The foolishness of asking the wrong questions Minister Gutwein

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Eva Ruzicka is out there on FACEBOOK asking about the idea of, and  the new emerging  myths to do with  "strategic capability". She also thinks that "Mayor Tony Foster hit it on the head by pointing to economist in pin striped suits."

She is asking Minister Gutwein, why he is so afraid to have a real conversation aimed at sorting out what is the reality of state government responsibilities.

Indeed she is on the money in asking about the capacity local government to maintain Tasmania's "increasingly frayed social fabric." 

The notion that the State should, as she says "actually [be] taking financial responsibility for whole of state services that in this day and age" is, it seems to her viable. OTher think the model is broken.

Likewise she seems to think that Tasmania's 29 Councils are best suited to delivering the required services.  But are they?

Mayor Foster might, as Eva Ruzicka says, be right about his pin striped suited 'economists'  but it seems that they are being asked to answer the wrong questions. The question that really needs asking is to do with the model's viable – a 20th Century model – and up to the task in the 21st Century for a population of something over half a million souls? 

Having asked that we then need to look around us and ask ourselves is this model standing up to the rigours of time. The evidence seems to pointing to it not being so. 

Stuart Bryce it seems thinks "that there's some merit in trashing councils [given] the latest scrap at LCC [Launceston Council] it seems that in certain "operational" circumstances, alderman are redundant." Most of the people who vote in council elections imagine that the are voting for representatives – not a bit of it in Launceston it appears.

Just look at all the nonsense that Ald. Danny Gibson is being exposed to and that it all alerts us to in regard to the renaming of the Aurora Stadium and the "support" for the North East Rail Trail by LCC. As Stuart Bryce says on FACEBOOK nothing "heard in Council [of] either of those decisions."

As George Burrows points out to Stuart Bryce "your lot [Launcestonians] are just beginners compared to Huonville and Glenorchy, but I must say you seem to be learning fast."

Social media is telling those who use it quite a bit and the press is telling us nothing of real interest.

If Minister Gutwein is not looking around himself and observing the unraveling of the 'local governance rope' one wonders whose lent him their rose coloured glasses and in order not to se what.

It hardly seems credible that the case for an open and independent inquiry involving 'the public' actually needs to be put to the Minister given all that's revealing itself. But it seems that it does!

About now if we were not having all-in-all-out four year term councils we'd be having elections - rather just had one. Councilors and aldermen would as likely as not be on much better behavior and the inevitability of facing local governance's dysfunction might just have been prolonged. But it seems that the dysfunction must be faced now.