Recording: Local government in post-crisis Australia

VERITY FIRTH:  Hello, everybody.  Thank you for joining us for today's event.  Firstly, before we begin, I'd like to acknowledge that ‑ well, we're probably meeting on lands across New South Wales, possibly even Australia, but where I am it's the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation.  I'm in Glebe at the moment.  The Gadigal people are also the traditional owners of the land that UTS is built on and it's something I think as a university we want to particularly pay our respect to Elders as traditional custodians of knowledge for the land on which our university is built because without that knowledge we are nothing.  I want to acknowledge traditional owners from the country that I'm on but also from the country that all of you participants are on.  One of the things we've been doing in these webinars is, if you want to, please type in the chat what country you're currently on today and acknowledge the Elders of the land that you're on.

 

So my name is Verity Firth.  I'm the Executive Director of Social Justice at UTS and I lead our Centre for Social Justice and Inclusion.  It's my great pleasure to welcome you all to this event, one of the many global events taking place today and tomorrow as part of the OECD's Government After Shock program, which we're jointly co‑hosting alongside the Institute for Public Policy and Governance. 

 

We have very distinguished guests with us today:  Clare Sullivan, Monica Barone, Mayor Tracey Roberts and Mayor Jerome Laxale.  We'll introduce them properly shortly.  Hold on, that's exciting.

 

Housekeeping first.  Firstly, today's event is being live captioned.  To view the captions, you click on the link that is in the chat, and you can find the chat at the bottom of your screen in the Zoom control panel.  The captions will then open in a separate window. 

 

If you have any questions during today's event, you will be able to ask them, but this is the way you do it.  We want you to type them into the Q&A box.  So don't type them into the chat box, next to the chat box is a Q&A box.  Type your questions into there and you can also then upvote questions that other people have asked.  Carol will be looking after this session, but mostly we tend to ask the questions that are upvoted the most ‑ you know, democracy.  So if you ask a good question, you're likely to be voted for.

 

So we all know that 2020 has been an extraordinary year.  We've experienced bushfires, floods, an increasingly desperate climate crisis, social and health issues, including racial and income inequality, a US election that's threatened the integrity of democratic systems, and of course all of this has happened during a global pandemic.  This has forced us all to make some significant changes in a very short period of time to the way that we work, live our lives and what we expect from organisations, business and government.

 

As we all experience change at this accelerated rate, now is in fact the perfect opportunity to identify and proactively work for the post‑crisis society that we want to live in.  There are many things to be proud of about the way that we have collectively responded to the COVID pandemic, but as we all know, COVID has also put a spotlight on the widening inequality that exists in our community.  We've seen real impacts of the divide in access to services, the divide in access to technology ‑ that's something that's become really apparent in the education sector ‑ and of course the divide in access to financial and housing security and how different the impacts of COVID have been on different sections of our community.

 

So now, more than ever, public institutions like universities and local government have an important role to play in supporting communities in transition and in influencing what the upheaval of this year will actually mean for 2021, 2022 and on into the future.

 

At UTS, social justice is at the heart of our university's priorities and our purpose.  Everything we do we are proactively working towards a future shaped with a more equal, socially just and environmentally sustainable society.

 

I don't need to tell either the panel or the people who've hooked in to this call, but local government agencies are often the first line of connection and response in our communities.  They provide many essential services, the need of which has been starkly highlighted by COVID, and they engage with vulnerable members of our society every day in a very real way at a grassroots level. 

 

To continue to do this in a changing world, local government needs to be alert to the challenges and able to respond to those challenges, but one thing I'd also like to say at the beginning of this forum is local government also needs to be supported and acknowledged for the contribution that it makes to the resilience and wellbeing of communities across Australia and too often both Federal and State Governments do not properly acknowledge and support the role of local government.

 

So today we will be focusing our lens on local government.  We'll be asking questions around how has local government responded during the recent crises, what challenges and opportunities have emerged as a result, what lessons have been learned and how can the positives be taken forward, and also how can we ensure that our councils, our locally supported councils, have the resources and capacity to continue to deliver for their communities into the future?

 

So I am now delighted to be about to hear from all you wonderful panellists on your vision for local government, but I will hand over now to Carol Mills.  Carol Mills is the Director of the UTS Institute for Public Policy and Governance.  She will be leading and moderating today's discussion.  Over to you, Carol.

 

CAROL MILLS:  Thank you, Verity.  Thanks very much indeed.  And may I also begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the lands upon which we are all meeting and we are all away from the east coast of Sydney to the far west coast of Perth, so I'm very, very pleased to have a real breadth of representation here today.

 

As Verity said, we are joining in I guess a global production here today, 50 different institutes across 25 countries all working together to discuss government aftershock.  And we very deliberately chose the topic of local government because we think it's become so pivotal in the last 12 months.  The rise again of federalism and the interest in the role of states and local communities has been heightened through the various crises we've suffered and additionally, as a Centre for Local Government, of which I'm the director, along with the Institute For Public Policy and Governance, next year is the 30‑year anniversary of the Centre For Local Government.  We have a very large number of things planned that we will be rolling out as part of that celebration and I guess re‑emphasising the role of local government in exactly the way that Verity has just spoken about.  So we thought this was a great opportunity to kickstart, early start into 2021, by having local government as our theme today.

