Themes in Contemporary Australian Local Government

Local government has aptly been referred to as the 'poor cousin' of the higher tiers of government in the Australian federation, not only in terms of its status compared with federal and state governments, but also measured by the attention it has attracted from scholars. While the genesis of the relative neglect of local government by Australian academics is no doubt complex and multi-faceted, at least two plausible explanations have been offered (Dollery and Wallis 2001). In the first place, compared with its state and Commonwealth counterparts, Australian local government expends a much smaller proportion of total public sector outlays. This may have led scholars to focus more research effort on these pecuniarily more significant levels of government. Secondly, in all Australian local government systems, local authorities have always been statutory creatures of their respective state and territory governments, falling under the prescriptive control of their particular state Local Government Acts. This appears to have persuaded a majority of the community of Australian scholars of government to focus on higher tiers of government as the main determinants of public sector behaviour as a whole.