Are shared services a panacea for Australian local government: a critical note on Australian and international empirical evidence

Abstract

Australian local government policy has undergone a major change in direction as policy elites have recognized the ominous dimensions of the problem of local council financial unsustainability and thereby realized that recent structural reform programs have done little to ameliorate this problem. As a consequence, attention has now moved away from forced amalgamation to focus on shared local services as an alternative means of achieving greater operational efficiency. However, an unfortunate feature of the present debate is that, with a few notable exceptions, very little effort has been expended on examining existing Australian and international empirical evidence on the performance of shared local service models. The present paper seeks to remedy this neglect by critically evaluating available Australian and international empirical literature on the outcomes of shared local service arrangements.