Its been a rough first week of march in Canberra.
It all started last Wednesday late in the night the Legislative Assembly passed an amendment to the Land (Planning and Environment) Act, which takes away third party appeal rights in planning matters. Basically the ALP avoided scrutiny by pushing this amendment through so late at night an absolute paradox seeing that the majority of the day had been taken up debating the no confidence motion against Jon Stanhope. On Saturday I find out from the Canberra times that they are finally going reinstate cut bus services it’s nice to see that someone has finally clued on and worked out that students should be able to get to school before school starts! And last week the government was trying to do a ‘matrix’ move on the Coroners report into the 2003 fires trying dissociate them selves from that mess.
With all of this crap going on I was trying to work out how you can fix the system in the ACT so that there would be more transparency and consultation in government. I think its simple ... with the Westminster “government versus opposition” model the entire ACT is run by 5 people. Its wrong! The ACT should be run like a City state with a popularly elected Mayor/Chief minister and a series of executive committees. It seems stupid to me that you have around a quater of the people that are elected to govern actually running the show. With and executive committee system you could have all sides of the LA involved.
It works in many other parts of the world, when I was in Canada I had a mate that worked in the local ‘Metropolitan’ council of Toronto. I know that in Canada most Metropolitan governments have been the subject of some sort of royal Commission. But this is largely because the basic problem with the Canadian style metropolitan government has been that it is a political compromise (as all things are :-) ). Few of the governance responsibilities were transferred entirely to this new level. For example, metropolitan governments would sell water wholesale to municipalities, which were responsible for local deliveries; build freeways, although municipalities controlled local roads and parking; issue area-wide plans, but leave municipalities the power to issue building permits and make the water and sewage connections. These are not really the issues that we suffer from in the ACT as we only have 2 layers of government. The natural tension resulted whenever the 2 levels of government are in competition with each other; sometimes urban development is seriously hindered. Similar to the NCA versus the ACTPLA . In Canada this kind of conflict became so severe in Winnipeg that after official studies and investigations where complete, the provincial government was forced to discard the ‘metropolitan’ approach in favour of a more unitary government. But here in the ACT it could work because we have already got those powers.
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