The second round of the constitutional fun challenge starts now and is open to anyone who wants to join in. Your task is this; The Liberals, Labor, Greens and Democrats have used the corporations power to abolish the states and territories. Bye bye NSW, Qld, Victoria, ACT and the rest of them. This leaves the councils as the next significant form of political organisation under the Commonwealth government - and those councils need constitutions!

Write a constitution for Local Government.

There are ; 203 Councils in NSW, 91 in Western Australia, 81 in Victoria, 73 in South Australia, 46 in Queensland, 30 in Tasmania and 7 in the Northern Territory. They range in size from the Brisbane City Council to ... well the internet is unclear what is the smallest council in Australia, by area or budget, but there are probably multiple contenders.

NSW has a Local Government Act which covers the procedures and conduct of local councils. The NSW Constitution also contains a section on Local Government. The Victorian Constitution contains sections on Local Government as does the Queensland Constitution the other states do not have formal constitutions, instead they have a series of bills and acts in classic Westminster style which informally make up their constitution.

There is also the Victorian Local Government Act 1989 , the Queensland Local Government Act 1993 [PDF] , the South Australia Local Government Act and the Tasmanian Local Government Act . So there is a wealth of material to start with.

Pick a council, or make a fictional one, and write a constitution for it. Either post the constitution here on SSR, or on your own site and leave a comment on SSR linking to it. Have fun.

Deadline

The deadline will be December 31st, 2006.

More Information

The Constitution Fun Challenge 1 [CFC tag] ;

• Constitution Fun Challenge Round-up
• CFC - Constitution Fun Challenge [1]

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.

The structure of councils are restricted by the state passed Local Government Acts. Some councils separate an elected Mayor (Executive) from the Council (Legislative) while others have the Mayor elected from within the Council. The Councils also have an interesting mix of multi-member electoral districts.

Councillor and Alderman are interchangable, the NSW Local Government Act in 1993 changed the name from Alderman to Councillor which is why the NSW Councils all have Councillors.

Blacktown City Council, NSW

Blacktown City Council has five wards each with three councillors being elected to represent them. The mayor is an elected councillor, but I cannot find how the mayor is chosen.

Darwin City Council, NSW

Darwin City Council has four wards with four Alderman elected in each ward. The Lord Mayor is elected separate from any Ward and is not an Alderman.

Geraldton Town Council, WA

Geraldton Town Council has twelve councillors and a mayor. The Mayor is directly elected from the electorate and the Deputy Mayor is elected from the Council. The Mayor has a four year term as do the Councillors with half the Council being up for election every second year.

Mount Gambier City Council, SA

City of Mount Gambier Council has five councillors elected in each ward. There are two wards in total. The Mayor is elected separately from the Councillors. The Council also has a flag .

Penrith City Council, NSW

Penrith City Council formed as the amalgamation of Penrith, St Marys, Mulgoa, Castlereagh and Nepean in 1948. There are fifteen councillors in the Penrith City Council elected from three wards with five councillors per ward. The council elects the Mayor each year from within their number.

CFC2

The challenge for writing a constitution in CFC2 for Local Government will be maintaining a sufficient level of separation of powers in what is a very small political unit that has the capability for high levels of communication and representation. It also appears that there is lots of room for innovative electoral arrangements which has been one of Australia's strong points anyway.

The Victorian Local Government Act has a pretty good set of objectives, roles and functions for a Local Council, far better than the NSW legislation.

The Victorian Local Government Act is pretty sparsely worded and better for it IMO. It requires that a Council not contain less than five councillors and no more than twelve. The Act also requires that they Councillors be elected.

Councillors are disqualified from the position if they are bankrupt or undergoing bankrupcy, they have not taken the oath three months after being elected. There are also various penal convictions that disqualify the person from becoming a Councillor for seven years after their sentence is served.

The Act also enforces a uniform election day on all Councils with the terms being four years. A local government constitution as part of the CFC2 need not deal with details like that which may be best done in subsidiary statutory acts rather than a constitutional act.

The Mayor appears to be uniformly elected from the Council under the Victorian Local Government Act;

71. Election of Mayor

(1) The Councillors must elect a Councillor to be the Mayor of the Council.

(3) The Mayor is to be elected-

(a) after the last Saturday in November but not later than 31 December in each year; or
(b) as soon as possible after any vacancy in the office of Mayor occurs.

(4) The election of a Mayor after the period specified in this section does not invalidate the election.

(6) The Mayor of a Shire Council may be titled the President.

(7) Any reference to "Mayor" includes a reference to "Lord Mayor" or "President" as the case may be.

In my opinion the best part of the Local Government Act is the section on the Council's Charter;

• Purpose
• Constituted
• Objectives
• Role
• Functions
• Power

A quick reminder that the Constitutional Fun Challenge 2 is still on with the end date of December 31st - which I am now extending to January 10th ... in part because I am hopelessly unprepared. CFC2 requires that a local government constitution be written up , in part or full, as detailed or abstract as you wish.

The premise is:

ssh jhoward@federalism.gov -p 1901

[jhoward@federalism.gov ~]$ cd /var
[jhoward@federalism.gov ~]$ rm -fR states/
[jhoward@federalism.gov ~]$ mv local/ federal/

I could have used nearly any Prime Minister's username and ssh account to do that. The premise is that the federal government, with the support of the major and minor parties at the federal level have dissolved the states and given local government 'home rule'. So local government is free to create their own constitutions and charters.

The challenge is that local government is small and combines executive and legislative within the one elected body. So coming up with innovative ways to establish some form of separation of powers without destroying the small size and ease of communications between members of local government is the main focus.

So whether you want to post a constitution, an outline, or an idea of how to deal with it, please do so - either here on SSR or on your own blog and site. Alternatively, if you don't want to get an account here, I can 'guest post' it for you if you email me.

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