 

Elsewhere across the world people are talking about digital role of government, they're talking about trust in government, a sustainable development, methods of governance in the new world order and climate action.  So there's quite a variety of things that will be brought together. 

 

This report and this recording will go forward to the OECD organisations that are arranging this and become part of a national report.  So again, thank you for our participants who have joined us online and thank you very much for the panellists, whom I'm about to introduce to you.

 

As I said, we are very fortunate to cover the whole breadth of the country and in a very democratic way we're going to introduce people alphabetically because each of them provides a different and very important role for us on the panel today.  Firstly, Monica Barone, many of you may know if you're Sydney based, has been Chief Executive of City of Sydney since 2006 and has a long career in local government in New South Wales.  The City of Sydney we often think about as the CBD and business area of Sydney, but in fact it has nearly a quarter of a million residents in the CBD and surrounding areas.  Monica manages a budget of about $850 million a year, nearly $1 billion in budgeting.  She has $12 billion worth of assets under her control and about 2,500 staff.  So City of Sydney is one large local government.  We'll be interested to hear about the particular challenges as a centrally based and city‑focused local government area during the period of COVID.

 

Our second panellist is Jerome Laxale from the City of Ryde, a middle‑ring suburb in Sydney.  It has a population of about 120,000.  Jerome has been on the council since 2012 and has been Mayor since 2017.  He's been very, very strong in supporting a whole lot of community engagement, community access, both in terms of development of facilities such as sports events and facilities, but also in programming, antiracism and engagement programs.  He's also very passionate and shares a passion with me, we've discovered in our conversations, around affordable housing, one of the great challenges of our time I think particularly in places like Sydney.

 

Thirdly, I'd like to introduce Tracey Roberts, Mayor of Wanneroo, which is a northern Perth council, an area of great growth.  When I look at the population figures in the last decade, Wanneroo has really taken off and it now is I think about the second largest local government area population wise in Western Australia, with over 200,000 residents.  In addition to that, and same with also Jerome, both of them also represent their local state‑based Local Government Associations, so they're going to be able to give us perspective statewide in Western Australia and New South Wales, but also from the perspective of the particular issues that their councils are contributing and ideas that they're bringing to the COVID response.

 

Our last but definitely not least is Clare Sullivan, Chief Executive Officer of the Local Government Professionals Association.  Clare has had a long career in local government herself and over 20 years in working in advocacy and inter‑government relations and the body she's now Chief Executive of represents the workforce in local government in Australia, and I think we often forget, again picking up on Verity's point, just how big local government is.  Over 200,000 people work directly in local government in Australia and if we think about the indirect impact those workers have, particularly in our rural and regional areas, where it's often one of the largest employers, thinking about the future directions of our workforce and thinking about the future needs of local government and planning ahead is a really critical role that Clare has now taken responsibility for fairly recently and we very much look forward to hearing from her.

 

Just before I do ask the panellists to commence, as I said, just to remind you that you can put your questions in through the Q&A part of the Zoom and we will look at a question time toward the end of the session.

 

Following my introductions, I'd now like to ask each of the panellists ‑ we're going to kick off with around about a three‑minute introduction from each and then we'll move into a broad discussion around the topics that they raise.  So, as I said, in my democratically chosen model we're going to go with Monica first.  Thank you.

 

MONICA BARONE:  Thank you, Carol, and thank you, Verity.  It's a great honour to be on this fantastic panel and to be speaking to colleagues across Australia who also work in local government, or probably are interested in public policy and other matters.

 

When I think about what we've gone through over the last ‑ it's been nearly 12 months of dealing with the COVID crisis, I generally feel extremely positive and optimistic in fact.  I'm really very impressed by the way that we've coped with this situation across this country and I think it's something that we should be extremely proud of.  We've been very, very capable.

 

Obviously when we look forward, though, we have to ask ourselves what are the attributes of that capability that we really want to understand and be sure we continue to invest in so that we are always able to adapt and cope to situations like this and also, as Verity said, we also have to look at the areas where we perhaps did not perform so well and ask ourselves what can we do about those things?

 

But just in the interests of my brief introduction, I'm just going to address two things, two of those attributes that have become apparent to me as being two good things that have enabled us to cope with this situation so well.  They are decentralisation of the way we run our services and our decision making, and also the very good governance that we have across our nation in our governments in our major institutions and I'm going to particularly focus in our community organisations.

 

So I'm just going to step back a bit and just give an example of one of the things that we've experienced that speaks to those two attributes.  When this administration of the City of Sydney was elected ‑ that's the administration of the Lord Mayor Clover Moore ‑ we very early on decided that we really did accept the research around social capital and that we accepted that that research said that communities or societies that had a lot of strong community organisations and institutions had more social capital and that's because the theory is that the more people participate in those organisations, the more they learn about good governance.  So that's the way those two things go together.  So we accepted that research and decided that therefore we were going to make it a hallmark of this administration to invest a lot in our community organisations and we radically increased our grants program as a consequence.  So that was the sort of theory that sat behind the grants program and that led to the situation that we found ourselves in now. 

 

So what happened during COVID, of course, was that one of the things that happened very quickly was that we recognised ‑ and this is also because we have wellbeing indicators, so we also know about the nature of our community and their wellbeing, and one of those indicators is their ability to raise, you know, $1,500 in a crisis is one of the indicators.

