NSW Premier seizes all the pencils

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Published: Tuesday, 30 November -0001 10:04

A happy Premier in Cabinet last week

In the September issue of depaNews we featured the Premier’s announcement that the reform of local government would mean “less pencils and more people digging up roads”. We had no idea what that meant but were concerned it may have been an old-fashioned vision of local government - it being a long, long time since anyone much worked with a pencil. It was certainly bad grammar - it’s fewer pencils, not less.

We met with Local Government Minister Paul Toole in October and the Minister and his staff were keen to shift responsibility for this nonsensical observation to the Premier as the author of the “less pencils” vision. So, it wasn’t their fault. They seemed more aware that local government has moved well beyond pencils and a focus on digging up roads. It did trivialise things, didn’t it.

But if there were going to be fewer pencils in the Premier’s grand vision of local government, what was going to happen to the pencils? Now we know.