Reform Wollongong City Council

It is clear that there is far more to the complex realities of the real life of former WCC General Manager Rod Oxley than is contained in “Named and Shamed” – the book which gives his side of the Wollongong corruption scandal.

But a critical examination of the information he actually provides allows me to tease out a far more important community issue than his personal fate  – and that issue is the need for us to rethink the formal organisation side of Council’s administration.

As the Oxley account shows, the “modern” form of organisation (old paradigm) provides a power-base for the Chief Executive office/General Manager. It works with a concentrated form of power at the apex and has a top-down command structure.

This allows for far more games than the types of activities which are genuinely part of implementing the wider community’s will.

COMMUNITY DEMOCRACY MOVEMENT MODEL OF COUNCIL

I argue that, as part of the process of reconceptualising local Councils, we need to pay equal attention to these bureaucratic pyramids of power as we do to the representational side of Councils (elected Councillors and Precinct Committees etc).

In short, we need to come up with new paradigm designs which re-centre Council’s various administrative functions back into the local communities where we live, and not to concentrate them in one tower in one part of our city.

DISCUSSIONAL AGENDA FOR COMING ELECTIONS

In putting these views forward my hope is that something of them may feed into the discussional reform agendas for the 2010 Federal election; the 2011 NSW State election and the 2012 NSW local government election (and beyond).

My paper runs to 31 pages and in a Word .doc format, CDM Post Oxley.

Bruce Reyburn
March 2010