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Brisbane’s mega-council: A singular success or a monster misstep?
By Zach Hope
Of all the spiels in his rhetorical kitbag, Graham Quirk learned early in his lord mayoralty that there was one so consistently bewitching to prospective interstate investors, he would reach for it on every annual mission south.
To the Sydney crowd, he would explain how the geographic reach of his Brisbane City Council was equivalent to 35 of their local government areas. In Melbourne, it was 31.
The point was to look north: building a city needn’t be a tangle of NIMBYism, regulations and hyper-local politics.
Then lord mayor Graham Quirk (left) with his predecessor, Campbell Newman, after securing a new term in 2012. Weeks earlier, Newman was elected premier of Queensland.Credit: Harrison Saragossi
“It always caught their attention,” says Quirk, lord mayor for eight years to 2019. “If you invest in Brisbane, you are coming to one council, with one set of rules. Ours was a powerful message, and one that I think led quite a number of people to invest in our city.”
Quirk remains an avowed champion of the Greater Brisbane Scheme of 1924 – the mass merger of 20 overwhelmed local government authorities into a single administrative behemoth.
William Jolly, the first mayor of the modern Brisbane City Council, called it the “great experiment”.
For almost a century, the experiment has held, enabling city planning on a unprecedented scale.
The BCC now boasts almost 1.3 million residents, making it Australia’s most populous local government area, while its annual budget of $4.3 billion affords it the economies of scale and purchasing powers of a quasi state government.
And the winner is ... Brisbane. The city’s successful bid for the 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games was initiated by the powerful south-east Queensland mayors. Credit: Getty
Where councils elsewhere focus on the three Rs – roads, rates and rubbish – the Brisbane version adds billion-dollar tunnels, bridges and Metro bus projects.
“And yet, our rates and charges are still comparable to, and often less than, other councils,” Quirk says. The amalgamations, Quirk concludes, have been an “outstanding success story”. For others, the Brisbane model is a democratic calamity.
How would the Brisbane suburbs look today if the great experiment never proceeded, with the city a collection of smaller shires, each competing for rates and business?
Would the people be lamenting, like many do in the southern capitals, a stunted city crammed with broke bureaucracies peddling soaring rates?
Or would there be an abundance of celebrated community spaces, more grassroots activism, and a heightened sense of belonging? More villages coalesced around Main Streets, or trams – removed under lord mayor Clem Jones in the 1960s – still rattling along suburban roads?
A long-gone Brisbane tram making its way along Sandgate Road, Clayfield, in 1969.Credit: The John Ward Collection, Brisbane City Council Archives
Nicole Johnston, the independent councillor for Tennyson Ward, which takes in a swath of Brisbane’s south, believes the historical absence of finer oversight has robbed sections of suburbia of what we would understand as character.
“And that’s a struggle that local councillors like myself and the community are in every day,” she says. “We want to preserve, enhance, and protect character in our areas.”
Tennyson councillor Nicole Johnston says the Brisbane council has got “too big for its boots”.Credit: Glenn Hunt
Innumerable factors have shaped Brisbane’s growth and built forms, not least of all floods. Johnston also understands the economic arguments for the mega-council model. But the balance between community enrichment and centralised power remains grotesquely out of kilter, she says.
“Brisbane City Council has got too big for its boots. It pretends it’s another state government, and it has completely lost the importance of putting community first when making decisions,” she says.
“Unfortunately, they remain focused on preserving their own power rather than empowering the community. And we see that with the way in which they allocate funding through annual budgets.”
When Johnston was first elected in 2008, then under the banner of the LNP, each councillor received a money pot for local projects called the Ward Parks Trust Fund.
The distribution varied depending on the development charges reaped from their individual wards, leading to concerns the CBD and inner suburbs were disproportionately awash with cash.
The trust eventually morphed into the present-day Suburban Enhancement Fund (SEF). To Johnston’s ongoing disquiet, it distributes only a flat $581,000 to each councillor annually (minus a $40,000 administration charge).
She represents about 30,000 residents across 10 suburbs. “This is pretty much the only money I get to do things,” she says.
According to Johnston, outer suburb ratepayers are subsidising billion-dollar inner-city developments that should never be council’s responsibility in the first place.
“[BCC] has forgotten that we need pedestrian crossings outside the train station – and you can’t get one of those in your local area for neither love nor money,” she says. “But they will spend billions on a bus project [Brisbane Metro] that most of the city’s never going to see the benefits of.”
Handing down the budget in June, Lord Mayor Adrian Schrinner noted that 87 per cent of investment was happening outside the CBD. It was “a deliberate approach”, he said, under a program called the Suburbs First Guarantee.
Rates, meanwhile, went up 3.45 per cent, about half Brisbane’s annual inflation rate.
