Managing Democracy? Assessing Some of the Outcomes of Australian Local Government Reform

In the course of the early to mid-1990s, each of Australia's six states introduced revised legislation which changed substantially the nature of their local government systems. The thrust of these changes was sufficiently similar across jurisdictions to indicate the emergence of a nation-wide perspective of the reform process. The substance of the reforms was directed predominantly at reducing the cost of local government service delivery and improving efficiency and effectiveness of operation. As such they constituted a vital ingredient of the broader microeconomic reform context which engulfed Australia's public sectors during the mid-1980s. Though the Australian local government arena is small by international standards - it only accounts for about five per cent of total government expenditure and employs some 140,000 people - it came to be viewed by both state and federal authorities as a critical component in the building of the nation's infrastructure framework.