Our politics is all symbolic team sports. You need to get ‘into the weeds’ to see what’s really in play. This…

Our politics is all symbolic team sports. You need to get ‘into the weeds’ to see what’s really in play. This story is being repeated across multiple communities, big rate increases. But this is a window into a much deeper cultural and social shift. /1 https://t.co/4lzIWijV4N

In very rough average terms, in many if not most communities, household expenditure on personal recreation is as high as 25% of weekly income. Expenditure on local civic infrastructure through rates is about 5% of that weekly income. That’s a HUGE social/cultural stat. /2

Think about what that shows, the shift in our societies towards individual over collective. People pay far more on take away food, booze, dining out, recreational travel etc. than they do on maintaining their local roads, parks, libraries, museums etc. /3

You can’t get a much clearer view of ‘society is a high school’ than that. Recreational lifestyles are adolescent lifestyles, now embedded across the full age range. We should see these financial crises facing local government as the cultural and social crises they are. /4

This is where the rubber of increasing anti-social libertarianism hits the road in our communities. State and federal governments can play low-tax games because particularly in the latter case they have far more revenue-fat to play with. There’s no luxury of that, locally. /5

It’s the only tier of government with a tight geographic link to where people live. Where the accountability for public utility is right in the face of the local community, governed by it. Vertical fiscal imbalance means the vast majority of revenue goes to the federal level. /6

Where it’s spent on extravagances like nuclear submarines and tax cuts to the wealthy. Meanwhile ordinary Australians in their communities are facing massive local rate increases, just so the maintenance of basic social infrastructure can be maintained. /7

It’s Ground Zero of the major shift in Australian society over the past decades, towards a more libertarian model, mostly derived from the US, where individual freedom and lifestyle is given prominence over collective goods. Even more resonant is Covid. /8

Local government was shaped by public health. Water and waste and sewer - all introduced as public health measures. You can play symbolic team sports at the federal and even State level, as politics. But there’s nowhere to hide the reality of public life at the local level. /end