 

Because we have that information and because we have those very strong relationships with our community and community organisations, we recognised very quickly that we were going to have a lot of people in our community that were not going to be eligible for JobKeeper and JobSeeker and therefore were going to be food insecure amongst other things.  So we very quickly allocated nearly $2 million worth of grants and coordinated 60 community organisations to deliver ‑ I think we're delivering about 20,000 meals or hampers into our community each week.

 

The point I'm trying to make is this, that we were able to do that, one, because we knew our community really well and were able to assess that risk very, very quickly.  Secondly, we had the network of community organisations, that decentralised network of community organisations, that were able to partner with us to deliver.  But my third point about good governance is this, that we know those organisations well.  Because we have partnered with them before and we have funded them before, we are aware of their governance and therefore we were able with absolute confidence to transfer $2 million almost overnight into their bank accounts to enable them to help deliver an essential service to our community.

 

All of those things are the attributes of a resilient community, but all of those things don't happen overnight.  They come from a systemic, you know, policy commitment and practice over many years.  That's the sort of resilience work that we really focus on and it's proven to work in this crisis.  Thank you.

 

CAROL MILLS:  Thank you, Monica.  That's a really interesting example, and again I think one of the things we'll come back to is the strength we were able to build on and draw on and how some of the innovations that were done and some of the success stories, which we'll hear more of in a moment, really were reliant upon long‑term investment, long‑term policy strengths and long‑term commitment into the community.  So a terrific example to kick‑start us.  Thank you, Monica.

 

Next I'm turning to Jerome to talk about some of the experiences, as I said, with almost two hats on, but at a statewide level as a representative of the New South Wales Local Government Association, but also with a great deal of experience as a councillor and mayor in the Ryde municipality.  Apologies for that.

 

MAYOR JEROME LAXALE:  That's fine.  Thank you, Carol.  Hello to everybody.  I'm coming from Wallumedegal land, derived from the word meaning snapper fish ‑ here in the City of Ryde we're very blessed to be sort of around Lane Cove River and Parramatta River ‑ and obviously pay respects to Elders past, present and emerging.

 

As Carol has said, I'm here representing Linda Scott, who's the President of Local government NSW and now also ‑ talk about wearing two hats, she's now also President of the Australian Local Government Association.  And I guess, just continuing on from what Monica has said, I think we can all be very proud of how local government has responded and adapted to the year of the crisis this year being 2020. 

 

As we've seen, and I'm sure you've all got examples of how across the country, be it in regional New South Wales, up in the alps in Victoria and even in metropolitan cities ‑ we can see that councils have really been at the forefront of a coordinated response to the crises that we've faced.  We hear some people saying "I don't hold a hose, mate", but I know during the bushfire crisis we've had councils and mayors who are literally holding hoses fighting those fires and cleaning up along the way.

 

From a city like Ryde, where we were impacted obviously by COVID, but particularly with those natural disasters, what we also saw from local government was those areas who weren't directly impacted by these natural disasters that there was a very quick move to helping our local government brothers and sisters and cousins right across the country, and Monica at the City of Sydney led a fantastic team as part of the local government bushfire recovery support group along with many, many other councils across Sydney who came together sharing resources from, you know, plant and equipment.  I know an inner west council I believe sent down some planning staff to some of the worst affected bushfire local government areas across the city.

 

Then, as we sort of came out of the bushfire crisis, we then fell into a global pandemic and the City of Ryde unfortunately was one of the first hit with I guess a larger number of cases early on, and what we've seen since the pandemic hit is how important local government has been to provide information to our local community about local cases to encourage important State and Federal Government initiatives, be they through financial support or health advice, local government has been asked to help deliver those messages and help, I guess, regulate social distancing and provide more eyes and feet on the ground to help our community get through what has been an incredible year.

 

To do all that, I guess from a Local Government NSW perspective, as the peak body for local government here, we recognised early on that to deliver all these services, not only for our communities but on behalf of the State and Federal Governments, we had to ensure that staff within these councils were well looked after and had a secure future and a secure job. 

 

So one of the major things that Local Government NSW was able to do on behalf of the sector was organise and negotiate very quickly an interim award with the unions and with the government which was able to provide the workforce with security and flexibility almost straightaway.  I've only been on Local Government NSW for a little while, but the speed with which we were able to negotiate an award with general managers and the unions and the government just showed how focused we all were in trying to ensure that local government employees and the sector was secure and that people could go to work and do their job flexibly and safely and get home every day.

 

Obviously the challenges from this ‑ lots of lessons.  Challenges which we'll touch on no doubt include long‑term funding security.  There's always pressure on local government to raise funds and to ensure that services are delivered, but I tell you what, I never thought I'd have to make the decision one day to close six branch libraries in the City of Ryde.  It was a tough one, but we did so prior to some health orders based on a number of local issues here. 

 

But what we've seen across the country is that a localised response, although often sometimes much maligned, does deliver for our community no matter where you are here living in Australia.  So really happy to be part of today's conversation, really proud to be part of local government and, yeah, looking forward to the rest of the day.

