When Brisbane’s councils merged into a single entity in 1924, it was applauded as sensible. But what have we gained and lost in the “great experiment”?
“And yet, our rates and charges are still comparable to, and often less than, other councils,” Quirk says. The amalgamations, Quirk concludes, have been an “outstanding success story”. For others, the Brisbane model is a democratic calamity.
“And that’s a struggle that local councillors like myself and the community are in every day,” she says. “We want to preserve, enhance, and protect character in our areas.”Credit:Innumerable factors have shaped Brisbane’s growth and built forms, not least of all floods. Johnston also understands the economic arguments for the mega-council model. But the balance between community enrichment and centralised power remains grotesquely out of kilter, she says.
The trust eventually morphed into the present-day Suburban Enhancement Fund . To Johnston’s ongoing disquiet, it distributes only a flat $581,000 to each councillor annually . “We are inaugurating today a form of local government of the most advanced kind,” he continued. “More advanced than any form of local government that exists in any part of the Commonwealth of Australia today.”
But delivering would be no easy task. He bemoaned in 1926 “that the majority of the absorbed councils bequeathed … bank overdrafts of varying sizes”.Marion Mackenzie, from the Oxley-Chelmer History Group, believes the amalgamation came as a “great sense of relief” to the erstwhile Sherwood Shire Council, the old boundaries of which she has lived in since 1970.
“It seems to work pretty efficiently,” she says. “At the same time, I tear my hair out about it regularly.” Through the lens of the BCC, researchers in 2015 explored the notion – “entrenched in the psyche of local government policymakers” – that bigger councils performed better.
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