Local Government - the Refuge of Small Men with Grandiose Visions

"Just empty the bins, mate!"

Local government is pretty simple - rates, roads, and rubbish.

Local residents pay their rates and in return, local governments ensure pot holes are filled, bins are emptied and nature strips are mowed.

The task doesn’t call for world changers. On the contrary, the job requires people who are prepared to dedicate themselves to ensuring the basic essentials of life get done.

Fill holes.

Empty bins.

Keep the grass tidy.

None of this is to say that local government is not a very important role. As inner Sydney residents, whose bins went un-emptied for a month will testify, local government matters.

But, increasingly, local government seems to be attracting incredibly mediocre people with equally incredible delusions of grandeur.

Local councillor is fast becoming the career of choice for people who boast the talent of Homer Simpson and the ego of Julius Caesar.

Take Melbourne’s Yarra City Council, for instance. This week the city’s nine council members required security guards to protect them from outraged residents furious at being slugged with a bin tax.

The council’s chief executive Sue Wilkinson said the bin levy was required to secure the council’s long-term financial sustainability.

Now you, like the good people of Yarra, might have imagined that rates would cover essentials like the removal of rubbish. Well, they used to. But these days, one’s rates are more likely to cover the Woke adventures of activist councillors.

Last year the Wokerati occupying city hall formed a Rainbow Advisory Committee that determined the LGBTQ “pride” flag flown atop the city’s administration building was insufficiently inclusive.

So, along with the original “pride” flag, council members decided to hoist the Philadelphia Pride Flag, the Pride Progress Flag and the Intersex-Inclusive Pride Flag.

But how to afford all the extra flags and poles?

Well, what are rates for if not to fund the politically correct escapades of small men and women who dream of flying big Woke flags?

As for the bins, they can empty themselves.

Don’t worry about the stench of uncollected garbage, see how the rainbow flags fly. So much diversity. So much inclusion. You can pay a levy to have your rubbish removed if it really bothers you.

When the Yarra City Council flag rate rises, they’re quite literally being flagged.

The Aromantic Flag being flown from Yarra City Council Headquarters in Melbourne. If you are not romantically attracted to anyone, we hear you, we see you, we believe you.

In 2021, a week after Valentine’s Day, the Yarra City Council decided to fly an Aromantic flag in honour of all those who experience no romantic attractions. And in 2019 the council insisted on flying an anti-nuclear flag to mark the anniversary of the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima.

Next time you vote at a local government election, be sure to ask candidates their flag policy because you can almost be certain they’ve thought more about that than they have your bins.

Meanwhile, on the Gold Coast, a $2m piece of ratepayer funded art is to be torn down because it’s, well, crap. And dangerous.

The Gold Coast City Council blew ratepayer’s dough on 97 yellow and grey light poles along the M1 motorway that, when lit up, were meant to spell ‘Gold Coast’. Except that as motorists wiz past the poles at 100km/h the sign is completely unintelligible.

The 97 poles quickly became a landmark for hoons doing burnouts on the highway, leading police to demand council turn the lights off at weekends.

So the only way to appreciate, let alone understand, the $2m sign was to stand a way off to the side of the highway, in the dead of night, but not on weekends.

You have to wonder if Gold Coast residents were ever ambitious for a $2m sign on the Yatala highway welcoming drivers from Brisbane.

Or was the sign just an expensive exercise in local government self-pleasuring, funded by ratepayers who were simply hoping for fewer pot holes and someone with a whipper snipper to cut the grass?

Local government’s attraction for tiny minds with grandiose visions is not limited to these shores.

Officials in Newark, the largest city in New Jersey, were elected to provide citizens with basic services. But, like their Australian counterparts, council members had loftier ambitions.

They announced in January, with great fanfare, that the city would partner with the Hindu nation of Kailasa.

No-one can explain how sister city arrangements help local ratepayers, but they usually provide wonderful travel opportunities for local councillors.

Council members took time off from managing city affairs to host ‘delegates’ from Kailasa in a ceremony fully of pomp, formalising their sister city relationship.

Mayor Ras Baraka, imaging himself to be some sort of local government Nelson Mandela, told the gathering:

“I pray our relationship helps us to understand cultural, social, and political development and improves the lives of everybody in both places.”

Mayor Baraka could pray all he wanted. Kailasa didn’t exist. There was no such place, as a 30 second Google search would have shown.

City Hall had established relations, on behalf of Newark ratepayers, with an entirely fictitious nation.

Six days after the majestic ceremony during which councillors charged with the upkeep of local parks were able to imagine themselves as foreign diplomats, the city was forced to admit they had been scammed by notorious Indian fugitive Swami Nithyananda who, according to reports in the New Indian Express, was wanted for child rape.

Now you’d think that very public reality check would have sent chastened councillors scurrying back to their desks to check on roads and rubbish.

But by now you should know that it is rarely in the nature of those elected to local government to work within their limitations.

A Newark city spokesperson told media:

‘Although this was a regrettable incident, the city of Newark remains committed to partnering with people from diverse cultures in order to enrich each other with connectivity, support, and mutual respect.’

It’s hard to imagine an enterprise more diverse than establishing sister city status with a place that does not actually exist.

But not quite as hard as to imagine a local councillor who is happy to admit he wasn’t voted into office to be a global statesman but simply to ensure potholes are filled.

Oh, and please, empty the bins, mate.