Over the past two days I attended the third Future of Local Government Summit. This summit is designed to ensure best practice within local government in the areas of resource management, sustainability and governance.

Last year’s summit identified eight key principles including:

1. Our time has come: embrace reform
2. Speak with one voice
3. Re-think what we do/how we do it
4. Achieve outcomes in shared services/ economies of scale
5. Measure ourselves
6. Really listen to the community
7. Deliver on local priorities
8. Involve all levels of government in the process of change.

The goal of this year’s summit is to develop a roadmap to assist local government in delivering upon the eight principles. In this regard a number of case studies were presented which examined community planning, resource sharing and the roles of local government within other countries such as the New Zealand and the UK.

There is an increasing trend amongst councils to share resources to ensure efficiencies of share and consistent information across the sector. Waste services, IT and human resources are also examples of areas that have seen an increase in council collaboration.

With continuous pressures such as cost-shifting it is imperative that councils stand united to ensure efficient and well resourced local government sector.