For Canberra's community councils, regular consultation with wider membership is a requirement, whereas it's merely "aspirational" for often under-resourced residents associations.
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Law academic Dr Bruce Baer Arnold says this is potentially problematic, especially considering the relative ease of creating an association, and the impact of economic divide on influencing policy makers.
Only five members are needed to incorporate an association in the ACT.
"You can fight city hall and you can sometimes win, but winning needs either a mass constituency ... or it involves moving the paper backwards and forwards in the right way," Dr Baer Arnold said.
Community councils, of which there are seven in the ACT, receive about $13,000 annually. This generally covers communication costs, organising events and meetings, and public liability and volunteers' insurance.
Up until 2018, the territory government covered associations' insurance costs.
Residents associations, of which there are 31 active, generally spend on much of the same, but don't receive any funding. Instead, they rely on government grants, and those in rich suburbs tend to be best-placed to apply for them.
Inner South Community Council has eight residents association members, with which it shares its funding.
"You might say, 'Let's go out and get a professional to draft our submission to the ACT government', or, 'We can do something here because it has disregarded its own rules ... let's hire a lawyer'," Dr Baer Arnold said.
"Some areas will be more privileged than others. They've got money and they've got expertise."
In some locations, membership would be: "young, affluent, educated and energetic", Dr Baer Arnold said. In others, it would be mostly: "people with spectacles, bow ties and pearls, who are particularly concerned with heritage values".
Suburbs hard-pressed for cash might rely on members' expertise to get them in front of officials or the judiciary about an issue, but it is difficult to vet whether they are truly representative of the community once there.
Residents associations' executives generally don't have to front up to questions about the size of their memberships, or how much consultation they'd had with locals about an issue.
Community councils in the ACT are required to hold 10 meetings a year to abide by their funding agreements, whereas residents associations only have to hold two.
Additional meetings could be negotiated, but that was "aspirational" for residents associations, Dr Baer Arnold said.
"I haven't seen a lot of [official vetting] in the ACT ... it has come up interstate where you've literally had two residents associations making competing claims about one [issue]," he said.
"If I was running an association and making a representation to government, one of the things I'd be flagging would be, 'We have [a large membership] and we're all very concerned', or, 'We have a small number of members ... but we're very committed'.
"You'd hope that small numbers might be offset by the persuasiveness of the argument."
Many working Canberrans, students and families are time poor, and associations are often set up to tackle a specific issue, Dr Baer Arnold said. Once resolved, they often fizzled out of registration, and what they campaigned for generally depended on individual members' views.
"It's cause politics: we were set up to do something, we won or we lost, and now we can go home," he said.
"You'll have people who are passionately interested in particular things but not interested in others."
There had been no major complaints about community councils' or associations' representations in the ACT, Dr Baer Arnold said.
What the associations said
Inner South Canberra Community Council chair Marea Fatseas
"Part of the original reason for us [having residents associations as members] was because there were existing residents groups [when we started in 2010].
"We thought that was the best way of making sure that we were in tune with what the grass roots were thinking."
North Canberra Community Council chair Leon Arundell
"We get somewhere around $13,000 a year from the government and we have a funding agreement that requires us to have regular meetings and tell the government what the residents think about things.
"We have about 20,000 households to cover ... a few years I looked at sending a letter to each of the households and found out it would cost about $7,000."
Pialligo Residents Association president Bob Ross
"We charge our residents an annual fee but it's not very much - it's only $25 - and Pailliago is only two streets so you haven't got a lot of people, really ... you're only talking about a small amount of money.
"We basically fly by the seat of our pants in the legal sense. [But some people in the community] are from the legal profession or the science profession, so there are people that can make contributions from their experiences and help us to make the right decision."
Tuggeranong Community Council president Glenys Patulny
"Every [community council] gets the same funding, irrespective of population, so that needs to be looked at."
Kingston and Barton Residents Association president Rebecca Scouller
"It would be great if there was some discretionary funding these groups could bid for without the large amounts of red tape involved for full grant applications.
"I'm sure we'd all appreciate the hours back from grant writing, organising fetes, seeking sponsorship or hosting the local Bunnings sausage sizzle."
Griffith Narrabundah Community Association president Leo Dobes
"One of the really annoying issues that we face is that developers and builders of smaller developments have been able to access government expertise to the extent that their development proposals are virtually certain of approval , but we do not get equal access at an early stage."