20 February

Again I can’t comment on behalf of Bathurst Regional Council. But I can express a personal and general view about local government, and use Bathurst as an example. Pretty much every council in Australia is ‘broke’. Local government receives nowhere near enough money to do the work it’s asked to do. All councils in NSW for example, bar 2 (of which Bathurst is 1) have applied for special rate variations at least once, some twice or even more. We live in a populist age where the response to that is predictable. Nobody looks calmly at the basic facts about the funding, everybody piles-on with personal abuse targeted at councils themselves. It’s disgusting to take an obvious lack of funds and continuously weaponise it in an attack on both elected and staff members of councils, to further political careers. To continuously call this basic absence of funds ‘incompetence’ and ‘corruption’, when councils are audited to within an inch of their lives and have staff who have devoted decades to the lives of their communities. Ordinary Council staff abused as they’re out in the community doing their jobs. This behaviour is led, by populist opportunists, in towns across the country right now. Turning every issue into a fake ‘debate’, to generate anger and therefore followers and votes. The flow-on effects are already being felt, with cancellation of services and events, but the fake, manufactured rage continues, to feed the popularity of the populists. This is exactly how Trump came to power. It’s what populists always do, manufacture anger against ‘the system’ (never defined), and then replacing current leadership with themselves.