The level of government least noticed, local government, is largely a public health body. It provides you…

The level of government least noticed, local government, is largely a public health body. It provides you with clean water, removes your garbage and sewage, inspects food premises, regulates noise and pollution. And much more. Its existence is a clue to something big. /1 https://t.co/2GJiUUDPqI

Obviously public health is dead right now, as the entire globe celebrates a continuous orgy of infection, with public health privatised and loaded onto individual immune systems. Local government is a remnant artefact of a time we did the opposite. /2

Its relative invisibility today, and the utter contempt most have for it, are a clear window into a broken governance system. Where governance literally meets the people, every day, with their specific needs, is the least visible layer of all governance. /3

State and federal governments, in our federalist system, dominate our attention. Because the faux team sports human dramas there are the bullshit our high school selves can never get enough of. Like the obsession with elections right now. Getting our team over the line! /4

Only to then spend the next 3-5 years moaning because our team barely fixed a thing. Not once stopping to think it’s because that whole system isn’t designed to fix anything. It’s designed for team sports. /5

When 19th century societies faced massive public health problems, as we do again now, they realised their State and federal governments had no idea how to fix any of them. So they invented local government. To actually do things. It’s still doing them. /6

Not because the local is the most important thing, none of that binary nonsense. Because the whole distinction between local and global has always been fake. An affectation. The problems local government fixes are global problems. The spread of disease, clean water. Sewage. /7

Leave those jobs undone and the problems don’t stay ‘local’. Infectious disease knows no boundaries. Local government is where universal/global jobs are actually done. State/federal government is just theatre. /8

Team sports. Mostly a waste of everybody’s time. State and federal politicians see local government as largely yokels. Which the elected often are, if you focus only on the elected layer of all three levels of government. /9

But the 19th century experiment of targeting governance at that exact point where local and global are indistinguishable is a forgotten experiment. I can tell you right now that if clean air had ever been part of this experiment, there’d have been no ‘living with’ Covid. /10

A political slogan from State and federal populist politicians. If actual clean air infrastructure and procedure had been embedded in local government, it would never have allowed this toxic fantasy to exist. /11

Don’t think of local government through the lens of elections and ‘the people’. All that idealistic claptrap. Local government is the ONLY level of government that focuses on fixing actual material problems, inside peoples’ lives. /12

Because State and federal governments invented it, to do that, fully aware they had no clue how and no power to do it themselves. Somebody needed to be in the actual communities, governing this practical work. Ditch the daily soap opera of State and federal team sports. /13

We need to refocus our governance back on solving the practical problems of our lives, which dissolve the distinctions between local and global at the same time. All practical government ends up local, but that local is also global, at the same time. /14

Right now this most critical layer of governance is under assault from toxic global movements on social media. Some local councils are staring into the abyss of governance by Facebook groups. We will not survive social media. /end