Hired Guns: Local Government Mergers in New South Wales and the KPMG Modelling Report

© 2017 CPA Australia Across the developed world, including Australia, public policymaking now rests heavily on commissioned reports generated by for-profit consultants, contrasting starkly with the earlier customary reliance on the civil service to provide informed policy advice to political decision makers. Dependence on commercial consultants is problematic, especially given the moral hazards involved in ‘hired guns’ providing support for policy ‘solutions’ desired by their political paymasters. This paper provides a vivid illustration of some of the dangers flowing from the use of consultants by examining the methodology employed by KPMG in its empirical analysis of the pecuniary consequences of proposed municipal mergers as part of the New South Wales’ (NSW) Government's Fit for the Future local government reform program. We show that the KPMG (2016) modelling methodology is awash with errors which render its conclusions on the financial viability of the NSW merger proposals fatally flawed

Policy-Based Evidence Making in Local Government: The New South Wales’ Municipal Merger Program, 2011 to 2017

Contemporary public policy-making relies heavily on commercial consultants for specialised advice. In this paper, we examine the problematic nature of this phenomenon by considering the controversial forced amalgamation programme in New South Wales (NSW) local government over the period 2011 to 2017. By way of a critical examination of two key consultant reports underlying the NSW municipal mergers, we show that the failure of this programme to achieve its intended aims is due in large measure to the nature of the externalised advice on which it was based and the manner in which that advice was solicited from commercial consultants

Amalgamation in action: Participant perspectives on the Armidale regional council merger process

Under its Fit for the Future reform programme, in May 2016 the New South Wales (NSW) government forcibly merged a number of municipalities, including the Armidale Dumaresq Council and the Guyra Shire Council in the New England region of northern NSW. Whilst scholarly attention has focused on the likely impact of municipal mergers on council performance at the system‐wide level (Bell, Dollery & Drew 2016; Economic Papers: A journal of applied economics and policy, 35, 99), much less effort has been devoted to the analysis of the perspectives of council managers and employees involved in forced consolidation. In order to address this gap in the literature, in this paper we present a case study of compulsory council consolidation of the Armidale and Guyra councils based on interviews with senior managers as well as a survey of council workers

Chalk and Cheese: A Comparative Analysis of Local Government Reform Processes in New South Wales and Victoria

© 2018, © 2018 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. A substantial empirical literature exists on the consequences of local government reform programs. However, much less effort has been directed at examining how reform processes affect the outcomes of reform programs and little work has been invested in the comparative analysis of local government reform processes. To address this neglect in the literature, this article provides a comparative analysis of the contemporary municipal reform initiatives in the New South Wales and Victorian state local government systems. It is argued that the much more deliberative and inclusive Victorian approach represents a superior approach to the hurried “top-down” New South Wales method