The Schonell is a Brisbane theatre, and one of its few great art cinemas. It's in the middle of the University of Queensland St Lucia campus, the product of a confused but surprisingly functional moment of seventies architecture. A distinctive feature is the internal brick cloisters enclosing the stairs descending past tiers of seats: cinema as church. The Schonell stopped trading as a cinema tonight .

By coincidence I was there: I knew it was coming, but not that it was so soon. Voluntary Student Unionism is blamed for its closing, and though that certainly seems to have brought it to a head, other factors are at work :

"The Liberal Party actually voted to keep the Schonell open! They're claiming the financial loss the Labor Party says the Schonell was running at isn't accurate, and that the financial records actually show the Schonell breaking even."

As the Time Off article mentions, the cinema cohabits with the finest pizza cafe in Brisbane. Just as Manchester United is a clothing company with a marketing department that also happens to be a football team, the Schonell is a cafe with a marketing department that also happens to be a cinema. And that cinema is situated slap bang in the middle of the one of the key art cinema demographics - students. On the other hand the union ties the cinema's hands by preventing it from running ads before the movies, following an vague anti-corporate aesthetic. Alert readers will note that falling down dead is a great way of sticking it to the man.

So at this stage I'm unsure if the UQ Union is, characteristically, unable to organise a pissup in a brewery, or whether this is a first step in a more complicated plan to offload the building.

Either way, I'm saddened. Farewell, Schonell, but I hope it's see you later.

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

Decentralisation and local autonomy are important principles. The rules, regulations and restriction that govern Local Government are currently all done at the State level. The current issue over uniform proportional representation for Local Government in Western Australia is a good argument for Local Government to determine these things themselves.

I believe that preferential voting in multi-member districts produces superior outcomes, but remain to be convinced that preferential voting, rather than first past the post [FPTP], does similar in single member districts. Local Government should have the autonomy to create their own electoral and voting systems that fit the local environment. The increasingly unitary relationship between Federal government and the States is decried, but little attention is paid to the unitary control of Local Government at the State level .

Giorgio Agamben's thesis in his books have been that the state of exception has become a common form of governance to get around constitutionalism. The most recent excuse for governing under a state of emergency has been terrorism. This subversive form of governance has not been limited to national or state governments.

Washington DC is a rather large city that is run as a city council form of government with an elected mayor and eight representatives chosen from the wards and five other elected positions. The other issues facing the DC Council is that their budgets can be vetoed by the national Congress.

The Council has been adopting emergency procedures to get legislation through council. This requires a majority of nine instead of seven, but avoids the legislation having to go through a process of public comment.

About one-fourth of the bills before the D.C. Council became law this way during the current two-year legislative session, including a package of anti-crime measures that alarmed civil rights groups and contentious legislation authorizing pricey parking garages for the new Washington Nationals baseball stadium.

At last Tuesday's meeting, legislators determined emergencies existed to pay multimillion dollar sums to mental health and developmental disabilities contractors, to authorize tax breaks and to move forward on a public-private partnership to build a controversial economic development project.

A $48,000 pay raise for the mayor and the council chairman first came to the council as emergency legislation but was withdrawn after several council members noted the lack of public scrutiny. Permanent pay raise legislation received preliminary approval last week after public hearings.

Most governments like to reserve the right to act absolutely even though it is in contradiction to democratic principles. Usually war is used as the excuse for an executive to act absolutely, commonly with the excuse of having to suspend the constitution to save it.

Often constitutional bodies will put in emergency powers so that the executive and legislative can act in an absolute manner without contradicting the constitution or law. A good example of this is the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. These are not an inalienable listing of rights as the government reserves the right to come first and act in emergency to suspend those very rights. Three sections: 2,7 and 15 can be overridden by an act of the legislature for a maximum of five years - before requiring renewal.

33. (1) Parliament or the legislature of a province may expressly declare in an Act of Parliament or of the legislature, as the case may be, that the Act or a provision thereof shall operate notwithstanding a provision included

in section 2 or sections 7 to 15 of this Charter. ...

3) A declaration made under subsection (1) shall cease to have effect five years after it comes into force or on such earlier date as may be specified in the declaration.

There is no reason for government to have exceptions or emergency legislative powers. Government can act quickly, and gain people's agreeance on the necessary speed of action without having to resort to a state of emergency or a state of exception.

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.

cam

There is no valid reason of governance or constitutional allowance for the federal government to put a plebiscite on the Queensland council redistricting during the federal election. It is outside the national governments jurisdiction and further "the mergers will be law when any ballots are held".

I fully agree with the argument that the councils should have home rule and the legislative ability to construct their own charters rather than have the state government do it, but this is nothing to do with the national government.

I read somewhere that this may be an attempt to get the same electoral effect as the ballot initiatives in the United States during the 2004 Presidential election where constitutional amendments to ban gay marriage at the states were included in the state elections.

The US tries to make state and federal elections occur on the same day including any referendum and plebiscite questions. They are a state based authority and it was not the federal government putting these on the ballot, it was the states, though I do not doubt that the Bush Presidential campaign was behind the suggestion.

I don't see how Howard can do this, or even if he will bother. It is probably enough politically that he has even mentioned it.

There has to be some wariness of cynicism that this is just a political stunt and there really isn't complete disdain by the Howard government for the separation of powers between the federal and state governments - it is just electoral pragmatism.

But as these new establishments of sovereignty over the states responsibilities grow it is corrosive on the whole federalist system and leads to new layers of overlap in responsibility, authority, services and funding. They end up having an effect far greater into the future than just a temporary electoral one.

For those that intimately care about political structures and their benefits as technologies this behaviour is quite repulsive.

Update - I read the plebiscite being used in a similar manner to the US ballot initiatives at Poll Bludger.

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.