Local governments make major multi-million dollar decisions, but no-one’s scrutinising them anymore

Periodically in Australian politics, everyone starts talking about a ‘scandal’ where a state or federal government has misspent ‘millions of dollars.’

Maybe it’s pork-barrelling in a marginal electorate, or a well-connected private school receiving a public grant to build their third gymnasium. Sometimes media commentators will get really excited about a policy change that’s predicted to shift property prices by 2 or 3 percent.

Yet when a local government misspends several million dollars, or makes zoning changes that drastically inflate property values, very few people seem to care, and often the media doesn’t even cover it.

Australia suffers from a major mismatch between the quantity and quality of reporting and commentary regarding state and federal government decisions, compared to decisions that are almost as significant (and often have a more direct impact on people's lives), but which are functionally made by local councils.

This is particularly the case in Queensland, where council amalgamations have created larger city and regional councils with bigger budgets and more policy-making autonomy.

But even in states where the councils are smaller, and state governments more frequently micro-manage or block local government initiatives, long chains of rubber-stampers mean that highly consequential decisions are heavily shaped by low-ranking council officers or part-time councillors with no subject matter expertise, and little external scrutiny or accountability.

Case study 1: In November 2025, Brisbane City Council announced City Plan amendments that functionally reduce the percentage of a block that must be set aside for trees and green space when the site is developed – in practice, this will mean some highrise development sites that previously had to reserve 10% of site area for deep-planted trees will be approved to build right up to the property boundaries (with a couple of bushes in concrete pot plants in lieu of genuine green space).

The change drastically increases the development potential for tens of thousands of properties across the city – you can build on more of the block, which means you can squeeze in more units or larger houses. So this benign-looking city plan amendment could increase the sale value of a large $10 million development site (e.g. a few neighbouring houses with big backyards) to $12 or $14 million.

When old, rundown houses in a neighbourhood are selling for $2 or $3 million each because of their development potential, this flows through to increased property values on nearby apartments and houses even if those other properties can’t easily be redeveloped.

There’s no guarantee that more apartments will actually be built as a result of this change. But across the Brisbane Local Government Area, the city plan amendments to deep planting rules could quietly inflate the total value of Brisbane real estate by several billion dollars.

Case study 2: From 2016 to 2020, BCC spent $115 million widening a 700-metre stretch of Lytton Rd in East Brisbane from two lanes to three lanes in each direction. The project removed dozens of established trees, ate several hundred square metres of public parkland, and crucially, involved the compulsory acquisition and demolition of approximately fifty privately-owned residential homes.

The Lytton Rd widening was supported by both Labor and the LNP, and while residents’ protests over the years certainly attracted some media coverage (particularly before the shrinking of Quest Newspapers), the council got off very lightly in terms of critical reporting and commentary considering how costly and disruptive the project was. Today, Lytton Rd remains as congested as ever. There’s no strong evidence that the project reduced travel times along the corridor compared to baseline congestion projections if it hadn’t gone ahead, or indeed if some of the $115m had instead been spent on introducing high-frequency bus services and peak-hour bus lanes through Brisbane’s eastern suburbs.

You can find similar examples in towns and cities across Australia. In regional areas where councils sometimes own critical infrastructure (e.g. Rockhampton Regional Council owns the town’s only airport, which is also a key hub for Central Queensland’s large fly-in, fly-out mining workforce), council decisions have massive ramifications for major industries.

Several big-budget federal programs are also effectively guided from the bottom up by local councils.

For example, the Roads to Recovery program allocates roughly $1 billion each year to local council road projects, but very few people outside the bureaucracy ever closely interrogate whether councils are spending this money sensibly.

In Brisbane, a whopping $3.35 million from this fund is currently being spent installing traffic lights at a minor suburban intersection in Tarragindi (total cost is $3.65m, with the council funding the balance), most likely so the local LNP councillor could claim to have ‘delivered’ something other than dog off-leash areas and playground upgrades. In Brisbane, there are hundreds of potential projects that would represent better uses of $3m+ of federal money, but the whims of a single councillor and a couple of car-focussed traffic engineers ultimately dictate where this money flows.

Much of the Roads to Recovery money across the country is being spent on road-widening or intersection-widening projects which reinforce car-dependence and do nothing to support public or active transport. They’re a lucrative cash cow for private construction contractors, but represent terrible value for public money.

No journalist is writing in-depth stories asking whether Gold Coast City Council's $58 million project to expand car capacity on Yawalpa Rd, Pimpama is good value for money, but they should be. The project has so far received two rounds of federal Roads to Recovery funding – $7.7 million in 2024/25 and $9.5 million in 2025/26 plus a bit of State Government funding.

