Imagine if politicians couldn’t touch a cent of public money until essential public services had been built…
Imagine if politicians couldn’t touch a cent of public money until essential public services had been built and/or maintained. This is an old cast iron pipe central to the big Sydney water outage this week. The feds have nearly all the revenue, the States and local government…/1 https://t.co/CNAqeOa3lD
…do most of the work. Vertical fiscal imbalance, an artefact of income taxation being concentrated at the federal level since WW2. The workaround is grants, from federal to State and from State to local. These are systematically rorted for political gain, a booming industry…/2
…in novelty cheques and photo ops. Department heads at both federal and State levels, as well as local government general managers, could easily identify the essential spending needs of the nation. But populism demands that elected buffoons get to decide where the money goes. /3
Maybe 80% or more of the business of government needs no popular input at all, it represents no great divide in beliefs where the community needs to be brought along by elected leaders. It’s just obvious work that needs doing, like water, sewer and roads infrastructure. /4
Try driving either urban or regional roads after recent rains, a lunar landscape of potholes and other damage. Local government has nowhere near enough money to either build or maintain roads, or water or sewer infrastructure. Unless they get a grant, accompanied by the local…/5
…political rep with their novelty cheque and photographer in tow. And now of course with Covid, there are obvious public health procedures to be followed, which require no political input, just as no politician is needed to fix a water pipe. But all of our governance is…/6
…waylaid by grant-funded vanity projects linked to ludicrous ideologies and personal prejudices of elected representatives. The mythologies of democracy allow all of this, when again more than 80% of the time we just need competent administrators. /end