much further research that can be done to examine the economic impacts of administrative geographies in detail. For example, do amalgamations and deamalgamations have instrumental impacts on Australia's geographies of inequality, both regional and intraurban? Consider one of the more contentious decisions within the recent New South Wales amalgamations: the reorganisation of council boundaries around Parramatta. Distant, higher income suburbs such as Sydney Olympic Park and Epping were stripped from adjoining councils and added to a reshaped City of Parramatta, enabling their council levy revenue to be directed towards the business growth corridor of Parramatta–Westmead. Nearer yet lower income suburbs such as Granville were ejected into a new Cumberland City Council, left to function deprived of any of the region's lucrative tax bases. How will the Parramatta region's existing extremes of inequality evolve in response to this change? How can geographers predict such impacts in the future?

4 POWER RELATIONS

Other articles in this virtual issue address the power relations between local governments and the state and territory governments that create them. While decisions such as council mergers are often framed in terms of administrative and economic efficiencies, just as often they may be made to reallocate power between tiers of government or to shift it between local government units, in which case the discourse about efficiency may be a distraction from other political intentions.

MacDonald (2018) focuses on the New South Wales government's reallocation of planning powers between state and local governments over previous decades, noting three changes implemented in succession: first, an attempt to take development approval power for large projects away from local governments and centralise that power in the state's minister for planning; second, a move transferring power over strategic urban planning to a new statutory agency, the Greater Sydney Commission; and third, the amalgamations that produced larger local government areas within which communities resistant to development could be diluted by larger surrounding populations. Seen in such light, the notion that the amalgamations were driven by a desire to obtain economic efficiencies begins to look disingenuous. Useful here is MacDonald's description of how such changes were resisted by a broad network of community groups that prevented the full neoliberal prodevelopment agenda of the New South Wales government from coming to fruition.

In turn, Ruming, Houston, and Amati (2012) paint a portrait of similar groups from Ku-ring-gai in the northern suburbs of Sydney—and among Australia's wealthiest local government areas. Ruming et al. distinguish between types of community groups resisting development in the area, each with different spatial extents and different tactical approaches to resisting development. Despite the different scales and tactics used by the different types of community groups, all were motivated by a sense that their communities' identities were tied to the identities of the local government's entities, invoking a shared sense of the character of given local government areas to challenge state government intentions for increased development in the area, as well as for the specific changes the state government sought to coerce the Ku-ring-gai council to make to the area's local planning instruments. Power at multiple tiers of government interacts with community power operating at its own varied spatial scales.

Another fundamental power imbalance relates to local and state governments' different forms of financial authority with respect to revenue-raising powers, something that may be assessed both in terms of the obvious vertical imbalances across tiers of government and horizontal imbalances in the funding allocated to different local governments. These matters concerned Walmsley (1984) relatively early in the period of neoliberal reform and his paper, also included in the virtual issue, seems to anticipate observations made by Beer et al. (2005) and Pritchard (2005) about the introduction of competitive mechanisms for local government access to state government funding.

Several of the concerns noted above come together in a portrait of the development of Warnervale on the New South Wales Central Coast provided by Ruming (2005). There, the state government sought an uplift in development on a fringe of the greater Sydney region and organised a circle of state government agencies to act in concert to plan the social and transport infrastructure required to ensure the success of a development of its scale. Addressing potential social inequalities was part of the state government's objectives for the master plan, but investment by the private sector was sought as the primary means to deliver the development including much of its infrastructure. Once the development had been planned, the state government transferred responsibility for the implementation of the plan to the local government, who was to collaborate with the state government's land development agency. The local government was then “forced to enter into dialogue [with the state] in order to receive the necessary funding” (Ruming, 2005, p. 89) and to plead individually for state government commitment to one of the centrepieces of the development, a relocated railway station. It is interesting that even inside the state government, there was a scalar dimension to the differences in priorities between different state government bodies. On one hand were state government agencies with a more local focus and who were invested in the success of a place, such as the land development agency, and state government departments with a more state-wide focus and concerned with managing state-wide spending needs according to more political criteria, such as the treasury.

The remaining article in this virtual issue is a reflection by Gale (2016) about how geographers engage with governments to develop and implement policies in practical terms rather than involve themselves only in political critique in ways that engender little immediate revision of those policies. He argues that geographers need to interrogate policies for their interactions with different geographic scales of implementation and their differential impacts across different places.

Whether one is engaging in policy development such as that Gale is concerned with, or engaging in political critique, this call for geographers to focus on scale seems highly appropriate to spatial and place-based studies of local government. As the articles assembled in this virtual issue demonstrate, geographies of local government are inherently scalar, playing out both in and between local governments, and between state governments and local governments, between state government departments and agencies, and between community groups and government bodies at multiple scales. With the renewed incursion of the Australian government into the delivery of local infrastructure and services and continued pushes for councils to form regional and commercial alliances, the scales at which local government services are both administered and provided become even more numerous.

Approaching the study of local government with these complexities in mind enables geographers to broaden our scope beyond state government discourses about local governments that might otherwise have us concerned only with the nature of local service provision and efficiencies thereof. It encourages us to examine questions of power, questions about the allocation of powers and responsibilities between tiers of government, and questions about strategies to provide or withhold funding to support those powers and responsibilities—strategies by which state governments shape local governments for diverse ends. This approach also prompts us to broaden the ways in which we investigate the inequalities that may arise as a result of action by any tier of government and to look for impacts on other tiers of government in our search for the consequences of those actions.

5 OPPORTUNITIES FOR NEW RESEARCH

Opportunities for more and new research abound, with more impacts of amalgamation rounds in New South Wales, Queensland, and Victoria to be identified and with proposals in other states such as Tasmania to be reviewed. In particular, the social and economic impacts of amalgamations have yet to be analysed or theorised in as much detail as they warrant, and nor have the relationships between local government areas' tax bases and their capacities to provide services and execute their powers been investigated as much as they should be. To what extent have amalgamations created local government areas that are more or less economically self-sufficient, equipped with revenue bases that can sustain the level of services they need to provide, and enable them to act with the amount of power they need to effectively govern Australia's places amidst the pressures of a globalised economy? Regional organisations and other commercial alliances of local governments also deserve greater attention, not only because they are becoming more frequent both in Australia and internationally, but also because they represent a key intermediary scale in the spatial hierarchy of government between the states and the councils and a key institution in the search for economic efficiency in local government. If Australia's regional organisations evolve to wrest real power from other tiers of government, as they have begun to do in some countries, they will become another force for geographers of local government to contend with, and another scale of analysis through which geographers can demonstrate their expertise and play a significant role in shaping government policy. New forms of intergovernmental cooperation such as the Australian government's city deals and regional deals may also become important subjects of future research.