Suchergebnisse

Subcontracting of services to the elderly by three of the federal government's Area Agencies on Aging.

Summary at a Glance Under the NSW Government's forced amalgamation program, the Cootamundra and Gundagai councils were merged in 2016. This paper examines the outcomes of the amalgamation by comparing the estimated outcomes prepared by NSW Government agencies and KPMG with the actual outcomes after four years post-merger. It demonstrates that the merger has failed on almost all counts. As part of the controversial local government structural reform program in NSW, the Cootamundra and Gundagai shire councils were forcibly amalgamated into the Cootamundra Gundagai Regional Council (CGRC) in 2016. Various documents and commissioned reports prepared by NSW government agencies, commercial consultants KPMG and the NSW Boundaries Commission Delegate all claimed that significant cost savings and other financial benefits would flow from the consolidated CGRC. Using data from the four post-merger financial years, in this paper we examine these claims against observed financial and operational efficiency outcomes at the CGRC. Three different analyses are conducted: aggregate accounting measures are examined, financial ratio analysis is used for performance comparison, and operational efficiency is estimated through Data Envelopment Analysis. All three analyses decisively demonstrate that the CGRC has not only failed to reap the claimed cost savings and other financial benefits, but its fiscal performance has deteriorated sharply. In sum, the CGRC represents a clear case of NSW state government policy failure.

AbstractDecentralised government – such as local government – allows for better tailoring of goods and services and hence higher levels of economic welfare. However, inequities in wealth can mean that some local governments experience difficulty trying to provide for the needs of their citizens. To try to mitigate these disparities, most systems of local government feature a program of untied equalisation grant transfers. However, proponents of equalisation grants schemes have struggled to provide a convincing moral justification for the practice: often scholars resort to rather unconvincing appeals to Pigou's famous normative dictum that equals should be treated equally. We propose that the natural law Principle of Subsidiarity is a more appropriate and robust moral justification for equalisation grant transfers. Moreover, we show how adoption of a subsidiarity justification would lead to improved grants practice that could be expected to avoid some of the serious problems that plague existing equalisation grant schemes.

AbstractAn important problem with decentralized government relates to its tendency to create disparities between the various units with respect to their capability to provide public goods. In response to this problem, intergovernmental equalization grant transfers are a ubiquitous feature of many systems of decentralized government. However, since the earliest times, scholars of fiscal federalism have struggled to provide a convincing moral justification for providing intergovernmental equalization grants. We outline how the principle of subsidiarity might be employed to create a robust moral justification for providing equalization transfers. In addition, we explicate the steps required to operationalize a subsidiarity-based grant system and conclude with a consideration of some of the difficulties that might be encountered in doing so.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to estimate and explore how religious affiliation may influence general and local trust in contemporary society.Design/methodology/approachThis paper employs data from the 2010 and 2014 waves of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey. The association between religious affiliation and trust was estimated using an ordered logistic regression and conventional ordinary least squares model.FindingsThe paper presents evidence of a statistically significant association between religious affiliation and trust that are consistent with theory.Social implicationsThis finding is important for a heterogeneous population like Australia as it seeks to build social cohesion in the face of threats to internal and external security.Originality/valueThe study contributes to the literature by providing – to the best of the authors' knowledge – the first results on the association between religious affiliation and trust for Australia.

It would appear that directly elected Mayors have indeed become fashionable. However, few seem to have paused to ponder the pecuniary impact of directly elected Mayors on local government: Indeed there is no evidence at all from the Antipodes and much of the extant work is somewhat dated. We analyse a five year panel of data for New South Wales, Australia and find evidence of strong and statistically significant increased unit operational expenditure in local governments that employ the directly elected mayor model. We conclude by outlining the effect that this association might have on local government sustainability.

AbstractIt has long been argued that shared services represent an efficacious means of securing efficiencies for municipalities. Indeed, pressures from fiscal austerity, taxation limitations, and the specter of forced amalgamations have resulted in an increasing uptake of shared service arrangements. However, the extant evidence is rather inconclusive and is largely restricted to analyzing the nett efficiency outcomes for the specific service shared. We broaden this evidential base by examining the association between shared service production and the efficiency of entire municipalities. Our analysis, employing a 5‐year panel of data, suggests that shared services are associated with a statistically significant reduction in overall municipal efficiency. We conclude by explicating on the public policy implications arising from ourprima faciesurprising results.

This article deals with a critical challenge for policymakers: how can political actors become policy winners in areas where they have previously experienced resounding losses? To address this puzzle, the article develops William Riker's concept of heresthetic, which describes how clever actors can disrupt the equilibrium of the political opposition by re-framing people's choices in such a way that they are inclined to contribute to their cause. Specifically, we propose a new analytical framework that enables scholars to trace and explain the various strategies available to politicians who seek to advance seemingly detrimental or risky policies in circumstances of uncertainty and complexity. This is applied to the surprising case of education reforms advanced by Australia's Liberal–National Coalition. In doing so, the article affirms the importance of vicarious instruction for aspiring herestheticians, the media, and the citizens whom they seek to manipulate.