APPROACHING DEADLINE
I am pondering the approaching deadline (24 May 2012) for making submissions on the Wollongong City Council Community Strategic Plan. In theory, this is an important planning document which lays down directions for the next ten years. One problem is once you buy into this process you tend to delude yourself about possible positive outcomes.
It is hard to say how the world will look in 2022, and I suspect that it will look very different to how it looks in 2012.
My own view – held for several years – is that Australian life is changing at a very fast rate and we cannot afford to slumber in the ways of the Menzies years mentality. Some very big challenges are emerging which will manifest themselves at the local level.
To meet these challenges as best we can we need to make real use of one of our ‘underperforming assets’ – the expertise of people who make up our local communities.
COMMUNITY DISENGAGEMENT POLICIES
Over the last decade Wollongong City Council has marginalised effective community involvement in the decision-making process. Local Area Meetings and Neighbourhood Forums were designed a toothless tigers.
We should have had a decade of experience by now with Precinct Committees, as Committees of Council. But the former ALP Councillors put their own narrow interests ahead of the rest of the city. Instead of approving the next model of Neighbourhood Committees (and there was need for refining the old model) they got rid of them altogether.
That is, a great opportunity was treated as a threat. Valuable time in building a better form of Council has been wasted. By now we should have been ready for the Mark 3 model, which would have been humming along very nicely in terms of doing community business in an effective way and also in a way which ensured the protection of all stakeholders.
NEW COUNCIL – BUT OLD INTERNAL CULTURE
With the election of a new Council, I took the view that this too should be treated as an opportunity.
However, based on what has happened since the election, I now believe it is pointless making submissions to Wollongong City Council about the need to restructure the organisation to empower people-in-community when the process of finalizing those submissions – what is included, what is excluded – lies completely out of our hands.(It may well be worth making submissions on many other non-organisational matters.)
Someone on Council’s staff will have the job of making sense out of the many and, no doubt, contradictory points of view which result from the ineffectual “Have you say” methods of community consultation.
I don’t envy them. The officers will have to work out which ‘masters’ they wish to please, and cut and paste accordingly. And their ‘masters’ are well represented in the senior management. The junior staff, with careers, mortgages and lifestyles to protect, are not themselves empowered and enabled to press for real innovation. We cannot expect people in these positions to be able to express what needs to be very clearly expressed.
The end result is entirely predictable since we – who seek a form of Council organization which provides for real community empowerment – are not significant cultural ‘masters’ in this process.
The resulting documents will always be crafted to comply with the unconscious specification which make up the internal culture of the present organization. And the present 20th century form of Council organization is part of the problem, not part of the solution.
SARTRE – YER WOT?
The existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre looked at these sort of matters much more deeply than I have. He came up with the notion of the practico-inert, and this seems to fit very well with where we are in Australia, in general, and Wollongong, in particular.
A Marxist website provides a quick summary:
Practico-inert
The “practico-inert” is a term coined by Jean-Paul Sartre in Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), defined as a field of activity, which despite being the outcome of a successful struggle by some group, has ceased to be responsive to that group’s needs. Bureaucracy is the classic example of a “practico-inert.”
The “practico-inert” responds to the subject’s continued struggle by accommodation, resisting the action of the Subject to which it owes its existence. Thus, whereas the activity of the group is intelligible as dialectic, Sartre describes the movement of the natural world and the “practico-inert” as an “anti-dialectic.”
(from http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/p/r.htm )
I think we are all familiar with this process of being ‘accommodated’ by Wollongong City Council’s community engagement process – that is, seeing our points of view systematically transformed into what suits ‘them’ and never what suits ‘us’. (Those of us who make submissions to Parliament will know this process is not localized at WCC.)
DIALECTICAL GROUP ACTIVITY?
But where is the dialectic group activity in Wollongong?
Community Voice – before the last election – would certainly fit the bill, and so too would the Greens. They both seem to have lost their fervor after the election of the new Council.
Reclaim Our City (ROC) opted to do such things as promote the Blue Mile when it really needed to adopt a city wide approach to reforming WCC.
Too many formerly active people feel disenfranchised and burnt out from their earlier encounters with the Wollongong practico-inert.
The new Lord Mayor and Councillors – as far as I am aware – have not demonstrated any real commitment to community empowerment by way of proposing reforms – such as Precinct Committees – to Council’s organizational structures. They seem to be flat out coming up to speed with a mass of paper work, reports and everyday issues rather than taking up the higher challenges of reforming Council to enable genuine community empowerment.
There are some people involved in the remaining viable Neighbourhood Forums who form something of a nucleus for change – they offer a glimmer of hope but they also lack the necessary critical mass.
When things appear to be going more or less ok for the great majority of people who make up our communities, there is unlikely to be any ‘grass roots’ social movement pressing for the types of social change which are required by a new community-based form of local Council. Trust is placed in the present authorities to deal with life’s problems and people are out of the habit of regarding themselves as active participants in civic life.
So, the limited view from Coledale is that we have an absence of leadership from the new Councillors, no city-wide active community group articulating these issues and no vague stirring from people-in-community themselves. The view may be different in other parts of the city.
It is unlikely in these circumstances that there will be any moves to restructure Council’s form of organization in a timely manner.
We may have to wait until a major crisis has its full impacts.
And so, with the aim of stimulating our collective creative imaginations, rather than make yet another submission on Wollongong 2022, i add the unfamiliar notion of the practico-inert into the conversational mix, and ask any local thinkers:
Under what conditions, if any, would WCC change its form of organization to enable properly resourced Precinct Committees (that is, with some real decision-making powers)?
I don’t think “by way of its present community consultation process” is the answer.
Existentially yours,
Bruce
Coledale May 2012
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