By Julian Bajkowski

The latest bid for constitutional reform to assure direct federal funding of local government failing to make it into the starter’s gate may not be a surprise, but that doesn’t take away from the urgency to find a solution to what will become a revenue time bomb over coming years.

Put simply, this time around the stakes are just too high for councils to gamble on the likelihood of electoral rejection at a referendum because this would mean “strike three” for an idea which has always been a tough sell in terms of populism.

Constitutional recognition for local government has been rejected twice before, in 1974 and 1988, and Australian Local Government Association vice president Keith Rhoades is correct when he says that if a bid at the next election fails, the question will not get up again in his lifetime.

As such, it’s worth asking why changing the way funding flows between jurisdictions is such a tough ask of the electorate – especially when there is a widespread perception that the nation is over-governed and burdened with the dead weight of unnecessary administrative complexity.

On one hand electors and interest groups complain when it takes years for funding for their individual causes to cascade down from the states.

Yet it’s these very same constituents and stakeholders who appear the most ambivalent to any change to the system in order to simplify and speed things up.

Perhaps the most disheartening aspect of the debate around which Constitutional issues ought to be put to a vote is the growing perception, fuelled by deliberately inflammatory elements of the media, that the very mechanism of a referendum is little more than hobby horse for those campaigning on boutique issues.

These are the same elements that dole out lashings of blame to elected representatives and public administrators but then offer no tangible solutions.

The irony is that despite the base nastiness of the political climate at the moment, the concept of direct funding to local governments for specific projects has not only bipartisan support at a federal level, it has the support of the independents as well.

That’s hardly surprising given that the Howard Coalition government repeatedly sought to directly fund specific policy outcomes – including health and roads – to expedite progress by bypassing the states.

Indeed, the quite literally retarded state of Australia’s national infrastructure can largely be put down to quarrels between states over funding and standards that have otherwise been overcome in other comparable developed nations.

Britain, a country far more densely populated than Australia, does not have a middle tier of government administering health or roads or rail or education – let alone eight.

So the question that now begs is how to navigate through the jurisdictional and political jungle in Australia to make progress on what will otherwise become a substantial drain on the national economy.

A persistent argument against holding referenda outside the regular electoral cycle is that the cost involved is too simply too high given the resources required in setting up polling booths across the nation.

However that cost could well fall dramatically if some form electronic voting is adopted.

Australians have so far shown they are not afraid to harness technology for national events and the next census will be a largely electronic affair.

With this in mind, it’s at the very least worth considering whether greater electoral engagement of the wider community through electronic polling could eliminate some of the decision-making bottlenecks that have constrained progress on cross jurisdictional issues for decades.

It would certainly make for a more informed and level-headed debate than the cheap and nasty talkback radio rhetoric of chaff-bags and budgie smugglers.

What do you think?