“When America sneezes, Australia catches a cold.” Well, with the American financial crisis the way it is, Australia’s “drug addicted like” credit system is experiencing its own withdrawal symptoms! What’s worse, the Labor NSW State Government is of no help, and the Federal Labor Government can’t even deliver all of its own stratospheric promises because of their careless and haphazard decisions.

But what can we do locally? Can Parramatta help itself? Parramatta is no longer under Labor control. Can we help provide some small business relief? Can we help preserve and protect local jobs? Can we create tax relief? Yes we can!

To start, let’s take a look at building approval which is nationally regarded as one of the key measures of economic activity and employment. Using NSW Department of Planning’s own annual reports for the last three years, you will see in Table 1 that Parramatta’s market share has dropped significantly despite a year-on-year growth across NSW. Ironically, despite attracting less development in Parramatta, the average time to process almost doubled!

In Table 2, we can also see Parramatta City Council’s average times to process generally increasing over the last three years in the sub-categories from mum-and-dad type proposals to major residential and commercial proposals. Our averages also are far above comparable metropolitan councils.

From a business perspective, Table 3 shows that our average time to process commercial, retail and office type proposals is far slower than comparable metropolitan councils, and also getting slower from one year to the next.

And finally, Table 4 shows the productivity levels per staff member is also much lower than other comparable metropolitan councils.

During a Labor majority Council, despite efforts to improve Parramatta through the development process, I finally had to resign on 20 June 2006 upon realising that the then Labor majority Council possessed no political will or courage to improve itself. It is cold comfort to realise that Parramatta has since gotten worse because of its unwillingness to change.

With an economic downturn, Parramatta must at least address this fundamental impediment to economic growth (or at least trying to maintain parity).

On 9 March 2009, Parramatta adopted a staff recommended reform package which surprisingly the staff confessed was not comprehensive enough to address all of the internal problems. Despite this refreshing admission, the majority resolved to accept no formal commitment for a timetable for the rest of the reform, nor what leadership or level of transparency were to be expected.

Interestingly, the most important point that the Parramatta City Council seem to miss is that such inefficiencies, lack of appropriate human resources and potentially systemic obstacles that combine towards delays, creates greater temptations for applicants/developers to use political or internal influence to resolve their difficulties with Council. Such temptations could create instances of corruption, no matter how big or small.