 

CAROL MILLS:  Thanks so much, Jerome.  I'm sure the discussion around partnership and both peer‑to‑peer support, one of the strengths of the sector, supporting one another both through their associations through rural and metro working together.  Even at the moment I think in New South Wales there's a large grant program being issued for assisting communities in particularly the rural areas to rebuild and part of that was a deliberate strategy to actually get support in the grant application process and learning about grants from the larger councils.  So again, there's a recognition right across State Government and in our communities about how closely local governments work together.  As I said, I'm sure it's a theme we'll return to.

 

Can I now turn to Tracey Roberts, who, as I said, is coming to us in a very different time zone, so much appreciate that, and who again has two hats on as a representative of both the West Australian Local Government Association and the Mayor of a large and growing local council herself.

 

MAYOR TRACEY ROBERTS JP:  Thank you, Carol, and also thank you very much for the opportunity and listening very closely to Jerome and the synergy between all of local governments right around Australia, I would also like to acknowledge Linda Scott as the newly elected President of the Australian Local Government Association and a very professional, articulate lady, and we know we're in good hands.  I would like to pay respects to the Wadjuk people of the Noongar nation, the land on which I sit at the moment.

 

When you talk about local government, and it's such a diverse scope of what we do, when you look at the amount of people that are involved and the impact on lifestyles and right across the world COVID has had a significant impact across all communities, I'm going to touch on the Western Australia local government and we all know that we've been at the forefront of all of the impacts.  We've been there frontline first base, how are we going to support our communities, you know, how resilient, how agile are we, and my goodness did this not really demonstrate just how we can respond to a crisis when in need.

 

The operational changes, the support for local businesses, communities, businesses were forced to close their doors.  Many community members were impacted negatively with their employment.  The services, the facilities, the community groups, everything stopped, everything came to a screaming halt.  Then we had to look at how this has impacted on the wellbeing of a community.  We focus very strongly on that in Western Australia.  The financial support, the hardship policies, how we waived our fees and charges, how we committed to a rates freeze, which was at the request of our Premier, how can we be innovative in providing our community services in delivering all of the things that the community expects. 

 

The important thing for us in local government in Western Australia was to keep our local spirit high, make sure that the amenities were offered and provided in such a changed manner, how are we able to provide that service, you know, what was the thinking style behind it.  We wanted to make sure that everybody was safe, everybody was supported.  We wanted to make sure that we kept the staff who were involved away from any virus.  So I guess it was a mitigation measure.  So many different things in addition to maintaining thousands of local government staff, redeploying them into different areas, and a lot of focus was on in the very early stages our community services and that's where we basically eventually, after all of the thought bubbles, where did we go, community services, health, wellbeing and vulnerability.

 

What was done, library services through the ‑ I talked a little bit before we started on the exercises, staff contacting vulnerable members of our community and making sure that they were okay.  So it was a significant contribution by local governments.  I'm talking about Western Australia, but we were very, very closely in touch with all of our associations right around the country making sure that we were all literally in support of and doing the right things of our community.

 

Local governments in Western Australia really did step up.  We provided $512 million worth of financial relief and economic support right across WA communities, so we did 139 local governments, they all did step up.  Even now sitting here, Western Australia local governments stand ready to provide further support to our communities in partnership with our State Government.

 

Having said that, the contribution of that support was absolutely noteworthy, given that it was made in the face of a hugely diminished revenue resulting in the closure of many local government facilities.  So we really did step up and the main priority for us was to keep our community safe and to limit the spread of the virus.

 

We've done well.  We look at our communities now and they are appreciative, but there is still more to be done and we are certainly not sitting back and thinking right, we're okay now, we've done a great job.  We know these waves are coming in.  We saw in Victoria, we've also seen recently in South Australia.  So local governments well and truly are playing a very key role in how we are responding to COVID‑19.

 

CAROL MILLS:  Thanks, Tracey.  That was a fantastic summation of what you're doing over there and I think a very interesting issue about the tangible and the intangible support and the direct link to the community, which is again something we'll return to in a few minutes.

 

Before we do that, can I now introduce Clare Sullivan again to speak who, as I said previously, is the Chief Executive of the Local Government Professionals association of Australia and is able to speak to us about what this means for staff and how the 200,000 people employed in local government across Australia have not only made a contribution, an enormous contribution in the last 12 months, but how we can assist and position them to continue in the new world.

 

CLARE SULLIVAN:  Thank you, Carol.  For those of you who don't know, Local Government Professionals is the professional association for the local government workforce.  I'm coming to you here today from Canberra and I'd like to acknowledge the Ngunnawal people, whose land on which I'm working from, and pay my respects to their Elders past and present.

 

As part of my job in Canberra and probably the best bit of my job is that I get to see some of the work councils are doing across Australia and never before has their work been more important than in responding to crises such as the recent bushfires and COVID.  Councils have been working tirelessly to keep people safe.  They've been ensuring community services are delivered in some of the most difficult circumstances.  They're reaching out to vulnerable pockets of our community and ensuring that essential services are reshaped to meet the changing needs of communities.

 

Throughout 2020, the local government workforce has shown its capacity to be agile, respond to constant change, innovate and be pragmatic.  As we've heard, we've seen library doors close, but their services continue through click and collect, home delivery and virtual reading.  We've seen public pools close, reopen, change constantly as rules and capacity limits change.  We've seen rubbish collection and road maintenance services change significantly, although much of this is seamless to the public.  Capital works and infrastructure investment has been sped up to create jobs and planning decisions fast‑tracked to make sure investment is happening across the country.

