350 words (3 minutes reading time) by Colin Weatherby
Professor Joseph Drew has produced his annual analysis of local government expenditure in NSW. He has also looked at the reasons for the latest large rate increases being sought by councils. Professor Drew gives his usual clear and calm description of the findings.
I think his videos have become an elegy for local government.
Continue reading800 words (8 minutes reading time) by Tim Whistler
Whilst Lancing Farrell has penned an interesting , and no doubt useful, piece on reframing, I think it doesn’t go nearly far enough. Councils are going to remain on a downward trajectory to crisis while they fail to make major changes in the way they think and act.
I have a much shorter list of changes that councils could make and should make. If they don’t, I fear that there will be massive financial failure and the sacking of councils and their CEOs, mainly because they are unable to make decisions where there are no winners, followed by the imposition of State control through the appointment of administrators and forced amalgamations.
Continue reading2000 words (20 minutes reading time) by Lancing Farrell
Introduction
Is the challenge that councils face insufficient revenue to cover costs? Or is it that they are providing services outside their remit? Or is it waste and inefficiency in their operations? Is it all of the above? And, if it is, where do you start to address it?
When you look at the different things councils are doing to respond to the rate cap – arguing for its removal or modification to enable higher rate increases, cutting services and service levels, shaving 10% off every budget to force savings, or implementing an ‘efficiency dividend’ through successive budgets – you could be forgiven for wondering if councils are trying to solve the same problem.
Having a common view of the problem to be solved is a start to genuine and effective action across the sector.
I have been thinking about a simple re-framing of the problem councils need to solve in a rate capped environment.
So, what is the problem?
Continue reading1200 words (12 minutes reading) by Colin Weatherby
A recent article in the Melbourne Age by Alan Attwood, entitled ‘Red tape’s strangling volunteering – creating more casualties than you’d think’, is timely in drawing attention to a growing problem in Victorian local government. Risk aversion and red tape are making it difficult for people to volunteer in their own community or even get a job at their council. This focus on playing safe seems to be counterproductive.
As Sidney Dekker and Georgina Poole point out succinctly in ‘Random Noise – Measuring Your Company’s Safety Performance‘, most organisations don’t exist simply to be safe; they exist to provide a product or service. It is unfortunate that many councils seem to be starting to think otherwise. Dekker uses the term ‘safety theatre’ to describe the superficial and often misleading efforts that organisations put into safety. I can’t help thinking that some of the risk management red tape making volunteering more difficult fits that description.
Continue reading400 words (4 minutes reading) by Carole Parkinson
I am always on the lookout for new and useful thinking. Sometimes the new thinking is not that new – it is old thinking in a new context. This is why a post on a new Substack caught my attention. It is a novel application of some proven thinking about value .
Continue reading1000 words (11 minutes reading time) by Gordon Brittas
I seldom put pen to paper, however, reading the viewpoints of former colleagues has stimulated my thinking. Tim Whistler and Carole Parkinson’s posts on model collapse have started me thinking they are onto something. Is model collapse just mediocrity at work? Perhaps mediocrity is a product of model collapse? Or could it be a cause? So many questions.
As an expert in mediocrity, I must say that I know it when I see it.
Mediocrity
A recent paper by Tobias Jones entitled ‘Italy’s strangely seductive culture of mediocrity’, struck a chord with me. Jones cites a paper by the Oxford criminologist Diego Gambetta and Paris-based philosopher Gloria Origgi, ‘The LL game: The curious preference for low quality and its norms’, which discusses why so many academic conferences in Italy go seriously awry in a ‘cocktail of confusion, sloppiness, and broken promises’. It suggests that most Italians in academia prefer sloppiness to perfectionism.
Continue reading1300 words (14 minutes reading time) by Lancing Farrell
I have been doing some diverse reading recently, some of it inspired by world events. Serendipitously, it has led me to an insight that I thought I would share.
The first book is Ezra Klein’s international bestseller ‘Why we’re Polarized’. He says the book is an examination of the American political system and that it is unlike most books on American politics, which he says tend to focus on the individuals.
“Let me be clear from the beginning: This is not a book about people. This is a book about systems.”
Ezra Klein, ‘Why we’re Polarized’
Klein is an American and says two decades of reporting on American politics has shown that it has predictable cycles and patterns that repeat. He sets out to explain the failure of the political system, which he says occurs despite it being ‘full of rational actors making rational decisions given the incentives they face’. He describes it as a collection of functional parts that combine into a dysfunctional whole.
Continue reading680 words (7 minutes reading time) by Tim Whistler
Some of the posts on this site really test your patience. There can be just too much idealistic thinking.
Personally, the idea of a Value for Money Statement seems to me to be the latest invention of councils trying to find a new way to pretend they are doing something that they are not. The name says it all. If this is not an example of John Gall’s ‘operational fallacy’, I don’t know what is. Along with Financial Sustainability Strategies, it is a distraction from the serious work councils need to do to fundamentally change what they are doing.
Anyway, it started me thinking about my local council and what they could write about their way of providing me with value for money – assuming they were prepared to be honest. Here is my attempt to describe what I can discern about the principles behind how they actually think they provide value for money:
Continue reading1500 words (17 minutes reading time) by Carole Parkinson
The Wigan Value for Money Statement
Lancing Farrell’s post on Wigan and the Deal 2030 explains how a council has successfully decided to make a radical change in the relationship with its community in response to austerity measures imposed by central government. By all accounts the Deal 2030 has been successful in reducing the resources needed for the council to deliver its services, in large part by reducing demand for those services by helping people to do things for themselves or to access services provided by the VCFSE (voluntary, community, faith and social enterprise) and private sectors.
It is 10 years since the Deal 2030 was launched. As with any big organisational change, it is hard to evaluate its success from the outside. To help us, there have been several reviews of the Deal 2030 since it was implemented, including the King’s Fund (2019), the Centre for Policy Impact (2019), and a Corporate Peer Challenge (2017). All have reported favourably on both the success in implementing actions in the Deal, and the impact of those actions on the Wigan community. Therefore, it was with some interest that I saw Wigan Council has recently released a Value for Money Statement.
Perhaps everything is not what it appears?
Continue reading1300 words (14 minutes reading time) by Colin Weatherby
Some time ago I wrote a post about council performance measurement being like a dashboard on a car. I used the image of a dashboard like the one on my 1962 Morris Mini to keep it very simple. I noted that the car dashboard had evolved over many years and been refined to be a distillation of information to the minimum required for a driver to be in control of their car. It didn’t tell the driver where they were going or if they were on track to get there. I was hoping it would be an example councils could follow. Lately, I have turned my attention to sport.
It is football season in Australia, and I was reading about how footy clubs, professional and amateur, are using data and statistics to measure and improve their performance. It started me thinking. Every council in Australia must have a local footy club. Perhaps they can learn something from them?
Continue reading
Local Government Utopia 