Tag Archives: services

292 – Check–Plan–Do or Plan–Do–Hope?

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600 words (4 minutes reading time) by Tim Whistler

When reading local government plans, you could be forgiven for thinking that The Secret (2006) was a management manual: “ask, believe, and receive”. It is hard to see how some councils think they will make a difference from the way they plan.

To be fair, I agree that councils usually aren’t intentionally stupid or reckless. They’re juggling rate caps, grant uncertainty, ageing assets, and a community that wants more of everything. They are under pressure, and when it comes to their long-term plan, the temptation is to plug the spreadsheet gaps with “efficiency dividends” and “future asset sales” and hope it all works out.

But that doesn’t make it strategic. I call it Plan–Do–Hope.

Council plans

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290 – The Capability Trap: How Budget Cuts Damage Councils Long Before Anyone Notices.

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3100 words (15 minutes reading time) by Colin Weatherby

Podcast option:

Credit: ChatGPT

Summary

  • Councils under rate caps are being pushed into a capability trap: cutting investment in how work is done, while demanding the same (or more) output.
  • Doing more with less works for a while, then it quietly destroys the ability to deliver safe, reliable services.
  • Escaping the trap means shifting from “work harder” to “work smarter” – investing in process capability, not just pushing people to do more.
  • This piece explains the trap in plain language and offers advice to avoid it.

Introduction

After ten years of “doing more with less”, many council roads managers describe their world like this:

“Today, I barely recognise our roads program. Every budget cycle we cop another efficiency dividend, another round of ‘temporary’ cuts to inspections, reseals, heavy patches and drainage repairs. On paper the program still looks coherent thanks to some clever rephasing and optimistic assumptions, but out on the network the cracks are literal.

We’ve gone from renewing assets at the right time to stretching them well past their use-by date. Crews that used to do planned maintenance now spend most of their time chasing potholes and complaints. We’ve sweated the plant so hard that breakdowns are normal, and cut training and supervision to the point where we’re relying on a few old hands to hold everything together.

What hurts most is knowing this was avoidable. Every ‘saving’ we booked was borrowed against the future condition of the network. We’ve lost capability in quiet ways – trainees we didn’t take on, engineers who left and weren’t replaced, inspectors who no longer have time to inspect, relationships with contractors hollowed out by always taking the lowest price.

The community still expects the same level of service, but we’re no longer set up to deliver it. We’ve traded investment in capability for short-term budget wins, and now the bill is arriving as risk, backlog and a network that’s deteriorating faster than we can look after it.”

This isn’t a story about lazy workers or bad managers. It’s what it looks like when a council slides into what Repenning and Sterman call the capability trap – without realising it.

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287 – The council goal posts

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550 words (4 minutes reading time) by Tim Whistler

Credit

Lancing has highlighted a key problem with many council services. I used to call it the ‘lowest common denominator effect’ (i.e. performance gets reduced to the lowest level tolerated) but I think the Taguchi Loss Function makes the point in a way that helps you to fix the problem.

Imagine that the diagram Lancing used to show the target value that a customer or citizen wants as fitting between two ‘goal posts’, to instead show a set of Australian Rules football goals. For those non-Australians, I have helped you imagine that with the diagram below.

If you aren’t aren’t familiar with Australian Rules football, when the ball is kicked between the two centre posts it is a goal and scores 6 points. If it is kicked between a centre post and the post either side, it is called a behind and scores 1 point. If the ball is kicked outside all the goal posts it is out of bounds on the full and there is no score and the opposition gets to kick the ball back into play.

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286 – Abundance, Regulation and Council Costs

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2000 words (18 minutes reading time) by Lancing Farrell

I might be drawing a long bow, but I think the Abundance agenda presents a fundamental challenge for those councils trying to find a way forward that is financially sustainable in a rate capped environment. It opens the door to reviewing regulatory and other service design to make savings and support economic growth.

Let me start at the beginning.

On 19 June 2025, in an article about a speech by Jim Chalmers, the Australian Treasurer, he was quoted as saying that left-leaning governments (as we currently have in Australia) are “strangling their own good intentions with bureaucracy”. He is asking regulators across the nation to identify regulations that can be axed or simplified to reduce compliance costs and increase the pace of economic growth. It is part of delivering a supply-side solution to the nation’s housing and energy problems by removing government-imposed impediments to production of goods and services.

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285 – Our first podcast: Challenges, solutions and future directions in local government.

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1800 words (18 minutes reading and/or 20 minutes listening) by Colin Weatherby

I recently found out about Notebooklm and asked it to analyse the entire Local Government Utopia website and answer a set of questions about challenges, solutions and future directions for councils.

The question and answer is below. First, a bit about Notebooklm.

Notebooklm

Notebooklm is a new AI product that takes a specific source or sources nominated by you and provides a summary, or answers to questions you ask about the source or sources that you have uploaded. I loaded the URL for localgovernmentutopia.com but could have loaded pdfs or other types of sources (or combinations of sources). You can load up to 50 different sources with a maximum of 500,000 words.

The person who told me about it had uploaded a manual for their camera as a source and then asked how to change the camera battery. Instead of leafing through a massive pdf manual online, Notebooklm explained how to change the battery with a link directly to the relevant section in the manual!

It also produces podcasts, primarily to help listeners understand complicated topics by hearing a discussion between two people about the source or sources. I was interested in this feature, so I had a go!

Podcast

I asked Notebooklm to make a podcast addressing this question using the Local Government Utopia website as a source:

“What does Local Government Utopia say about what a local government putting the wellbeing of its constituents first looks like; what issues are important and currently not acknowledged in local government; what are current research or policy gaps in local government; any thoughts around recent Commonwealth or Victorian parliamentary inquiries into local government; and finally, what thoughts are there on where public policy might be able to make a meaningful contribution.“

Here is the podcast.

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284 – The Public Service Chain Reaction.

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1700 words (18 minutes reading time) by Carole Parkinson

The Deming chain reaction

Tim Whistler cuts straight to the chase. In the case of his latest piece, I think he could do with a little nuancing of what he is proposing. His description of the disruption to ensue if councils can’t manage their finances with a rate cap is probably accurate, but also, avoidable.

I have been talking to executives at councils and it is true that they are grappling with defining and agreeing on what they need to do. Everyone involved in leadership seems to be pulling in a different direction – Finance wants direct funding cuts to balance budgets now; Directors want efficiency drives to fit services into budgets as soon as possible; Councillors want to cut services they think the State should provide and avoid electoral backlash when they stand for re-election in 2028. It is a vicious cycle.

I have a more immediate approach, which neatly fits with Whistler’s focus on infrastructure as the big service, allocating capital first, and, most importantly, reducing expenditure where you should, not just where you think you can.

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281 – Reframing the reframing…

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800 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.

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280 – Reframing the challenge to councils

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2000 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?

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279 – ‘Guerilla volunteering’ – a response to risk aversion and red tape?

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1200 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.

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276 – Synchronicity, systems, facts and accidents…

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1300 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.

Why we’re Polarized

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.

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