Learning from Experience in NSW?

While the bulk of the empirical evidence shows that municipal mergers do not improve the performance of local authorities, Australian policy-makers nonetheless continue to impose council amalgamation, as illustrated by the current New South Wales 'Fit for the Future' local government reform process. This paper first critically examines the empirical evidence employed by the Independent Local Government Review Panel on the impact of the 2004 council mergers. We argue that this evidence is flawed. We then provide an empirical assessment of the municipal mergers, which occurred over 2000-2004 with our sample drawn from Group 4 councils in the New South Wales variant of the Australian Local Government Classification System. Group 4 councils represent a group of significant regional cities and town councils with similar operational activities. We demonstrate that merged councils have not performed any better than their unmerged peers over the period 2004 to 2014. The paper concludes with some brief policy implications for local government reform in New South Wales and elsewhere

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

Inconsistent Depreciation Practice and Public Policymaking: Local Government Reform in New South Wales

Public policy based on numerical indicators - a form of 'public management by numbers' - has become commonplace across the world. Whereas a good deal is known about the deleterious effects of this type of policymaking - including ratcheting, output distortion and 'gaming' - unfortunately little attention has focused on the adverse local government policy consequences of inconsistent depreciation accruals by local authorities. This paper seeks to address this gap in the empirical literature on local government performance. After examining the use of accounting data by local government policymakers, the paper reviews available empirical evidence of inconsistent depreciation practice both in Australia and abroad. We then consider the recent New South Wales (NSW) Independent Local Government Review Panel's use of accounting ratios as supporting evidence for boundary change in local government as a case study of the adverse impact of inconsistent depreciation practice. The NSW experience clearly demonstrates the distortionary effects of empirical evidence resulting from significant variation in depreciation accruals by individual local councils. The paper concludes with an assessment of the options available to local government policymakers wishing to obtain more accurate accounting accrual data for policy formulation purposes

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