 

We've also seen councils develop a range of programs to support businesses and restore community competence.  There's incentives to buy from local businesses, economic development strategies to reposition regional areas, entrepreneurship programs popping up, and business grants and stimulus activity.  It's quite remarkable what's been going on in such a short space of time.

 

We recently undertook a survey of councils looking at the impact of COVID on the workforce and found an incredibly positive story.  Minimal negative impacts are occurring such as reduced hours or pay.  Where councils did have to stand down staff, staff were quickly re‑employed when facilities could open. 

 

We've seen a huge amount of redeployment.  In some cases councils have redeployed 25% of their workforce into substantially different jobs and that's in addition to the commonsense changes, such as asking outdoor staff to start working at the work site instead of the depot.

 

We've seen digital transformation happen at an incredible pace.  We've all talked about it and heard about it for a number of decades, but in the last 12 months we've seen systems put in place to ensure staff can work from home effectively, can access key systems, and can collaborate virtually and using technology.

 

The local government workforce are the people who've worked hard to make this happen and are embracing some of the opportunities that will come out of this.  We're going to see lasting effects in terms of more flexible working conditions, better use of technology, and more progressive management practices such as managing teams for outcomes.

 

The other interesting thing that's happening is a dramatic rethink about the future of our communities.  Cities are grappling with changes in people's movements and the transport and infrastructure we need for the future.  Regions are looking at new ways to attract and retain skilled workers and councils are reconsidering their workforce plans to ensure they can meet the changing and expanding needs of their communities today and into the future.

 

As we've heard from the other speakers, there is some great work being done around the country by councils and I think it's worth taking a moment to reflect on the 200,000‑odd people who've been working really hard to make sure Australians are safe and to improve the lives of every Australian.  Thanks.

 

CAROL MILLS:  Thank you, Clare.  That was a fantastic summation of just all of the ways in which we've been impacting local government workforce.  We've seen I think by the look around us most of us are dialling in from home for this Zoom meeting and that is certainly a way of working, but how you then manage that in terms of the sort of type of front‑of‑house and direct service delivery that many local government staff are responsible for, and I think we started when Verity's comments about COVID hasn't affected us all equally, there have been different responses and different requirements of different parts of the country and different workforces and the examples given today again about how we maintain that very strong community focus when we're requiring people to be right at the frontline and be delivering services face to face and directly or substituting for those services in very innovative ways.  So thank you for drawing our attention to that issue.

 

Thanks all of you.  That's been a really fascinating I guess group of complementary but different perspectives about what local government has been able to do and I think some of the themes that have come through fundamentally have been about the strength and preparedness of local governments across the country to react, to have a very strong sense of their community and a very good understanding of what their communities' immediate needs are, whether that be citizens or businesses, and workforce and being able to respond quickly to that.

 

I want to just now ‑ if I can just begin with a question relating to that is we've talked about how this has changed and how quickly decisions have been able to be made, but each of the people here is coming from a position of authority within their council and I'm interested in what that's meant for you personally and having to change or potentially make decisions in a way that we don't have all the information you might require, or in Monica's situation as CEO not having all of the material to provide to her councillors and to make judgment calls, and how you've responded to that and why you think councils have been able to come with you on that journey and had the confidence to make some of the decisions that you have asked them to make.  Can I go to you, Monica, first on that?

 

MONICA BARONE:  Thank you.  I think there's two things that we really all ‑ I'm sure all of us did much the same thing and the first is to be absolutely really focused on communication.  So we have an enormous amount of effort into communicating with our staff and communicating with our community in order to enable them to know what's going on and to be involved in the decision making.  I think one of the things I always say to staff is that if there's no communication, if there's a communication vacuum, people will fill that vacuum and they'll fill it with misinformation.  So it's really important to guide ‑ to be in control of the communication and to be really proactive in that communications.

 

The second thing I'd say, though, of course is that you don't know everything and that's really important you say that as well, that you continuously say, "With the information that I have and to the best of my abilities, this is the decision that we're going to make today and I reserve the right to change my mind tomorrow when new information comes in."  So I think it's also about being truly honest under these circumstances.  So I think that the key to managing any change is ensuring that you communicate really well with people.

 

The final thing I'll say is this, and it's something I have to say carefully because I don't want to sound paternalistic, but I think we have to realise that for many people change is unbelievably uncomfortable and frightening and so if you're in a leadership position, you also have to be calm and assured, even if you're saying "I don't know the answer", but you are saying "I don't know the answer, but I'm going to do my best to find that answer, I'm going to give you the best information I can."  So it's really important in a leadership position at a time like this that you don't panic and that you understand that many people face ‑ somebody said to me recently that many people spell change F‑E‑A‑R and if you're in a leadership role, whether for your staff or your community, that sense of assurance and patience and calmness is also really important.  Thanks, Carol.

 

CAROL MILLS:  Thanks, Monica.  Can I ask you, Tracey, from a mayoral and also head of Local Government Association perspective, what was it about the local government services and advice you were getting from personnel across the state that gave you confidence to make some of the decisions and some of the support changes that you made?

