More than once over the course of a week with Australian local government professionals, I was told that Australia mustn’t let the UK’s crisis go to waste.

If looking to the situation of British local government can inspire proactive change in Australia, that’s all to the good – though I wasn’t sure how much comfort that would provide to hard-pressed councils back home.

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As the guest of Local Government Professionals Australia and the Municipal Association of Victoria, I was able to compare changing leadership demands among senior professionals and also see councillors from all over Australia working on collaborative design for local government transformation.

The conversation about local government is very different in Australia. Many of the challenges leaders face stem from managing the impact of growth or from a concern that new rate capping measures may slow the rate at which their largely independent income is able to increase. From a UK perspective we might wish we had such problems. Conversations about the level of spending reductions implemented by British councils were in general met with incredulous horror.

And of course there are key differences between local government in Australia and the UK. Local government here has a high degree of fiscal autonomy, raising money directly through business and residential rates. As a federal system the primary vertical relationship is with State government and indeed local government exists at the whim of State government rather than having constitutional status. Councils have a different set of responsibilities, generally they are not responsible for care, for instance. Finally, there are no political parties at local government level which alters the tone of debate considerably (and councils often tend, in practice, to be officer rather than member led).

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Having said all that many of the challenges are the same: a changing economy, an ageing population, rising inequalities, high rates of mental health problems and the increasing disengagement of many citizens from conventional political processes.

Some of the responses to these challenges will feel familiar to UK councils: local government reorganisation in New South Wales or new city deals, based on the UK model, in Townsville, Launceston and Penrith.

But as in the UK, I think, there is a sense that there’s disconnect between these sorts of technical innovations, useful though they may be, and the real scale of the problem. So there’s also a growing interest in place shaping, co-production and a civic commons approach. So we heard about council’s roles in community obesity programmes in Cockburn City, in the creation of micro housing (pdf) around market gardens in Tweed Shire and in community land grants in Mt Barker.

At the end of the event in Melbourne, councillors endorsed a new road map for local government which explicitly positioned councils as co-creators and facilitators of community-led outcomes.

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The question I was left with however, was whether the energy and momentum for change could be maintained without the burning platform of crisis that UK local movement has experienced.

Jonathan Carr-West is chief executive of the Local Government Information Unit.

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