Local democracy needs a change of heart

Anyone who reads a newspaper, attends a public meeting on a local issue, or has the occasional chat with neighbours who are hot under the collar about what the council is doing with a local footpath or park, knows that local democracy can be a lively thing.

Councils, as the level of government closest to the community, are meant to nurture this most grassroots sphere of democracy.

Points in the council charter in the NSW Local Government Act state that councils must facilitate the involvement of members of the public and users of facilities and services in local government, and exercise their functions according to principles of equity, access, participation and rights.

Lofty sentiments, but reality can be very different, as Newcastle Council has shown.

The long-running Laman St fiasco, in which the council was prepared to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on legal action to impose its will rather than a trifling amount on an independent assessment of the trees, has been the most prominent symptom of the breakdown between the community and the council - but it's by no means the only one.

Soon after the current council was elected in 2008, it took the axe to many of the previous council's community participation programs.

Most controversially, it cut the city's network of Community Forums, which provided a means by which residents in local neighbourhoods could meet to discuss local issues and hear from councillors and council officers.

Soon after that, council staff were banned from speaking engagements at community group meetings.

On-site inspection meetings - in which councillors, council officers, and members of the community would meet to discuss development applications or council proposals affecting a particular location - tapered off, and have now been dropped entirely.

The current council has held a record number of closed councillor "workshops", where councillors and council staff get together to discuss key issues behind doors closed to the public.

"Community representatives" who did not live in Newcastle and had no networks in the local community were appointed by the current council to council committees.

According to the council's website, its Guraki Committee (which advises the council on Indigenous issues) has no community representative, hasn't met since September last year, and has no meeting scheduled for this year.

In its latest move on community consultation, Newcastle Council is proposing to reduce its requirements for notifying development applications to strata title owners.

If adopted, the proposal will mean that instead of notifying individua l strata title owners and occupiers, the council will notify only the owner corporation of a strata lot.

The staff report that recommended this change to the council meeting said that it would assist in delivering the council's "Open and Collaborative Leadership" strategy.

As Mohandas Gandhi once said, "the spirit of democracy is not a mechanical thing to be adjusted by abolition of forms. It requires change of heart."

You can have your say on the proposed changes to the notification requirements to strata title lots under the Newcastle Development Control Plan until Monday 21 May 2012. See http://www.newcastle.nsw.gov.au/council/community_consultation/public_exhibitions