The criticisms brought up here by Cr Johnston are certainly accurate. Watching Brisbane City Council meetings there is a strong sense that they’re more interested in playing party politics than doing the right thing. And I have often wondered if the size of BCC contributes to that. Other Councils’ members often don’t even run under a party ticket. They’re members of a political party, to be sure, but at least from the outside, it’s less a part of their identity than it is for BCC (and State and Federal) candidates & representatives.

Ironically, the first Lord Mayor of the amalgamated BCC, William Jolly, wanted politics of BCC to be “not to any extent … on party lines”. That is certainly not what we see today, sadly.

“But they were a bit taken aback to find that these seven or eight councillors were replaced by one person who didn’t live in this area at all. The council seemed a bit of a distant place for a while.”

This is telling to me. I think our Council is too small in terms of number of councillors for the area and population it serves. And like any deliberative body, it would benefit greatly from a proportional system.

So I would suggest merging all of the current wards down to half the number of discrete wards, but having each ward return 6 Councillors, using the same system we use for federal Senate elections. This would triple the number of people, but would have a much larger impact on how accurately the body reflects the will of the people. Currently the LNP controls an insane 74% of seats, despite receiving 46% of the popular vote. Labor has less than 19% of seats from 33% of the vote, and Greens just 1 seat (3.7%) from nearly 18% of the vote. If our politicians are going to be party-aligned, we should at least have a system where the make-up of the Council has party members that are reasonably close to what people actually want.

Something interesting to think about is how this large BCC makes for a very politically powerful Council. Brisbane has the political weight to push around the State Government at times, and it uses it. Brisbane is the only city to run its own public transport network itself, and the awkward way that TfB and TransLink interact is certainly detrimental to the efficiency of our network. BCC has been incredibly disappointing when it comes to completing their part of projects when a project is meant to be done in tandem between BCC and TMR, such as with the North Brisbane Bikeway where the State completed their 4 stages years ago, but the 1 stage BCC is supposed to do has been cancelled and restarted more times than I can count.

There’s also a great video on one of the North American urbanists’ YouTube channels that talks about how council amalgamations have been done in North America with the express purpose of hurting inner-city urbanists and allowing suburban sprawl to force its preferences onto the inner city. Unfortunately I can’t find that video right now, but it’s something I’ve thought on for quite a while. I’m not entirely convinced it applies to Brisbane, considering we amalgamated long before the car-dependency push of the post-war period, but I do wonder how much of an effect it could be having anyway. Or, potentially, the reverse could happen, with the amalgamation being potentially the only reason outer areas get as much active transport infrastructure as they do thanks to more of a unified vision for the city. Dunno, just something to mull over.

Personally, it is a success.

Spent a decade or so in Sydney. Lived in multiple places all within a 5 km circle but three different local councils.

It felt slightly ridiculous as a resident, but it is insane from a planning point of view.

During the planning/building for the Olympics the amount of time and money wasted because of multiple councils was impressive, even for the Olympics.

One city, one local gov makes so much more sense.