 

MAYOR TRACEY ROBERTS JP:  We were very fortunate, Carol, in that the information that we got from our State Government was clear and it was very timely.  So we were able to respond to that.  It was I guess communication ‑ I agree with Monica, communication, but also teamwork, that real sense of rolling up our sleeves and everybody doing what they absolutely could.

 

So there was certainly not a lot of sleep for anybody I don't think in the early days when we were all trying to be very strong operating on little sleep and a lot of Beroccas, but the main thing is we were all on the same target and that was maintaining our community's health and wellbeing.  So the service delivery changes that had to occur quick smart, which was the online methods of community development and service delivery, you know, how that team spirit and how innovative and adaptive that the whole staff became right across Western Australia.  Everybody had ideas and everybody believed that this could be achieved.  So it was listening to everybody and making some really good decisions that empowered people to be able to go and do things.  Certainly the redeployment and redirecting staff into different areas, like the plumbers and engineers in community development role because that was where the priority was because of the welfare checks and the initiatives.

 

So it was that sense of understanding and team spirit, but the main thing is that we were very, very clear at the very outset, you know, at what stage COVID‑19 we were at and what we needed to do.  So the communication, the team spirit and the adaptability was absolutely key.

 

CAROL MILLS:  Thanks, Tracey.  Jerome, can I take that point in a slightly different direction that in addition to having the confidence of the staff and asking them to do different things and to be redeployed, as Clare said, we also had to ask the community to accept different ways of services being delivered and we talked about digital.  Can I pick on Ryde for one moment because Ryde is a very culturally and ethnically diverse community and I wondered if there were particular challenges or lessons to be learned about being able to engage such a diverse community in such a period of urgency.

 

MAYOR JEROME LAXALE:  Yes, look, this is something that this term of council in particular has really been active on, is to try to I guess reform the way that the City of Ryde as an organisation communicates with our community.  We've got 23% of people who live in the City of Ryde who are from China, we've got 10% who are from Korea, and then obviously a whole ‑ we've got a large Armenian population, Italian, so yes, communicating has always been a challenge. 

 

And in a time of crisis, and particularly early on ‑ cast your minds back all the way to February 2020.  I know it feels about a decade ago, but in February, prior to the daily updates from Premiers, prior to the social media posts from New South Wales Health, there was nothing, there was absolutely no information in those early days of the COVID pandemic. 

 

I mentioned in my opening, in the City of Ryde we had one or two cases here or there and it left some of our most vibrant town centres and businesses and communities like a ghost town.  The town centre of Eastwood, which has a huge Chinese and Korean make‑up to it, virtually went from this bustling town centre to a ghost town in about one or two days and this was prior to any restrictions coming in.  It all came down to ‑ and I think Monica touched on this before ‑ the absence of information.  What we were left with is misinformation.  We had these almost ‑ some of them were even reported to be deliberate attacks of misinformation to keep people out of Eastwood and we had to I guess work in overdrive to start communicating to our local community.  So we had to take ads out in the local paper with basic health advice which wasn't being provided by other levels of government at that time.  We were the first local government area to give a direct grant to small business in Eastwood in particular because it was being smashed by this misinformation.

 

So we learnt a lot.  We're hoping that a lot of the information we're putting out now will be permanently translated into the English‑Chinese, simplified Chinese and Korean being the largest populations, but it was difficult, particularly when the methods of communication for people aren't traditional.  A letter in a letterbox sometimes goes completely unread for weeks, months, or if at all. 

 

So we had to move quickly and our staff and communications team ‑ I'm sure they're looking forward to their holiday this year, but I tell you what, they did a fantastic job early on at a time ‑ as I said, at a time when the State sort of weren't geared up to deliver that communication that you're seeing and that we take for granted now, but back then it was completely absent and we had to act quickly.

 

Talking about the overarching theme of today, that's what local government is good at.  We're agile, we're on the ground, we know our local community and we know what they need and that's something that we're able to deliver here in the City of Ryde pretty quickly.

 

CAROL MILLS:  Thanks, Jerome.  Clare, we just talked about the staff.  They'll all be looking forward to a Christmas/January break, no doubt about that.  What do you think in terms of positioning staff who might have change fatigue or might have been able to treat these things as an emergency, but can they sustain this effort into 2021?  We've seen in Melbourne, we've seen in Adelaide yesterday that we can't adequately predict the future.  Are there certain things that you would be hoping that councils really concentrate upon in terms of staff wellbeing in the next 6 to 12 months?

 

CLARE SULLIVAN:  Certainly you're absolutely right.  I would say the local government workforce has performed incredibly well, but deserves a much‑needed rest over Christmas where they can.

 

I think a lot of councils are starting to build in flexible working arrangements, working from home and encourage some of those more progressive policies within their workforce and that seems to be well received and sort of almost demanded in some cases from the staff.

 

I think there's now a better focus on collaboration and we've seen a lot of sort of the fast fail approaches, and in the public sector it's not failing in your service delivery, it's having the checks and balances in place so that you can pick up future failure and mitigate against that before it actually does fail.  So I think there's a greater tolerance within the workforce for trying new things and accepting that it might not be right the first time and you can change and you can fail.

