Consultation, or Outsourced Accountability?

Consultation done well is one of local government's genuine strengths — which is exactly why misusing it on minor decisions is such a waste. Councils are legally required to consult before changing rules, setting key budgets, or taking on big projects. That protects people's right to have a say, and skipping it can leave a council open to legal challenge. The surveys, hearings and feedback forms aren't just box-ticking. They're part of how local decision-making is meant to work.

But there's a real tension worth naming. Councils ask the community to "get on board" with consultation, and then, when the overwhelming feedback is "please just get on with the job," that voice is often ignored. It's also a bit misleading to suggest councils are trapped by rigid legislation here. Section 76AA of the Local Government Act requires a consultation policy, but it gives councils real autonomy to set their own thresholds for what counts as significant. The 2014 amendment didn't invent consultation — it just made the choices around it more transparent.

The intent behind Significance and Engagement Policies is usually good, built in the spirit of co-design and partnership. But many councils have set the bar for "significant" so low that almost any decision, however minor, gets routed through a full consultation process — whether or not the community actually wants a say. That's a self-imposed perverse incentive: the low threshold protects individual decision-makers from ever being seen to act without process, even where speed would have served ratepayers better.

Over-consultation is just one symptom — the fuller diagnosis sits in a fuller argument on improving council operational performance.

A higher threshold wouldn't stop a council choosing to consult on anything it wanted to. It would just remove the obligation to run the full process on minor matters — waste that shows up directly as slower delivery on exactly the decisions ratepayers are asking to get on with.

Many councils have adopted quite conservative thresholds here, in what looks like an attempt to win over a cynical public. In doing so, they've lost sight of a basic principle of representative democracy: we elect people to make informed decisions, precisely so the rest of us don't have to vote on every issue. The current risk-averse approach ends up outsourcing that core decision-making duty, and it isn't cheap to run. The public is asking "can't you just get on with it" — and councils, caught in their own perverse incentive, keep answering with more process instead.

Facing a Section 17A cost-effectiveness review, or just want to know where your own thresholds sit? Get in touch.