Hearing that Alexander Downer, for a very, very long time Australia’s foreign minister, and a top-rated contestant in the “foreign minister with the lowest IQ” stakes, has finally stepped out of politics.

It takes me back…

…back to a press conference in the country town of Armidale, when Downer was there for a much-postponed jolly as he was trying to decide whether to challenge John Howard for the leadership of Australia’s (conservative) Liberal Party. (It is no compliment to Howard that Downer won.)

There was a reporter from the local ABC radio, the regional paper’s stringer, and me, wearing my “university community radio” hat — not what you’d call a formidable force. Yet we had him on the back foot, frantically looking to his press officer for rescue, as we asked the obvious questions about leadership challenges.

…and then back to drinking with staff from various Australian embassies around south-east Asia, who all, whatever there religious affiliation, sent up regular passionate prayers whenever Downer was in the region: “please, please, don’t let him make the inevitable gaffe on my patch”.

Ah nostalgia…. and a very strong argument against the hereditary principle in politics.

Since I find myself often involved in debates around local government in Britain, I’ve been thinking that I should read something about its operation, what works and what doesn’t, and the thinking about how it’s reached the place it is now. So when I saw a copy of Modern Local Government by Janice Morphet (Sage, 2008), I thought I should pick it up – and I have even now managed to read it, even if I admit to having skimmed bits where the forest of acronyms just became impenetrable.

I’m not, you might be pleased to know, going to give you a complete precis, but a few points I drew from it.

1. The changing nature of the council – in the Local Government Act 2000, the council moved from being seen as the only source of power, which it delegated to officers, to being part of the process of power. Now the power to act lies with the executive, the creation of which was seen as “the cornerstone of establishing direct accountability to the community and electorate … a means of overcoming corruption through openness”.

Proposals announced in 2006 suggested that council leaders should be elected by direct or indirect election and should remain for four years, a result of a view “that stronger local leadership is more accountable to the local community”. (Also a move to all-out elections every four years, rather than “elections by a third”.)

2. The relationship between national and local government
a) “Local authorities have been pressurised to use their funding more effectively through the setting of targets, assessment, peer review and benchmarking.” Some have used this to argue that central controls will always be necessary, others that when performance has improved the argument for control falls away.
b) Looking historically, the UK is one of the few countries in the EU not to have a constitutional position for local government – the implication of the existence of such would be that it would be free to act and also raise revenue such as local income tax, sales tac, tourist tax, or other specific charges. Until 2000, it was not able to act or spend without specific legislated powers, which were in many different pieces of law. The Local Government Act of 2000 created their duty to promote “exonomic, social and environmental well-being”, which is seen as a fundamental and strong in its capacity to support action, although it specifically excluded finance and charging powers (although these were promised subsequently, and were partially provided in the Act of 2003, which provided the power to “trade”, which allowed, for e.g. the congestion charge in London.)
read more »