Council chambers: Past their use-by date? Five ongoing corruption investigations or inquiries into representatives at five Sydney councils were launched last year. Add in another five into councillors and staff that have featured at the ICAC in the past five years and you have councils responsible for $5 billion in development annually. Global corruption watchdogs rank Australia alongside Scandinavian nations as corruption free. But some of the stuff revealed by council inquiries would blow an Indonesian ombudsman's hair back.

At Botany Council, the ICAC heard of several million dollars being paid for fake or inflated invoices, a high five figures "microwave" budget and senior managers spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on overseas travel. How did this go unnoticed in a budget of only $50 million at an organisation open to democratic scrutiny? Nobody cares. Over the New Year break, former prime minister Bob Hawke called for state governments to be abolished, citing familiar arguments. But it's suburban councils we should think about abolishing.

The factors that have fostered council corruption are making them less relevant. Clean and successful government depends as much on the people looking in and scrutinising from the outside as the quality of its members. The Herald is the only major news organisation to maintain a full-time team devoted to scrutinising the activities of local government as readers display a marked preference for news about quasi-celebrities in Canberra. Elsewhere the task is left largely to local newspapers, which are in decline and where reporters say councils can use their advertising budgets to apply pressure over critical coverage. Merging the city's councils and doubling their size will help, but only ever so much.

This is a symptom of a bigger and terminal decline in local communities and civic life, set forth first by television and then by the internet. The City of Sydney, which is well run, of a high-profile and pursues projects of enough scale and substance to draw scrutiny, is an exception. But in the rest of Sydney's councils the poor quality of political representatives (and the senior bureaucrats they appoint) is at crisis point. Candidates for councils are now mostly determined not just by political parties but by factions within them and local chiefs who control branches. Right faction dissidents in the Liberal Party publicly claim that its party tickets in many areas are determined by some of the lobbyists who have come to hold enormous sway in its two dominant factions.

If that is true, the risk for corruption is probably much greater at the local level, where scrutiny is scant and developers are circling, than in federal politics. ​ The benefit to having elected representatives is that they can be pulled into line by the public. But this seldom happens in council life, and when it does, it usually concerns a swimming pool. It's worth asking whether the council chambers could be substituted with a Swiss-like system that allows the public to challenge decisions if enough residents sign petitions opposing them. We have already entered a great anti-democratic experiment.

About half of Sydney's councils are in the freezer while the Baird government prosecutes its merger plans. Councils are also being stripped progressively of planning powers by the state government. Removing elected representatives from councils has brought about some immediate wins, such as the cancellation, by an unelected administrator, of decisions made to the benefit of elected Auburn councillors. But there have already been complaints about administrators acting against the will of local residents, most notably the Inner West Council's (largely irrelevant) stance on WestConnex. It's time to weigh the gains of having professionals run local government against the loss of voters' franchise. Importantly, we should see if most people notice.

Loading Local democracy is a fine idea, but its time might be up. James Robertson is state political reporter.