 

I think the other thing that will probably be a lasting sort of positive benefit actually from COVID and some of the disasters is the increased visibility of local government services.  I think a lot of what we do traditionally is invisible to the community, but COVID, the bushfires, the drought, some of the recent disasters have highlighted what councils are doing and, as Jerome was saying, have forced us to communicate more effectively about what we're doing, so not only there's awareness about it but some recognition that communities are held together by their council and there are a range of services that are being promoted throughout each community to keep that cohesion going.  So yes, there will be a lot of benefits that come from it after a good Christmas break.

 

CAROL MILLS:  Thank you.  We're getting toward the end of the session and I just wanted to ‑ I've just had a glance at some of the Q&A, so I want to ‑ some of them are far too long to read and have our remaining period.  Two themes I probably want to pick up on from them.  One of them, there's a series of comments extremely complementary about what the local government council has done in their area and people have given terrific examples to expand on those that our panellists have already done and we'll find a way to help distribute that information.

 

The others have a theme written slightly differently in different areas but basically two things I think are coming through:  how can State and Federal Governments better support local government in these roles given the constraints that we've had around rate capping in some states and other funding issues that have been really I guess coming to the fore as the progressive impact of not being able to raise rates; the second, the interim period we've got now where I think Monica and some other panellists spoke about the fact businesses were struggling and even in the businesses I know Monica manages assets that are commercially leased, for example, as part of the revenue stream in the city of Sydney, but those businesses were affected by COVID and therefore the revenue stream to council becomes affected.

 

I'm going to ask each of you this, if I may, starting probably in the same order we began today, but what is it State and Federal Government can help you do to continue the work that we've been talking about today, but also potentially expand upon the lessons and really substantially build the profile and I guess, as Clare just said, make higher recognition in the community about the incredible delivery of services, planning responsibilities that councils actually have?  So Monica, can I ask you from a state and government perspective what would help you keep moving?

 

MONICA BARONE:  I'm going to answer that slightly differently because I'm going to actually refer to your organisation here, Carol and Verity.  I think one of the things we have to do, and we do do but it's an opportunity now, is to look at the value derived as a consequence of this activity and the avoided cost as a consequence of this capability. 

 

Now, I think some of the research that I always find fascinating of course is the research around carers, that if we didn't have carers or if we didn't have volunteers, what the cost to the community or the public purse would be if we had to pay for those services, or what the cost would be to the people who are not going to receive those services in terms of their quality of life.

 

So I think that local government is forever delivering, but what we have to really do is do a very good job of quantifying the value of what it is that we deliver in its multi sort of facetted way and start to make the case much more strongly for the avoided cost, and of course that goes to that resilience work.  As you know, I've chaired the Sydney resilience office for the last five years.  City of Ryde has been extremely active and very successful in this space as well. 

 

Of course the whole point of that resilience work is to understand what the possible sort of shocks and stresses are that will hit a community and then plan to both most importantly mitigate against those, because if we mitigate ‑ it's one thing to respond to a disaster or a shock.  It's much better to not have it at all or to have all of that mitigation invested in.

 

So I think that what we continuously seek is that respectful relationship that understands that it's collectively that we do these great things, but there is an incredible amount of avoided cost as the consequence of local governments' work and starving us to death through things like rate pegging is only in the end going to create a huge cost impost for the State Government and the Federal Government. 

 

I'll just finish on one example, and I use this example with every local government in Australia that I ever come across, and I say if you starve local governments to death and they eventually don't fix the bridge and the bridge collapses, then you're going to have to pay to fix it to get the goods to market.  So there is no benefit in starving local government to death the way that you're doing because the longer we are unable to maintain our assets ‑ and with resilience work I say to CEOs all the time if you think you've got an asset backlog now, wait until you look at it through the eyes of resilience because the amount of money we need to spend to make our infrastructure resilient is enormous, but if we do it, we will have more resilient communities and we will avoid the enormous amount of disaster spending that we currently are having to fund.  Let's face it, all of that is being transferred to the public purse.  Thank you.

 

CAROL MILLS:  Thank you, Monica.  I think challenge accepted in terms of the value for local government project.  As I said, 2030 is our 30th year of the Centre for        Local Government and we're very ambitious about what we can contribute.  You've just laid down the gauntlet of something that really would have lasting impact, so I'm definitely going to have a serious look at that.

 

I think the other issue you've just raised about the preventive functions, this is something we haven't always invested in at government level for a variety of reasons and the erosion of assets and not forward planning enough, having a much stronger capacity to build that case is also really important.  So thank you for those very wise words.

 

Jerome, what can we do from your perspective about getting the state and federal support for the achievements of local government?

 

MAYOR JEROME LAXALE:  How long have I got, Carol?  Look, I think fundamentally ‑ I think particularly at a state to local level ‑ I think the State Government needs I guess to understand and respect the place of local government, the capacity that we have to deliver for our communities.  In so many areas, but outside of crisis areas in terms of planning and open space delivery and some of the bread and butter stuff that local government can deliver there seems to be this almost constant conflict between state and local government rather than sort of being equal partners so to speak, and I note some of the comments have been talking about constitutional recognition and I think we're all supportive of that.  It just seems to be like local government is the black swan or the cousin that no‑one really talks to at Christmas, right, but when needed upon, we're almost ‑ as we discussed earlier, we're the first ones on the scene.

