In a judgment that appeared to owe more to the black letter of the law than to its intent, the Supreme Court today gave the green light to Barnett and Simpson to boundary-adjust local government as we know it out of existence in WA.Nationals, please take note, today's decision means that Barnett and Simpson can reduce the number of non-metropolitan local governments by half, with the support of a compliant Local Government Advisory Board, simply by abolishing every second one and expanding the boundaries of the others to swallow those abolished.
And then a few years down the track, it will halve the number again.
Tom Dadour must be turning in his grave at the way the legal system has allowed the powers-that-be to get away with perverting the poll provisions of the Local Government Act that he fought so hard for.
Mind you, it's hard not to be disappointed at the performance of the applicants' Senior Counsel who, by general consensus, failed to mount the arguments effectively and abandoned two grounds of the action without consulting his clients. His doing so effectively precluded mounting the argument that the Minister's proposals, even though largely rejected by the LGAB, would have had a pervasive impact on the Board's deliberations.
I was impressed, though, with the speed with which the Chief Justice came to his judgment, segueing, without a pause, from the applicants' Counsel's submissions in reply straight into the judgment.
I always, perhaps naively, thought that the point of debate or legal argument was that what was said might have some impact on the decision reached. If this is not so, what the hell were we all there for?
I would like to pay my respects to Ian, and his family, for their extraordinary courage and sense of honour, to the point they put their own money on the line to pursue this action in the courts.
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