As south-east Queensland pushes for signatures on the dotted line of potentially the country’s biggest City Deal, a strong message to “get the governance right” has been shared from a similar deal in Western Sydney.
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At a Committee for Brisbane event on Wednesday morning, the chief executive of Liverpool City Council in western Sydney detailed the long road to securing a “transformative” city deal last year.
The Western Sydney City Deal was signed in March 2018 after a two-year negotiation process with eight councils.
Last week the federal government announced willingness to investigate the signing of a major south-east Queensland City Deal covering the entire region.
The state government and the Council of Mayors (SEQ) also released a pitch document, TransformingSEQ, detailing their vision for the proposed “game changer” deal.
Liverpool City Council chief executive Kiersten Fishburn told attendees of the huge complexities involved in negotiating the deal between eight councils, the state and federal governments.
“To express the complexity of that, that’s four Labor mayors, three independent mayors and one Liberal mayor … who had to work collaboratively with a Liberal state and Liberal federal government,” she said.
“A quite extraordinary sense of being able to work in a bipartisan direction for the betterment of the people of western Sydney.”
Ms Fishburn said the city deal was complicated by the planned western Sydney airport at Badgerys Creek, which was expected to bring around $20 billion worth in federal and state investment over 10 years in Liverpool City Council alone.
“It took us about 18 months to thrash out our City Deal, and in it I think there are some fantastic initiatives,” she said.
Speaking of the key lessons she learnt through the process, Ms Fishburn said one of the biggest issues was that of governance throughout the deal.
“Get the governance right, and get it right from day one,” she said.
“If I could do anything differently, I would have spent a lot more time working out our governance issues rather than delving straight into what we were going to try and get out of this deal.”
She said at the start of the western Sydney deal planning process, no one thought through how mayors would communicate with each other, how council’s general managers would communicate, or how decisions would be made collectively.
“We didn’t think any of these questions through,” she said.
“You need to have resolved those issues earlier rather than later and we really resolved them on the fly.
“If there’s one thing I can suggest to anyone doing this work, spend a lot of time on your governance right from the start.”
Ms Fishburn also said it was important to recognise that the three tiers of government operated in completely different ways.
“You need to appreciate that all three tiers of government have very different ways of working, and they might not understand the way you work,” she said.
“Anyone involved with this deal, sit down and actually do some conversation about what your sticking points might be, so you can be aware of them.”
One of the most complex challenges in getting the City Deal across the line in Sydney, Ms Fishburn said, was in bringing local councillors along on the journey.
“Because of the way state and federal work, many things remain in cabinet-in-confidence,” she said.
“There was a lot of concern from state and federal about breaching their cabinet-in-confidence, correctly so.
“But on council’s side there was a lot of concern about councillors being asked to sign up to something when they hadn’t been privy to the full information.”
Ms Fishburn said that issue was one that needed work, but she warned that Queensland should be proactive in addressing such issues ahead.
The Committee for Brisbane event also hosted a panel of expert speakers on the issues around City Deals, with lessons from Darwin, Townsville and other City Deals shared.
