Recording: Local government in post-crisis Australia

Descriptive transcript

Hello, everybody. Thank you for joining us for today's event. Before we begin, I'd like to acknowledge that 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 as a university, we want to particularly pay 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.

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 some very distinguished guests with us today: Clare Sullivan, Monica Barone, Mayor Tracey Roberts and Mayor Jerome Laxale. We'll introduce them properly shortly. But first, a couple of housekeeping matters.

Today's event is being live captioned. To view the captions, click on the link in the chat, which you can find 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, please type them into the Q&A box, not the chat box. Next to the chat box is a Q&A box—type your questions there, and you can also upvote questions that others have asked. Carol will be looking after this session, and mostly we tend to ask the questions that are upvoted the most—democracy in action! So if you ask a good question, you're likely to be voted for.

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 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 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 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—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.

Now, more than ever, public institutions like universities and local government have an important role to play in supporting communities in transition and influencing what the upheaval of this year will mean for 2021, 2022 and into the future. At UTS, social justice is at the heart of our university's priorities and purpose. Everything we do, we are proactively working towards a future shaped with a more equal, socially just and environmentally sustainable society.

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 resilient, alert to the challenges and able to respond to those challenges. But local government also needs to be supported and acknowledged for the contribution it makes to the resilience and wellbeing of communities across Australia. Too often, both Federal and State Governments do not properly acknowledge and support the role of local government.

Today, we will be focusing our lens on local government. We'll be asking questions around how local government has 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 locally supported councils have the resources and capacity to continue to deliver for their communities into the future.

I'm 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.

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

As Verity said, we are joining in a global production here today, 50 different institutes across 25 countries, all working together to discuss government after shock. 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. 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, 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 the digital role of government, trust in government, 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 to our participants who have joined us online and thank you very much to the panellists whom I'm about to introduce to you.

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, who many of you may know if you're Sydney-based, has been Chief Executive of the 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 the 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 strong in supporting community engagement and access, both in terms of development of facilities such as sports events and facilities, but also in programming, anti-racism and engagement programs. He's also very passionate, and shares a passion with me, around affordable housing, one of the great challenges of our time, 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 about the second largest local government area population-wise in Western Australia, with over 200,000 residents. In addition to that, and same with 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 working in advocacy and inter-government relations. 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 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 ask the panellists to commence, just to remind you that you can put your questions in through the Q&A part of the Zoom, and we will look at 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 a three-minute introduction from each, and then we'll move into a broad discussion around the topics that they raise. So, in my democratically chosen model, we're going to go with Monica first.

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 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. 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 capable.

Obviously, when we look forward, 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 particularly in our community organisations.

So I'm just going to step back a bit and 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 research said that communities or societies that had a lot of strong community organisations and institutions had more social capital. The theory is that the more people participate in those organisations, the more they learn about good governance. So that's how those two things go together. We accepted that research and decided that 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. That was the theory that sat behind the grants program and that led to the situation we found ourselves in now.

So what happened during COVID 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 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. Because we have that information and 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 who 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: we were able to do that, one, because we knew our community really well and were able to assess that risk very quickly; secondly, we had the network of community organisations—that decentralised network—that were able to partner with us to deliver; and thirdly, we know those organisations well because we have partnered with them before and funded them before, so 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 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.

Thank you, Monica. That's a really interesting example. 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. 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.

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 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 President of the Australian Local Government Association.

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 crisis—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, 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—there was a very quick move to helping our local government brothers and sisters and cousins right across the country. Monica at the City of Sydney led a fantastic team as part of the local government bushfire recovery support group, along with many other councils across Sydney who came together, sharing resources from plant and equipment. I know an Inner West council sent down some planning staff to some of the worst affected bushfire local government areas across the city.

Then, as we came out of the bushfire crisis, we fell into a global pandemic, and the City of Ryde unfortunately was one of the first hit with a larger number of cases early on. 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 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, 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. 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.

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 were secure and that people could go to work and do their job flexibly and safely and get home every day. Obviously, there are lots of lessons and challenges, which we'll touch on, including long-term funding security. There's always pressure on local government to raise funds and to ensure that services are delivered, but 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.

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 living in Australia. So I'm really happy to be part of today's conversation, really proud to be part of local government, and looking forward to the rest of the day.

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 in New South Wales there's a large grant program being issued for assisting communities in rural areas to rebuild, and part of that was a deliberate strategy to get support in the grant application process and learning about grants from the larger councils. So again, there's a recognition across State Government and in our communities about how closely local governments work together. 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—much appreciated—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.

Thank you, Carol, and thank you very much for the opportunity. Listening very closely to Jerome and the synergy between all local governments right around Australia, I would also like to acknowledge Linda Scott as the newly elected President of the Australian Local Government Association—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, it's such a diverse scope of what we do. When you look at the number of people 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 Western Australia local government. 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, how resilient, how agile are we? 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 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? What was the thinking style behind it? We wanted to make sure that everybody was safe, everybody was supported, and 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.

That's where we basically, after all of the thought bubbles, ended up—community services, health, wellbeing and vulnerability. What was done—library services, staff contacting vulnerable members of our community, 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 closely in touch with all of our associations right around the country, making sure that we were all in support of and doing the right things for 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—139 local governments, they all did step up. Even now, 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.

Thanks, Tracey. That was a fantastic summation of what you're doing over there and a very interesting issue about the tangible and 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 an enormous contribution in the last 12 months, but how we can assist and position them to continue in the new world.

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 today from Canberra and I'd like to acknowledge the Ngunnawal people, whose land 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 confidence—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.

Thank you, Clare. That was a fantastic summation of all the ways in which we've been impacting the local government workforce. We've seen, 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 front-of-house and direct service delivery that many local government staff are responsible for, and as Verity said, COVID hasn't affected us all equally. There have been different responses and 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 delivering services face-to-face and directly, or substituting for those services in very innovative ways. Thank you for drawing our attention to that issue.

Thanks, all of you. That's been a really fascinating 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 begin with a question relating to that. 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—having to change or potentially make decisions in a way that you 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 councillors 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?

Thank you. I think there's two things that we really all—I'm sure all of us did much the same thing. The first is to be absolutely focused on communication. We put an enormous amount of effort into communicating with our staff and our community in order to enable them to know what's going on and to be involved in the decision making. 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 be in control of the communication and to be really proactive in that.