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

Attention Lord Mayor Bradbery – we need a new community-centred form of Council organisation.

HONEYMOON PERIOD IS OVER

Since the election of the new Wollongong Council last year I adopted the attitude that the new Lord Mayor and Councillors should be given a chance to settle in and show what they can do. It is, after all, a very step learning curve with impossible demands on their time.

During this time I also attended various events connected with the formation of the Community Strategic Plan, such as the Summit held at the Wollongong Town Hall.

Recent events in the Neighbourhood Forum 2 area have taken me past the point of with-holding the use of my critical facilities while the new Council beds down.

There is a real disconnect between what Council is doing and where our local community is at. If this is so in Coledale, I have no doubt it is true in many other places across the city.

Council is, I believe, lacking the appropriate leadership necessary for us to effective reform our means of dealing with community business, and needs a bit more ginger in its diet if it is to come up to full speed.

DEAD HAND OF PAST IN VISIONING PROCESS

It was while I was attending the Town Hall Summit sessions for the Community Strategic plan that I became aware of something which I then found vaguely disturbing.

That is, the whole process of forming the 10 year plan is being shaped by an obsolete 20th century view of Wollongong City Council as a form of organisation.

This old form of organisation is unconsciously given privileged treated by the internal culture within Wollongong City Council – that is, by the staff who make important decisions about both the consultation process and how the result of that consultation process are to be interpreted.

These people, always very pleasant to me I must say, work and live within the existing framework and cannot see beyond it. But they have an institutionalised view of the reforms necessary for our form of local government.

In addition to this, there is a systematic privileging of a CBD centred view of Wollongong as a city – and a corresponding neglect of the actual communities where we all live.

We are effectively locked into the past by a ‘centralisation’ process which filters out the steps necessary for us to change in the right direction. And the past model is not fine-tuned enough to deliver the kind of services we, in local communities, need – that is, timely and effective use of our scarce resources to address real problems.

A FRACTAL IMAGE

For a very small example as a fractal – it is impossible, it seems, to get Council to merely trim some vegetation on Cater Street, Coledale, which blocks drivers vision on a dangerous bend. It has taken months of messages – following up a 200 plus petition about these dangers – and still no action.(But see footnote.)

Council have told us that it will be years before there is any possiblity of action to take care of the main dangers to drivers and children on the dangerous bends on upper Cater Street – if ever.

And there are many more and important examples of this disconnect between what Council needs to be doing, and what it actually does.

We just can’t afford to be this inefficient. We need to have more direct local say over how, where and when our ratepayer dollars are spent in keeping with local needs and priorities.

Neurologically speaking, the present form of Council organisation is akin to that of a dinosaur.

FAILURE OF CREATIVE IMAGINATION

Creatively imagining our future is key to the process by which energy follows thought. The vision of Council in the present Wollongong 2022 is dominated by the dead hand of the past, and i believe something vital for our success is being filtered out in the present process.

It is my position that, if there is any major flaw in the present plans being drawn up to cover the next 5 and 10 years, it is the failure of those in key decision-making positions to be able to creatively imagine an improved form of organisation for Council – and to institute effective changes now – not in 5 or 10 years.

That is, there is a failure of the imagination necessary by our civic leaders to creatively address present and emerging challenges.

If we are to be able to effectively address our real challenges (in these rapidly changing economic times) we need a form of organisation which is re-centred in our actual communities.

Despite the lip service being paid to being ‘a connected and engaged community’ I can detect no evidence of this in the draft plans to date. I have seen no evidence of this even from the Greens, who have Precinct Committees as part of the Local Government policy.

Our new Council was elected with a mandate for reform and change. They should not be waiting for a finalised 10 year plan to show us what they are capable of. We need action now, not in 2022.

NEED A NEW NETWORK TO ADD A BIT OF HEALING GINGER

The only way this is going to happen is for all those people concerned about genuine community empowerment before the last Council election to now form a new network to press for real reform.

A new community action network can make good use of the new communication and networking technologies available – so it can be formed across the whole area of the Greater City of Wollongong.

Not Green, Ginger!