Page 3181 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 23 August 2017
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a foothold amongst progressive councils. That is why I am suggesting in my motion that the ACT starts on municipal services. Of course, in the ACT we call them city services.
I will briefly describe some of the participatory budgeting exercises that have already happened in Australia. In 2014 the City of Melbourne led a participatory budgeting process to determine how the city’s annual budget in the order of $650 million should be allocated over the next 10 years. The process was conducted over five months and cost $185,000. It had two tranches: a broad engagement of the community through a variety of outreach and traditional engagement methods, including online budget allocations and workshops; and the random selection of a representative panel that was led through a deliberative process to determine the long-term financial plan for the city.
The outcome of that panel was 11 recommendations. Nine of these were incorporated into the financial plan and one was interpreted as a direction for the council to take on an advocacy role. One recommendation was not adopted because it expressed a desire to increase rates, whereas the newly introduced state government had just introduced a rate capping policy.
The City of Greater Geraldton has conducted two participatory budgeting processes in recent years. In 2013, the first process asked a deliberative community panel of 28 randomly selected citizens to determine priorities for the 10-year $68 million capital works budget. After meeting for four days, the panel presented a list of 138 capital works projects prioritised by the community.
In 2014 the second process charged 37 citizens with recommending the desired range, level and priority of services for the council’s $70 million annual budget. The deliberative panel met on seven Saturdays over a six-week period and made recommendations about which services should be increased, decreased or refocused, and those that should remain the same.
The early adopter in this, of course, is Porto Alegre in Brazil. They have been doing this participatory budget thing since 1989. The citizens of Porto Alegre attend public meetings where they make proposals and vote to decide how municipal funding is allocated. The city has decided how to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on capital projects in this way.
Numerous studies have found that this approach is strongly correlated with reduced poverty, improved access to water and sanitation, increased affordable housing stock and reduced infant mortality rates. Typically, citizens’ decisions have increased the proportion of spending allocated to low-income groups and public amenities. This has been so successful it has now spread to over 200 Brazilian cities.
These are only some examples. I understand that over 2,000 participatory budgeting exercises have been conducted worldwide. Participatory budgeting has been used to combat pork-barrelling and corruption as well as provide a way to manage finite budgets in the face of infinite community demands.
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