Local Government in Australia is fairly limited in the services that are provided and the manner in which revenues are raised to match those services. The Brisbane City Council [BCC] is the largest form of local government in Australia after the amalgamation of several city and shire councils to create the BCC in 1924. The Council has an elected Executive in the Mayor, as well as a Civic Cabinet which acts as a bridge between Executive and Legislative. The Council also has a strong committee structure.

Local Governments in Australia do not command a great deal of resources or services, this is mostly supplied at the state level. For instance police and fire are the domain of the states. This is in comparison to the United States model of County/City where the local government supplies and supports those functions through indirect taxes.

Apart from preferring a strong-federalist model where the Federal Government is limited to functions of international and intra-state responsibility (such as stopping the states leveraging tariffs and retributive economic actions against each other), this is why I see the current push by the Liberal, Labor, Greens and Democrats to abolish the states as unwise. It would simply over-whelm the Local Governments who have no experience or history in providing such a wide range of services or the high budgets and leveraging of taxes required to support such a form of government.

The Constitutional Fun Challenge No.2 takes the fictional position that the states have been abolished, so the local governments would have to find a way to ramp up to meet the cost and supply of services which the states previously supplied. The constitution, may or may not, have to reflect that reality. It is also likely that in such a situation the Federal Government will swoop down and take all the responsibilities it has always wanted. That may include complete control of education, health, police, fire etc and leave the Local Governments with Rates, Rubbish and Roads - which is not too far different from what they are responsible for now.

John Howard remarked in a radio interview;

"If we were starting Australia all over again, I wouldn't support having the existing state structure," he said. "I would actually support having a national government, and perhaps a series of regional governments having the power of, say, the Brisbane City Council.

Which probably represents the thinking of federal politicians on what a system of government would look like without the states. This is like the British model which has Westminster then local councils. It has no states like Federal systems such as Australia, the United States and Switzerland have. Ironically, Britain has been decentralising with the establishment of self-government in Scotland and Wales, which is akin to a growing Federalist model of government.

Since having many councils like Brisbane's would probably require amalgamation of existing councils to create super-entities that are still less power than the current states - which is the way the Brisbane City Council came into being in 1924. The Brisbane City Council's budget appears to be 620 million for 2006/07. That is significantly less than NSW's 30 billion budget for 2004/05, and in a non-federalist National-Local system that makes Local Government near to politically insignificant. It would be a system of unitary government dominance at the Commonwealth level.

The Brisbane City Council also has exclusionary clauses in Queensland's Local Government Act of 1993 [pdf]. The Local Government act is big - over 1,000 pages. Most of the exclusionary clauses in the Act relating to the Brisbane City Council [BCC] appear to be to maintain the BCC's existing practices.

The Brisbane City Council is organised between Executive and Legislative functions. The Legislative component includes the Council and Committees, while the Executive is the Mayor and the Executive offices/management. There are twenty-six councilors in the BCC. There is also the quasi-legislative-executive body of the Civic Cabinet which acts like a parliamentary style Executive Cabinet and includes the Mayor and those Councilors which are the chairpersons of the seven standing committees.

The Committees are the dominant legislative function of the Council. In which specialist, special interests and community members all provide feedback in the formulation of policy that will ultimately be executed by the Mayor's office as executor.

One of the benefits of not having legacy crap like a ceremonial monarch in a political system is that the Executive can be elected directly. This is true for the BCC who has elections for the Mayor as well as councilors to represent Wards. This defrays the absolute control that a party has in parliamentary systems, such as Australia's federal and state systems where the legislative majority becomes the informal executive.

For instance if a majority of Liberal members of parliament are elected in the Federal House of Representatives then the senior member of the Party becomes the Prime Minister and assumes the Executive role, including the appointment of an Executive Cabinet. By contrast the people of Brisbane elect their Mayor and Councilors, so that the outcome of of who holds the Executive position is independent of the outcome of the majority party in the Council.

Currently the Mayor of Brisbane is Campbell Newman who is a member of the Liberal Party. The Council is composed of a Labor party majority with seventeen Labor councilors. This situation is impossible in the Westminster style government that is practised at the Federal and State level of government.

Because the City and Shire Councils often act outside of the national and state media spotlight, and don't have the ridiculous limitation of having to adhere to a politically irrelevant monarch or westminster tradition, as well as being smaller political groupings, they are able to innovate organisationally more than the Federal or State parliaments are capable of - hamstrung as they are by current, modern and historical realities.

Sacha Blumen argues for a Greater Sydney Metropolitan Council [GSMC] which would be a supra-council body modelled along the same lines as the Greater London Authority. The GSMC would be responsible for "broad Sydney-wide planning and transport within the Sydney metropolitan region rather than for this to be done by the NSW state govt." Sacha expects there would be an elected mayor and approximately 25-30 councillors.

The Queensland councils are as a rule larger than the NSW ones. The Brisbane City Council [BCC] has a population of about 950,000 and a budget of close to a billion. The Sydney City Council [SCC] in comparison has a population of approximately 156,000 in its political borders.

There are numerous local governments in Sydney responsible for greater populations than the SCC including Blacktown, Fairfield, Wollongong, Sutherland, Lake Macquarie, Penrith, Liverpool, Gosford and Bankstown.

This is probably because those parts of Sydney are newer as well as being demographic centres of the Sydney suburbs. The SCC is mainly for the central business district of Sydney rather than the suburbs.

The BCC is also unique in Queensland politics because it has its own charter. If you look at the local government act for the BCC the Queensland state government lays out the charters for all local governments except for the BCC. Nearly every line of legislation has an "except for Mike clause" in it.

I am not certain a supra-council body would be a good idea for Sydney as it would be centered in Sydney proper which has urban issues rather than the suburban issues of Hornsby, Bankstwon, Liverpool, Campbelltown, Penrith and the Hawkesbury.

It may be that an inner-city and inner-west super council would provide the kind of urban leadership that Sydney requires, but I would be loath for such a structure to extend out to the Blue Mountains. That kind of consolidation of the urban councils would be better achieved by amalgamation of the urban councils than a Sydney-wide super-council.

Tangentially - Guy discusses the London congestion charge policy at polemica.