The chief executive of the Sydney Business Chamber, Patricia Forsythe, said in an opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald last week that Sydney's 470 local councillors needed to move away from arguing over the appropriate size of a backyard swimming pool on to bigger issues such as affordable housing and infrastructure renewal. "The councillors on these new Sydney super councils should be paid a full-time wage and be resourced accordingly. They need to see themselves as boards of directors who focus on the larger strategic issues facing their region, rather than managers lost in day-to-day administration," she said.
The Local Government Association hit back. The president of the Local Government Association, Genia McCaffery, said councils were already focusing on ways to modernise their sector and reject overly simplistic assertions that "bigger is automatically better". She acknowledged claims that some economies of scale could be achieved but said amalgamating councils would not fix their under-resourcing. "It won't remove the burden of an unfair rate-pegged system, inadequate tax allocations, a cost-shifting bill that totalled $431 million in 2007-08 or an infrastructure renewal backlog that grows by $500 million each year," she said.
Places like Brisbane manage with one Council for much of the city, and even Auckland is consolidating its 6 councils into one. But apparently it’s too hard for Sydney where it’s obvious that three “super” Councils – Sydney, North Shore and Parramatta, say – could manage the city between them and the other Councils could quietly fade away.
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