Penrith and Fairfield councillors won’t be on the Christmas card list from Liverpool Council this year. And if their radar was a bit better, they could have added Campbelltown councillors to that list, because invariably one of them will get up at a monthly council meeting and bag their northern neighbours. While Liverpool itself is proud of the rate of building activity around the town and the number of giant cranes dotted around the central business district and beyond, some outsiders see it as a sign of overdevelopment. So when an application for an apartment comes up at Campbelltown, someone will warn against it by saying: we don’t want to end up like Liverpool, or some such thing.
It’s a puerile thing to do, criticising your neighbour. But not everyone who gets elected to council is a model of restraint, good manners and has some intelligence. On the other hand, Liverpool Council could choose to ignore its critics and just concentrate on its own ambitious plan to become the third regional centre after Sydney and Parramatta. But no, it’s instead at war with Penrith, where a councillor accused Liverpool of having a “bad crime rate’’. And Fairfield’s crime was its mayor giving Liverpool mayor Ned Mannoun a spray when he told him Liverpool was going to letter drop in Fairfield its No Intermodal case.
Mannoun told Liverpool’s Wednesday night November meeting he couldn’t repeat the words the Fairfield mayor had used. Still, why give these people oxygen? I don’t know. All I know is that Liverpool doesn’t need to defend itself, just as Campbelltown doesn’t when it comes under fire. Places that do, whether it’s through their councillors or local media commentators, come across as being defensive and insecure. Take a pill, get over it, move on.
With the March state election getting closer, the Liberal Party candidate for the seat of Liverpool, Mazhar Hadid told Confidential he was getting a good response in his campaign so far. People are saying good on you for having a go, and also asking me why I am not deputy mayor anymore, you were doing a good job. I tell them I had to give it up to concentrate on the state election, Cr Hadid told us.
What does it cost your council to be part of local government association of NSW? A lot of your rates that’s what, more than $60,000. But what do councils get in return? A recent council report had this to say: The benefits to council are LGNSW’s provision of a range of networking opportunities which provide significant exposure and channels of advocacy for Council Executive and Councillors. At the most recent Local Government conference held in Coffs Harbour, both the Premier and Minister for Local Government were in attendance and addressed those present. But the report also addressed “what are the benefits if council withdraws its membership from LGNSW? The benefit of withdrawing membership of the LGNSW would be the cost saving of the membership fees for the relevant financial year. Wonder which option ratepayers would vote for given the chance.
The LGNSW could be a useful body, for example focusing on producing model policies such as meeting practice which councils could adopt.
The idea would be that instead of every individual council paying for advice from a lawyer on meeting practice, LGNSW could do it right once for councils for a much lower price overall.
The above is just an example, but there’s a multitude of things LGNSW could do to help councils.
But it doesn’t do them. It instead spends $20,000,000 on a one sided referendum campaign basically using ratepayers money telling them how to vote.
And it’s not going to get any better, because the association is dominated by an alliance between Labor, Greens, Nationals and rural independents who just think councils are so fantastic that the only purpose of the association is to use ratepayers money to convince ratepayers and government how fantastic we are and how we deserve even more ratepayers money.
I’d rather see Campbelltown leave LGNSW, along with a number of sensible councils in Western Sydney (our friends at Liverpool included) to do what LGNSW should be doing, saving money for ratepayers by doing common tasks between councils, not blowing it all on lobbying.