LOCAL GOVERNANCE SORT OF EXPLAINED

YES, YES, this is good and sort of on the money! The point that seems to be missed serially and surreally is the TRUST FACTOR. 

What these figures are telling us among lots of things is that not much less than half of LAUNCESTON VOTERS did not see the point in voting for Councillors because you just cannot TRUST them to do what say they'll do. Some are so blatant as to imply 'trust me I'll listen to you' etc. etc. Town Hall should be renamed 'The Hall of Hubris' and voters could trust that albeit that there would still be no need to vote.

To be fair some might have imagined that they could 'do something' and found that the Local Govt Act 1993 actually worked against such perverse notions. One current incumbent serially bleats that they "do not have the numbers" and that if I say that "they'll laugh at me" – OH MY GOODNESS what a terrible state of affairs. 

When a candidate tells you that they'll 'represent you' you really do have to take it with a 'pinch of salt'. Pretty soon you'll discover that there is a subliminal agenda and overtly standing up for a constituent or the constituency is not there when the going get tough – the avoidance of exertion is omnipresent.

So, why would you vote for a cohort of people who have no real commitment to be held accountable? 

How could they be trusted by anybody? 

The Act, on close inspection, mitigates against 'elected representatives' doing so. Moreover, in local governance money is never far from the cut and thrust of things and if you are into bureaucratic Empire building, money is never back of mind. Thus, pesky well-meaning 'representatives' need to be bureaucratically curbed – and if you look, the rest is history given the distorted provisions of 'the Act'.

Launceston's Council has a history of rejecting any notion of empanelling a Citizen's Assembly/Jury. The accountability and transparency that Direct Deliberative Democracy brings with it is quite, quite, unwelcome on the evidence coming out of Launceston's Town Hall – and the answers to questions in open Council. 

Town Hall's preferred 'consultation process' is the one where 'responses' can be orchestrated and if needs be, massaged, in order to get the outcomes vested interests desire for whatever reason. It is said that a meeting is an event at which the minutes are kept and the hours are lost. Bureaucrats will tell you that a meeting is a practical alternative to work and that they'd be over much more quickly if nobody spoke at them.

Traditionally competition makes us look at winning. A worthy project inspires us to take an attitude of seeking improvement. The winning mindset focuses attention on 'being first come what may', the other way of doing things allows us to pay attention to how we manage to achieve an outcome – the ethics, the accountability, the transparency. 

When a Councillor declares the importance of 'money' and asks you what you mean by "ethics" you just know that you are at an intellectual dead end. When David Morrison told us that “the standard you walk past is the standard you accept” he was on the money and he quite likely did his research in places like Launceston's Town Hall.