If you live in a wealthy area of Sydney, Gladys Berejiklian's government thinks your views are more important than if you don't.
If you live in Hunters Hill, or Mosman, or Vaucluse, Berejiklian's government thinks your views matter more than if you live in Punchbowl, Merrylands, or Ashfield.
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Berejiklian abandons council mergers
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NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian defends the policy of council amalgamations, but concedes the implementation was wrong.
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Berejiklian abandons council mergers
NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian defends the policy of council amalgamations, but concedes the implementation was wrong.
That is a conclusion which is only too easy to draw from the pitiable, risible, craven decision taken on Thursday to abandon Sydney's remaining council mergers.
Set to one side the merits of the original amalgamation policy. The Premier and her ministers say they think mergers are a good thing. Sydney residents will be better off, they say, if local community services and town planning are conducted by larger councils.
But mergers, like any changes to civic administration, are unpopular with some segments of the community.
And in the past two years, those segments that have provided the strongest resistance to council mergers have been in wealthier segments of the city. There is more to lose, perhaps, and more to protect.
Those councils challenged their amalgamation in court, while other parts of Sydney went along with what the government said was good for them.
But in the interests of "certainty," the Premier now says the remaining mergers need to be abandoned. That is because, she says, these legal battles could drag on for many months or even a year.
This is absurd for a few reasons. First, if the only thing that mattered was "certainty," no government would knock down homes for a new motorway, or sell off state-owned infrastructure assets. Why has certainty been elevated over principle or conviction?
Second, it's true that the legal process could drag on. But there is no irresistible legal reason preventing the government from merging the remaining Sydney councils.
The Local Government Act includes provisions that spell out how to amalgamate a council; the government's only problem is that it has been too incompetent to follow them.
And third, the situation that Berejiklian has now settled on is inherently unsustainable. The only thing certain about the mess of a policy that allows some (rich) parts of Sydney to keep their councils while they are merged elsewhere is that it will provoke, in time, more uncertainty.
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