 

So I guess first and foremost that would be great and I want to commend the current Minister, Shelley Hancock, former Mayor.  I think she started the turn on that and we've seen some of that in some of her announcements recently in regards to the emergency services levy, funding for elections, et cetera, et cetera.  But there's a long way to go.  So I think particularly at the departmental level ‑ I think sort of a recognition of what local government can deliver is really important.

 

We then go into obviously some of the funding things and I'll touch on them because there are so many.  I touched on the emergency services funding, rate pegging is a big issue for local government obviously, and just reforming the rating system so that we can sort of have a bit more of that secure funding future.

 

Too often decisions are made without input from local government or, even worse, the input is provided and it's ignored.  So I think first and foremost the State and Federal Government can perhaps give us a more equal seat at the table and, in the case of the National Cabinet, restore our seat at the table and that would be a great start.

 

CAROL MILLS:  Thanks, Jerome.  Tracey, can I turn to you and the west, similar issues or a different perspective?

 

MAYOR TRACEY ROBERTS JP:  Yes, I certainly echo Jerome's comments about a seat around the table and National Cabinet definitely, from a national perspective.  We've been very fortunate in that the benefits of Western Australia's council actions have been assessed.  Our state recovery controller sent out a survey for all local governments to complete so that they've got a voice from all local government, so I'm hoping that they will read very carefully that feedback and obviously respond and listen to the feedback.  Our Premier and our Minister for Local Government have actually come through local government so they do know the workings of local government, which is really helpful. 

 

So there's a number of areas, but I'm mindful of time ‑ a little bit like Jerome, how long have you got?  We know local governments will always be there, they're a constant when others have gone.  So the making sure that the feedback we provide is listened to, that they understand and there are a number of issues we are addressing at the moment, but I guess the main thing is that we do need resourcing in certain areas.  It's important that that's provided to us so that we can continue to do the good work that we've done.

 

Monica touched on it and so did Jerome, you know, if our assets and if we are constantly trying to fix things that are broken rather than being proactive and resolve it before it's broken, then it will obviously be of great benefit not only to local governments in Western Australia but to our community.  So it's once again listening to the feedback and making sure that from local government our voices are heard and that we have our voice in the right places.

 

CAROL MILLS:  Thanks, Tracey.

 

MAYOR TRACEY ROBERTS JP:  I think I snap‑shotted that within the few minutes.

 

CAROL MILLS:  Excellent job.  Tracey has done a good job of I guess also raising the bit about the National Cabinet, which Jerome touched on very well but very explicitly.  I know this is an area where there's been concern.  For those of you who aren't aware, local government had a seat at the table for COAG, the Council of Australian Governments, for many years.  That was replaced during COVID with a national forum which has no longer got representation from ‑ well, not presently I should say has representation from local government and perhaps we can start that dialogue as well after this session.  Clare, from a staff and professional perspective, what can we do to ask of our State and Federal Governments to assist?

 

CLARE SULLIVAN:  Look, I think it comes down to autonomy and trust.  I think local governments are democratically elected and have the staff and the capacity to deliver what their community needs.  They need the autonomy to be able to raise the revenue that their community is willing to pay for the services that their community gets.  So I think a piece around respecting the autonomy of local government is critical and trust. 

 

Trust is interesting, particularly when there's a crisis and you see state governments needing local governments.  They trust us then to do the good work that we do and to do what it is they need our help with, such as the health messaging Jerome was talking about earlier, but the trust needs to continue all of the time, not just when they need us.  So I think autonomy and trust are the two things that I see missing in the intergovernmental dynamics in Australia at the moment.

 

CAROL MILLS:  Thank you.  That brings us to the end of our time and I would make two comments, if I might.  What has come through very strongly in this is the importance of the local connectivity that local government has been able to provide during this crisis period, the ability to act quickly because they're strongly both knowledgeable about the community within which they're working but also have trust on that community has clearly come across in each of the examples people have provided.

 

Similarly, the fact that local government has been agile in the way that its workforce has responded, its management has responded and councillors have responded to making decisions in very difficult and sometimes ill‑informed times.  We make the best judgment call we can.  That relies on strong communication, strong trust and a well‑trained workforce as well to make sure that they've actually got that capability.

 

Lastly, I think the comments we've just made about perhaps one of the side benefits of COVID in addition to the very direct service examples we've given is that local government's profile has been raised in this period.  We've seen local government respond time and time again and as I said in the comments coming through to this session, people recognising the great strength of the peer support they've received from other local governments and also the support they've received from their local communities.

 

There's real opportunity for us to build on this and, as I said, I take the comments that Monica had about how do we demonstrate this in a concrete way, how do we build on the ‑ I guess often when you're busy doing things, case studies become isolated we're so busy doing, we don't have time to sit back and reflect.  Perhaps that's a place our university and institutes can make a contribution.  That's a lesson I'm taking away to think about. 

 

I'd like to conclude by thanking all our panellists very much today.  I'd also like to thank the staff of the institute and Verity's team at the Centre for Social Justice for helping organise this.  I'd like to thank the OECD for actually being the stimulus for the discussion and I hope that we can engage much more in this kind of dialogue and forward thinking about how local government's contribution can be further strengthened and recognised.

 

So I thank all of you.  Thank you for participating and we will continue this dialogue as we move forward.  Thank you.  Thanks, everyone.