A critical appraisal of the Western Australian local government review panel’s recommendations

Compared with most other developed nations, Australian local government policymakers have traditionally relied heavily on structural reform based on compulsory council consolidation as their chief instrument of municipal reform. Western Australia (WA) launched its most recent attempt at local government reform in November 2017 with the appointment of a Local Government Review Panel to make recommendations on improving its Local Government Act 1995. The WA Government released the Final Report: Recommendations for a New Local Government Act for Western Australia prepared by the Panel in August 2020. The Final Report offers a host of recommendations for improving the Local Government Act 1995, the great majority of which represent uncontroversial improvements to the Act. However, Recommendation 8 calls for the establishment of a Local Government Commission empowered to make recommendations on municipal mergers and Recommendation 10 proposes the formation of community boards to facilitate municipal representation in large councils. This practice insight paper critically examines these two contentious recommendations in the light of extant empirical evidence. This serves to highlight the contrast between the weight of empirical evidence in the literature with the ‘evidence-free’ nature of Recommendations 8 and 10.