8 September

Everybody loves a pile-on, on local government. Some food for thought. In the past 25 years councils have had to assume a whole range of community services that nobody else would provide. They now offer up to 150 services, including aged care and childcare. The spending needed to take on these roles has quadrupled in those 25 years. The revenue to councils hasn’t budged at all, so they’re doing all of this work with the same revenue sources they had 25 years ago. Obviously those two trends are unsustainable. The response? Social media has led a pile-on, against these community bodies trying to keep communities together with string and bits of sticky tape. Vast conspiracy theories, defamatory abuse, the venom is amazing. I give up expecting people not to be righteously ignorant. But they can at least be decent.