The Canberra Liberals' lead Senate candidate has backed a call for a review of the ACT's self-government system and declared if the territory government was treated the same way as councils, it would have been sacked.
Nick Tyrrell said how a city with fewer than half a million residents could get into nearly $2 billion of debt was an urgent question that needed an urgent fix.
"If this was a council anywhere else in the country, it would have been sacked for financial mismanagement," Mr Tyrrell said.
But the Senate candidate said he firmly supported self government and the city should not be afraid of a "warts-and-all review" of whether legacy systems were still working.
Opposing a review would be a very conservative position to take, he said.
"David Smith has stirred a hornet's nest, but when you cut through the noise of self interest defending the status quo, you find a community that is being let down regularly, a growing debt burden that's casting a shadow over our kids, and a government that I'm sure admits privately they have no idea how to dig us all out of it," Mr Tyrrell said.
Mr Smith, the federal Labor member for Bean, this week called for a review of the Self-Government Act, the federal law that acts as a constitution for the territory's parliamentary system.
But ACT Opposition Leader Mark Parton did not back the call for the review, declaring it was something Mr Smith had pushed for when almost no one was asking for it.
"How can the ACT become a state when it can't stand on its own two feet? Net debt surged over $1.8 billion in a year. We are paying more for fuel and more for groceries," Mr Parton said.
"Federal Labor cleared housing debt for Tasmania but not the ACT. Katy Gallagher has stayed silent on auditing Commonwealth funding. Labor is out of touch. Canberrans deserve better."
Thomas Emerson, the Kurrajong independent in the Legislative Assembly, said it was a bit of a cop out to call for a review when Canberrans were not seeing the results they wanted from both levels of government.
"I haven't been contacted by anyone calling for a review of the Self-Government Act, but I do regularly hear from Canberrans who want to see their elected representatives fighting harder for the issues that matter to them," Mr Emerson said.
"People want more active and responsive representation from their federal members and from their MLAs, and they want to see the matters that they're concerned about being escalated by the people who have already been elected to represent them."
Mr Emerson said the Hare-Clark voting system in the Assembly set up an interesting way of doing politics that fostered more collaboration.
"If members of the Legislative Assembly operated in a way that was more focused on collaboration and delivering for our communities than on picking political fights, then perhaps we wouldn't have federal members calling for a review of the Self-Government Act," he said.
On Monday, Mr Smith said there should be no predetermined outcome and everything should be on the table, including a move to single-member electorates in the Assembly, he said.
"If Canberra's current arrangements are no longer delivering the level of local accountability and responsiveness that a city of this size deserves, then the question is not whether reform should be discussed, rather what form that reform should take," Mr Smith wrote in an opinion piece published in The Canberra Times.
Mr Smith said the Federal Parliament's joint standing committee on the national capital and external territories needed to examine the operation and effectiveness of the Australian Capital Territory (Self-Government) Act 1988.
The review could examine parliamentary representation and federal funding together, he wrote.
The ACT government indicated it was not considering the kind of review sought by Mr Smith.
"The ACT's self-government model has served Canberra well for more than 35 years, delivering strong economic growth, high living standards and more efficient government than the alternatives," a government spokeswoman said.
