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[woldring]

Hi all,
I want to draw your attention to an article in today's SMH entitled Local government - "Defining the national role of Councils". The article by Harvey Grennan <hggrenna@smh.com.au> is essentially an extract/summary of an issues paper by
Dr. Oiver Hartwich of the Centre of Independent Studies. The Centre is a well-known conservative think tank which is pro-federation as the reference list of this issues paper makes very clear. Nevertheless, the issues paper makes a serious effort to consider the proposals to include local government in the federal constitution and define its functions, which are mostly quite ill-defined in the state constitutions. It does more, as it considers new functions for local government, e.g.
primary and secondary education.

I am no fan of this Centre at all, as you know,  but if we were to move to a two-tier structure with local government being the second tier the question of defining functions of that tier comes to the fore. In that context the paper makes some contributions worthy of discussion.  It is however quite amazing that the author does not consider that the functions of the states would actually be further undermined to the point where their continued constitutional existence becomes quite untenable. The issues paper can be traced from the Centre's website (12 pp.)


Klaas Woldring.

[woldring]

I should add the URL of the issue paper:

http://www.cis.org.au/issue_analysis/IA104/IA104.pdf

[eclipse]

I'm wondering if our groups have, say, a "top 3 models" that define the balance of powers between National and Local governments?