Maybe this is actually just a rant about how entrenched car culture is and how all levels of government are still wasting huge amounts of money expanding road capacity to carry more cars (in spite of all the evidence that this doesn't work) without ever being criticised for it.

But that phenomenon is closely connected to the fact that so many road infrastructure spending decisions are either made or heavily influenced by local councils that few people pay much attention to.

When I first took office as a Brisbane city councillor back in 2016, there were four journalists sitting down the front of the meeting chamber in city hall to report on proceedings.

ABC, Brisbanetimes, Quest News and the Courier Mail all had reporters assigned specifically to cover local government affairs in South-East Queensland (these reporters were separate from the Brisbane-based political journos covering state parliament). Quest News still had at least a dozen printed newspapers and multiple reporters covering local government news across different parts of South-East Queensland.

The biggest TV stations – channel 7 and channel 9 – also had dedicated local affairs reporters for Brisbane who were often producing multiple stories about Brisbane City Council debates and announcements each week, and various local radio stations who took their lead from either ABC or Courier Mail routinely picked up stories.

Australia’s mainstream media was already well into its ongoing decline at this point, and resourcing, airtime and column space dedicated to local government news was less than in the early 2000s. But it still felt like the media at least cared about what was happening on Brisbane City Council, and in the smaller councils of neighbouring satellite cities like Ipswich and the Redlands.

Crucially, several of the print journalists assigned to cover local government were senior, experienced reporters who were savvy enough to cut through the spin, and had enough time to interview and interrogate a range of sources, rather than just taking a couple of quotes from the mayor’s office and a couple from the opposition councillors.

Today, the reporters who are occasionally assigned to local politics stories generally don't have much background knowledge about how councils really work or the context behind major decisions.

There are still several great Brisbane-based journos covering local politics – the ABC’s Kenji Sato and Brisbanetimes’ Felicity Caldwell are two of the most astute – but they’re all split across a broader range of beats and responsibilities, with less capacity for deep-dive investigative reporting than in the past.

The overall quality and quantity of mainstream media coverage regarding local government and related local policy issues has dropped noticeably in Brisbane, and the same is true in other capitals.

The decline in coverage and scrutiny of regional council decision-making is perhaps even more pronounced. The dearth of regional papers, radio stations and TV reporters means that even on the occasions where local affairs are covered, ‘news stories’ often involve little more than copying quotes from resident Facebook groups or uncritically regurgitating media releases from the mayor’s office.

I don't know which came first – public disinterest and disengagement from local government, or declining mainstream media coverage. But it's now a self-reinforcing cycle.

While both emerging independent media and social media influencers/commentators are to some extent increasingly filling other gaps left by the hollowing out of mainstream media, that's not happening as much for local politics. The rewards for chasing audiences wherever you can find them (rather than people who are geographically concentrated in a particular city or region) mean that even as we’re seeing a diversification and fragmentation of coverage and commentary about national and international affairs, new media still isn’t even close to replicating the depth and breadth of reporting and analysis we used to get for local government decisions and issues.

In some cities, various local channels and stations are partially meeting the appetite for greater understanding of local issues.

For example in Brisbane we have videographers like Adam Young of THE Brisbane Channel, who produces well-researched Youtube videos and now a podcast about issues like housing, urban planning, transport etc. Younger generations are also getting in on the act, with quirky volunteer-led projects like Tight Knit collective drawing more attention to council issues, as well as individual commentators like Immyonboard, who are starting to translate growing online audiences into organised advocacy groups.

But in Brisbane at least, even the largest of these kinds of channels doesn’t yet have the clout to significantly impact policy outcomes or political priorities, or to secure timely responses from the mayor’s office. THE Brisbane Channel’s most popular videos generally attract up 20 000 unique viewers – very impressive for a one-man operation, but still far short of the reach that mainstream media coverage of local affairs would have attracted a decade or two ago. In a city of millions, you need to be reaching very big audiences for politicians to start worrying about what you’re reporting on.

I'm not arguing for any specific response to this phenomenon. There's certainly a gap for local councillors and advocacy groups to build larger audiences communicating directly with residents, but of course this leads to a less holistic picture of what's going on and what different political actors are saying and doing.

I would love to see more independent media focusing on council decisions and local politics. But I can appreciate that if the mainstream media and wider popular culture isn't signalling that local government matters, it's harder to build an audience that's interested in it.

Mostly I just wanted to remind readers that things weren't always like this. The near-total absence of meaningful media scrutiny over significant local council decisions is contributing to an environment where, outside of election campaigns, most mayors and councillors don't seem to care very much at all what the majority of residents think. This, in turn, leads to less council resourcing allocated towards public consultation and engagement, and ultimately a failure in public imagination regarding the radical potential of local government.

But I'll save that for another article.

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