Australian Local Government and Community Development: From Colonial Times to the 21st Century by Frank Hornby. Melbourne, Arcadia 2012. Pp.xxi+371 AUD$25 Paper.
Local government is admired for being ‘close to the people’. Respect from communities extends naturally to those institutions that claim to represent or serve them, as many local governments do. The centralised mass media blitz means citizens are better informed about issues and actors on the national stage than those local and so it is that the third tier of government in this country is unregarded. It may be that the public’s expectations of local governments have not been high, as well as not being particularly well informed. In which case this wide-ranging study coming as it does from an experienced practitioner, Frank Hornby, promises much, especially as he claims to offer us an historical and a national account.
Guided as he is by the pioneer historian of local government in New South Wales, Frank Larcombe, Hornby identifies the failure of early initiatives. In rudimentary urban and rural settings landholders were reluctant to accept responsibility for local amenities in the absence of support from the central government. Modern local government as the Australian colonies received it derived from reform initiatives undertaken to serve the pressing needs of sanitation, energy and transport in the new industrial cities of Britain. The taxed ratepayer, municipal borrowings, the town clerk and the salaried expert were the new faces and features of Britain’s reformed corporations in places like Manchester and Birmingham. So they might have been in Australia and truly influential had colonial corporations been allowed to keep pace with the growth of cities and towns and not savaged by colonial central governments who, paradoxically and, in turn, were themselves captured by localism – by ‘local members’. Colonial and State governments in Australia controlled municipalities and kept them down by fiat of legislative control, leaving them numerous and relatively powerless. On occasion they have denied their democracy. It remains no accident that the most recent attempt to have local government recognised in the Constitution failed dismally.
Hornby brings us quickly to the twentieth century. Too quickly in this reviewers view and notwithstanding a rich store of archival and research material in all the colonies and states, which he ignores in favour of but a few often ancient secondary sources and numerous reports. He misses much that is relevant in the colonial and State settings. The debates over the franchise, the growth of municipal assets and services, crises of infrastructure, of transport and public health, the splendour of ceremonies, town halls and cultural entertainments, the complex character of councillors and aldermen and mayors, reform initiatives like the town planning and the greater city movements, social evils, old and new world exchanges, women and charity work – these hold little interest for him. Overview accounts of local government history in major colonies such as Queensland and Victoria are simply inadequate. Before we know it the book is less than a quarter gone and we are in contemporary times and the author’s comfort territory. He is interested in the peer association of local governments as an interest group, even as a player in Australian national politics. This perhaps explains his ready inclination to read putative national figures (Sir Henry Parkes, but only Parkes) and national events (Federation) into his story. By and large though individuals do not much trouble this narrative, not even major administrators or long serving councillors or for that matter innovative ministers of local government who might have had some vision for the sector. This is local government seen from above through a crude national and peer prism of national politics.
We do get some signposts. The Whitlam government’s far-sighted Australian Assistance Plan (AAP), for example, that sought to establish direct links (and funding for) local communities. It was resisted, predictably by State governments and more surprisingly by many municipal bodies. The author gives an account of events and institutional bodies he himself participated in, like the Australian Local Government Association (ALGA), a body writ large in this story. His account of local government’s involvement with Indigenous people, ‘new settlers’ (migrants) and themed issues, ‘affordable housing’ and arts and culture, are seen through the prism of conference deliberations and submitted reports rather than any deeper or systematic research. The final section four promisingly subtitled ‘Local Government and National Politics’ is similarly constrained. All of which encourages the reader to wonder whether a memoir rather than a supposedly objective and researched ‘history’ would have been a better vehicle for the contents of this book. This is a pity, as there is a need for a wide-ranging and historically well-informed study of this unregarded third tier of government in Australia.
This book review was originally published in Australian Historical Studies
