Tuesday: not a good night for Victorians, as they got the bill for all of Dan Andrews’ hard-hat photo ops. But down the highway, in my beloved home town of Geelong, there was a political spectacle in many ways just as damning.
It was a meeting of the council of the City of Greater Geelong, to which I, among some hundreds of interested residents, was drawn on account of sudden and deep budget cuts to the city’s excellent, extensive and heavily used library service.
My family have been Geelong library members for more than half a century and this is my second such campaign. Many of the faces are the same: exactly the kind of mature, thoughtful, concerned citizens who are the backbone of every community. And a great cross-section was present on the night, from elderly people on walking frames, to kids already in their pyjamas dutifully holding signs. My favourite read: “So Bad Even the Introverts Are Here.”
Such dangerous subversives did council deem the public, in fact, that the mayor announced off the top that none of the 35 intelligent and well-informed questions lodged by members of the public would be answered on the evening.
Answers were to be posted online “in the interests of transparency” – a vintage “war-is-peace” construction. Murmurs spread. Glances were exchanged. You’re kidding, right?
So there was nothing to do but sit there, through a strictly supervised and choreographed 45 minutes of anodyne questions about trees and swimming pools, although in my case also to sketch the characters for a forthcoming satiric novel about local government.
There’d be the corporate Cruella de Vil CEO constantly stroking her hair, the unctuous mayor preening like a school head boy, the deputy mayor who bloviates on Facebook and looks as though he got up halfway through his barber’s appointment, all enabled by a cast of egomaniacs, chancers and cowards. Just a novel, of course.
Anyway, someone had to say something for the quietly seething audience, so when the question time petered out, I interjected that the whole thing had been a disgrace and that the councillors should be ashamed of themselves.
Because it was: a gross affront to all the decent people who had come in good faith and at considerable inconvenience in the expectation of feeling heard, who for their concern and interest received not their rightful thanks but what felt like to me a kind of smug disdain. I also wanted to give the security guard something to do: poor bastard must have been bored out of his mind.
“Always the same,” I heard people complain afterwards. “They treat us like dirt.” And it’s true: Geelong, in my view, has suffered a decade of hopeless administration that never seems to change.
But chances are you’ve seen something similar on your council: there are 537 in Australia, more than half in regional areas where the forces that used to hold them to account, like established local media, strong community institutions and common decency, are in diminishing supply.
They slip under the radar, don’t they? Even though they actually have a more profound impact on our daily lives than macro debates in Canberra, which occur far over our heads, like fighter jets duelling in the stratosphere.
Does your council seem to spend their time veering between crazy extravagances and mindless austerities, chin stroking about Australia Day and declaring climate emergencies when residents can barely keep track of their growing multiplicity of bins?
Pity the poor saps who have to work for them, like the fantastic library staff in Geelong, told first that three well-loved libraries would have to close, then that opening hours would be hugely cut back and that there were no resources to staff two newly built libraries, and were now in hopeless limbo while the financially embarrassed council scrabbles for change down the back of the library couches.
Pity the citizens relying on those councils, like library users in Geelong: the old who find personal connection there, the kids who get read to, the unemployed who use the internet to make job applications, the poor who simply go there to keep warm. Amid a cost-of-living crisis, what could be more important?
Tuesday night provided an exampleof what’s wrong with this layer of government in Australia: the lack of accountability, the anti-democratic procedures, the waste of everyone’s time, the disgusting rudeness. Police and security? Granted that local council meetings have been known to get unruly, but if people get treated like this maybe it’s not so surprising. And for people who wanted to talk about libraries? I guess you never know when you might need to Taser a nonagenarian.
We’re overdue a reckoning, and Victoria, where scandal has wracked councils from Casey to Moira, might be as good a place to start. And what better case study than the arrogant and seemingly unaccountable City of Greater Geelong?
