600 words (7 minutes reading time) by Lancing Farrell 

It is 8 years since Local Government Utopia started and this post looks back at what has happened.

A lot has been written on the blog covering a wide range of topics. People often suggest to me that the blog would make a good book. There are over 250,000 words in the posts so far. Enough for 25 books. Publishing a book is likely to be less effective than a blog. A non-fiction book is considered successful when 10,000 copies are sold – that’s only 10,000 readers! 

Plus, a blog makes reading cheap and easy.  

I have done some basic analysis of the most popular posts and where readers live in the world. 

The popular topics highlight interest in customer experience, performance measurement, public value, systems thinking, service definition, and leadership in local government.  Clearly, these are relevant topics for councils across the world.

The most popular countries reflect the relevance of what happens in Australian local government to other jurisdictions. 

When I started writing for the blog people told me to be careful. Leaders in local government don’t like scrutiny. It will be a career limiting move. I was told an illustrative story about the perils of reading, writing and saying that management action should be based on knowledge and evidence.

A colleague described a council as being a train on a track heading somewhere on the great local government railway network. It has been on this track for a long time.  From time to time, drivers get on and off the train. No one questions where the train is going or when it is supposed to arrive. The only challenge the drivers really have is the occasional risk of derailment, mainly from the actions of the State government. His advice was just hop on and enjoy the comfortable ride. 

I like this story for a couple of reasons. After a few years of working at a council you realise that no one can really tell you where you are going and how you will know when you have arrived. There is a lot of activity but whether or not it helps the train to reach a destination doesn’t seem to matter so long as the train keeps moving. Even keeping the train moving is not always a requirement as it can be quite comfortable when the train is stationary.

After a few decades of working at a council you also realise that you are seeing the same stations pass by and the train has actually gone in a circle. It might be a small circle, a big circle or a figure of eight. I think this is what the State government sees councils doing and why they feel the need to periodically ‘derail’ councils and set them on a new track. This has happened in Victoria with municipal amalgamations, compulsory competitive tendering, and the rate cap.

Aside from derailment, the other disruption that drivers must manage is people on the train starting to ask too many questions about where the train is going, who is waiting for it to arrive, and when it is expected it to get there. This frequently happens when people start reading and their knowledge grows. 

As someone who quite likes reading on the train, I would like to thank all of the readers of Local Government Utopia. When the blog started, as you can read in the ‘About’ section, the objective was to create a ‘frank and realistic discussion about what is happening in councils’ from the viewpoint of practitioners. Hopefully this has occurred and will continue to occur. 

The posts are intended to help practitioners to act and ‘pull a lever’ to switch to a new track when it becomes apparent that the train is about to go around in another circle.