Reshaping Australian Local Government: Finance, Governance and Reform

Abstract

Scholars have invested a vast amount of effort into the theoretical and empirical analysis of government in representative democracies. Despite this impressive literature, local government can nevertheless justly be described as a poor cousin of its more exalted state and federal relatives in terms of the attention it has drawn from the research community. At least three factors may be explain the existence and persistence of the unfortunate state of affairs. In the first place, in many advanced economies expenditure by local government often comprises a relatively small proportion of total public sector outlays and thus it may have been construed as somewhat less deserving of scholarly inquiry than relatively larger provincial and central governments. This certainly appears to have been the case in Australia where around 730 municipalities outlay $13 billion, representing some five per cent of total government expenditure or about 1.6 per cent of gross domestic product (NOLG 2001).