Growing Places to Protect Local Identity and Lifestyle

It’s been a month since the Queensland Local Government elections and the dust is beginning to settle on the new Local Government landscape. The council amalgamations and downing sizing of councillor numbers has created a watershed moment in the transformation of the State’s Local Government and the future sustainability of many towns and communities.

At the centre of the reshaping of local government are the new Regional Councils. These are the new Local Government areas formed by amalgamating from two to eight neighbouring local councils. Their scale has created the need for new administrative and political structures.

One of the biggest impacts evident during the election process was the need for regional council candidates to focus their public policies at the strategic level. It is clear that the new Regional Councillors will need to act more as a board of directors than the traditional hands on fix it guys of smaller local councils.

The new challenge within the administration of Regional Council is how to effectively manage the delivery of services across large areas without creating a new level of senior managers that reinforces existing silos of responsibility rather than being a catalyst for innovative change.

Amongst Local Government’s many critical challenges of internal organisational structures, the looming liabilities of service infrastructure maintenance and the pressures of growth infrastructure for the booming regional centres there lays the forgotten lands of edge towns and communities. These are the small towns and localities within a two hour drive of our current raging growth centres.

For many of these small towns and localities the combination of narrow business bases, declining population and high levels of aging is eroding the very identity and lifestyles they cherish.

They may be small, but collectively they represent a significant part of our community and political landscape. These are the heartlands of community passion and pride of place. Where during the recent Local Government amalgamation process there was, and still is, a deep seated fear that this change will cause a loss of local identity and lifestyle.

There is also a growing realisation that time is running out to secure the long term sustainability of these small towns and localities.

These places are not screaming out for growth infrastructure, but rather innovative projects that provide catalyst infrastructure designed to reengage their economic base with future growth opportunities. It is about providing the missing bits of public infrastructure necessary to attract new private sector investment and create quality local jobs.

To avoid the slide into social and economic dysfunction requiring ongoing and increasing support of State and Federal agencies, the opportunity of Catalyst Infrastructure may be their last chance to turn things around.

Catalyst Infrastructure has the potential to be one of the most critical grassroots issues for local, state and federal government if our current economic prosperity is to be shared to build stronger more sustainable communities.

The current media attention and political debate about transportation, housing and environmental sustainability paint a picture of growth infrastructure needs that ignore the fact that the benefits of growth are not being evenly distributed through the community.

There a many places that need help to reconnect with the economic opportunities of the future.

This is going to be a particular challenge for many of the new Regional Councils as they grapple with the non-growth reality of many of the small townships within their growing Regional Council area.

How local and state government responds to this challenge will determine for many communities whether their fear of loss of identity and lifestyle was justified.

This is an issue I will be exploring in more detail at a public lecture being presented at the University of Sunshine Coast next month.

...see more details here.