Mike Baird is deluded over council amalgamations

MIKE Baird reckons the answer to local government inefficiency is the amalgamation of councils against the will of the people. Delusion, says Mark Latham.

MIKE Baird has convinced himself that the answer to local government inefficiency in NSW is the amalgamation of councils against the will of the people. This is a delusion consistent with his God complex, as he seeks to reshape the drinking habits, sporting interests and government of the state in his own image.

Along the way, NSW has become a joke. We are now known as the wowser state, where visitors have no hope of enjoying Sydney’s night-life after midnight or greyhound racing after July next year. Last month, when Melbourne’s Western Bulldogs AFL team beat the Swans at the SCG, their fans carried with them a banner that read: “We’ll win this game and party till late, or at least till all your pubs close at 8”.

We are in big trouble when the Mexicans are laughing at us. Baird’s policies are reminiscent of the dictator Kim Jong-il’s decree in North Korea in the 1990s: “If I don’t like doing it, nobody else should.”

If our Dear Leader wants to close down a certain industry in NSW or abolish a certain local government area, we are all expected to fall into line. Not only are these decisions arbitrary and authoritarian, they reflect self-serving political calculations.

The greyhound industry was dispensable because, unlike The King’s-educated Baird, the privileged son of a Liberal MP, it mostly involves Labor-leaning battlers — people who can’t afford to get into horse racing.

The government’s council amalgamations had little to do with efficiency and inefficiency. Local authorities that have operated as sheltered workshops, with lousy customer service and substantial cost overruns, were allowed to stay in place, as long as they had a Liberal Party mayor.

The worst council in NSW, by some distance, is Camden in southwest Sydney. Under Baird’s policy, it has the same boundaries, the same councillors and the same reputation for waste and mismanagement as it had four years ago. Nothing has changed since the 2012 election when the Liberals won control. Camden used to be a beautiful heritage township, the home of the Macarthur family that put Australia on the sheep’s back with their 19th-century merino flock. Today, the main street is a permanent construction zone. Paving work that should have taken two months has dragged on for more than a year.

Before Christmas, the council repaved the kerbside section of the footpaths — a huge inconvenience for local businesses, with a 30 per cent loss of trade. Then after Christmas, the council came back to try to finish the job, replacing the remaining pavers up against the building line. This knocked another 20 per cent off trade.

Amid the chaos, several of the newly constructed kerbs had to be redone, as they had the wrong alignment. Laybacks also had to be retrofitted for the benefit of oldies and people with prams. In the fast-growing housing estates of Camden, private landscaping businesses are putting down square kilometres of pavers each month. Yet the council, replicating the public sector sloth of the old Soviet Union, hasn’t been able to complete 200 metres of footpath work in 12 months. The calamity continues, as the remaining dust-strewn shoppers battle through wreckage resembling an Islamic State raid on Baghdad.

Premier Mike Baird / Picture: Sam Ruttyn

Against the wishes of residents, Camden, once the heritage jewel of the Macarthur region, has had its appeal tarnished. This is what the mayor Lara Symkowiak calls progress: ignoring objections from the community and making the township worse than when the council works started. I’ve seen many strange things in politics, but never a Liberal mayor who has managed to get offside the local Chamber of Commerce and Historical Society.

Residents are worried that the next step in this “progress” agenda will be to abolish the two-storey building height restriction. This would allow high-rise development, turning Camden into another Fairfield or Parramatta.

With so much suburbanisation in Western Sydney, why can’t a single heritage town remain immune from the march of the developers’ dollar?

Having wasted millions in the main street, Camden’s municipal logrollers have now turned their genius to the question of car parking.

Even though the town centre has surplus spaces, the council has approved the construction of 52 new parking spots at an average cost of $65,000 — surely the most extravagant parking project since Louis XIV built new palaces to house his royal carriages. Recently for a school assignment, one of my children surveyed Camden’s shoppers about the cost-effectiveness of this plan. The most common response was: “$65,000 for a parking space. What are they, gold-plated?”

Council amalgamations reflect Mike Baird’s God complex, says Mark Latham.

If Camden Council was serious about efficiency and community service, it would sack the senior staff responsible for the town centre shambles. The worst thing that can happen in local government is it becomes a club, where underperformance and inefficiency are ignored.

The councillors and senior staff become too chummy, looking after each other at the expense of the community. The Baird government’s council amalgamations are a distraction from the real challenge of reform: how to empower the public to break up councils that have become insider clubs.

Annual, independent auditing of local projects would be a useful starting point. Better still, four-year council terms should be reduced to two. Voters wouldn’t have to wait too long before kicking out an arrogant, incompetent local authority.

Memo to Kim Jong-Baird: this is a new concept we are trying to promote in NSW. It’s called democracy.