This is a personal reflection on seeking to enter into a relationship with Aboriginal Armidale. It is not therefore a scholarly article, but it will have scholarly elements. It will often use the first person, as uncomfortable as that is and should be in an academic context, because of the uncomfortable personal nature of this reflection. This reflection will be in three parts. The first part concerns how we got here and why it matters. The second part concerns how things could be so much better than they are, and the third part concerns what to do about it. The conclusion is that we need to create a more shared sense of community, in which everyone has a sense of dignity.

Extensive research has examined municipal resilience to external shocks; however, quantitative assessments of financial resilience based on performance remain limited. This paper addresses this gap by analysing financial sustainability in Victorian local governments across three phases: pre-crisis (2017/18–2018/19), the COVID-19 pandemic (2019/20–2020/21), and recovery (2021/22–2022/23). Using bias-corrected Data Envelopment Analysis, we find that councils’ financial resilience declined during the pandemic. Although recovery was relatively rapid, performance did not return to full efficiency. Both urban and rural councils experienced reduced resilience, with rural councils closely mirroring the overall sectoral decline. Strengthening rural councils’ financial capacity may generate system-wide benefits, particularly during shocks. Second-stage fractional regression results show that factors such as council size, taxable income, and local unemployment significantly influence financial sustainability, especially during crisis periods. Overall, the findings highlight important policy implications, emphasising improved shock-response mechanisms and stronger governance, particularly for rural municipalities.

Despite extensive international research on economies of scale in municipal service delivery, the topic remains underexplored in South Africa and Africa. This study aims to address this gap by examining the relationship between municipality size—measured by population size and staff numbers—and economies of scale in the municipal service delivery. Drawing on data from district and metropolitan municipalities between 2016/17 and 2019/20 and employing regression analysis, the results show a significant U-shaped relationship between both population size and total expenditure and staff numbers and total expenditure. Importantly, these effects vary between metropolitan and district municipalities. For example, expenditure tends to decrease with increasing population size up to a threshold of approximately 158,000 residents, beyond which diseconomies of scale emerge. These insights offer practical implications for regional planning and service delivery strategies, particularly in guiding decisions on municipal consolidation and resource allocation.

The performance of local governments continues to be a key concern for public policymakers around the world. While a substantial body of research has examined the supply side of municipal performance, particularly focusing on efficiency at both the service-specific and system-wide levels, comparatively little attention has been given to municipal effectiveness, or the demand-side perspective. This study aims to address this gap by empirically investigating the relationship between municipal efficiency, measured through operational efficiency estimates, and municipal effectiveness, measured through local resident satisfaction scores. The analysis focuses on the Victorian local government system, one of Australia’s seven states, over the period 2014/15 to 2017/18, with the goal of identifying whether a systematic link exists between efficiency and effectiveness in municipal performance.