On the afternoon of March 18, 1925, a crowd shuffled along George Street and through the doors of the Central Technical College, now part of the QUT campus, for a most auspicious civic occasion.
The old municipal system, racked with poor finances and indecision, had failed to achieve the progress required by an expanding metropolis. Now, the people’s anointed rulers of the new Greater Brisbane Scheme were meeting for the first time.
Queensland home secretary James Stopford delivered an opening address congratulating the new aldermen and consoling the newly redundant, who had “accomplished much, [but] not perhaps as much as we would have liked”.
“We are inaugurating today a form of local government of the most advanced kind,” he continued. “More advanced than any form of local government that exists in any part of the Commonwealth of Australia today.”
At 2.46pm, lord mayor William Jolly, an accountant by trade, took the chair. He wished for future council business to be of a “high tone” and “not to any extent … on party lines”.
The first lord mayor of the modern Brisbane City Council, William Jolly.Credit: Courtesy of Brisbane City Council
It was “undoubtedly our opportunity to remodel our city in the light of modern ideas”, he said. “Our first duty is to visualise the ideal city of the future, and then proceed with the definite purpose to carry it into effect.”
Among his priorities were bridges, drainage, permanent arterial roads, abattoirs, electricity, milk supplies, mosquito control and an improved health service under a full-time medical officer.
But delivering would be no easy task. He bemoaned in 1926 “that the majority of the absorbed councils bequeathed … bank overdrafts of varying sizes”.
Achieving the “bold and progressive” goals would be “tempered by the cold, sane light of reason”.
Marion Mackenzie, from the Oxley-Chelmer History Group, believes the amalgamation came as a “great sense of relief” to the erstwhile Sherwood Shire Council, the old boundaries of which she has lived in since 1970.
The local representatives, she says, had been overwhelmed with questions of roads, sewage and rubbish.
“But they were a bit taken aback to find that these seven or eight councillors were replaced by one person who didn’t live in this area at all. The council seemed a bit of a distant place for a while.”
Mackenzie says there was negligible angst from the people at the time, and she wonders whether there isn’t still a sense of pride in the Brisbane experiment.
“It seems to work pretty efficiently,” she says. “At the same time, I tear my hair out about it regularly.”
From time to time, Victorian and NSW state governments flirt with mass amalgamations, such is the temptation for savings or, more pertinently, the removal of NIMBY development barriers. Sometimes, they follow through.
Then-premier Jeff Kennett controversially pushed through Melbourne amalgamations in the mid-1990s. In 2016, Mike Baird did the same in Sydney. But both reforms were small-scale compared with Brisbane.
Closer to that bar was a 2017 proposal from the Committee for Melbourne to merge 31 councils into one, or several. It did not land well, and the committee declined to discuss the idea when asked by this masthead.
Through the lens of the BCC, researchers in 2015 explored the notion – “entrenched in the psyche of local government policymakers” – that bigger councils performed better.
They compared four key BCC performance markers from 2008 to 2011 against councils in metropolitan NSW, and others from south-east Queensland.
Their paper, published in the Australian Journal of Public Administration, found Brisbane council outperformed the others’ averages in asset management but lagged in “financial flexibility, liquidity and debt servicing”.
“In sum ... these findings lend further support to the growing corpus of research that suggests ‘biggest is not always best’,” they concluded.
The Grey Street Bridge, pictured while under construction in 1932, was among lord mayor William Jolly’s priorities. In 1955, it was renamed in his honour. Credit: Courtesy of Brisbane City Council
Social demographer Mark McCrindle says the mega-council model makes sense in the south-east Queensland context – as the nation’s fastest-growing region, it needs the fastest-growing infrastructure. A citywide vision is streamlining.
But his polling since the COVID-19 pandemic suggests people are craving stronger local connections. “And if our identity in terms of our local government area runs across a million people, it’s probably harder to have that sense of belonging,” he says.
In Sydney, John Stamolis, an independent on the merged Inner West Council, says he, too, is sensing a return to a more old-fashioned style of community-mindedness.
“Issues like the environment are doing that,” Stamolis says. “Pressures of overdevelopment are doing that.
“Even in their shopping, they’ll go off to an IGA or a local store now. But with decision-making, they have no connection with the state government. They have no connection with the federal government. Where do they get that connection?”
Stamolis is one of many people agitating to unwind the Inner West Council into the pre-2016 LGAs of Marrickville, Leichhardt and Ashfield. The beefed-up council, he says, has failed to deliver on promised service improvements and infrastructure. Moreover, “it’s a big bureaucracy”.
“It’s like the Brisbane council – the average resident could not have any say,” he says.
“So, what is the definition of local? What is that level you need to be represented, have your voice heard and be connected to your local community?
“I think Australia needs to be having that conversation.”