The Municipal Outlook for the Future.— The municipal limits of the capital cities of Australia by no means correspond to their social, industrial and economic boundaries ; as municipal centres they are the ((pulses" which contain only a fraction of the population of the metropolitan areas and are only just now wak ing up to the necessity of bringing into being comprehensive Greater Sydneys, Greater Bris banes, Greater Melbournes and Greater Ade laides. The same sociological forces are at work in Australia as in America, Great Britain and the continent of Europe, where enlarge ment of areas and greater cities have been dom inant planks in municipal platforms for years. We may therefore expect similar results to fol low in Australia as have been achieved else where in the course of the next decade.
Some small effort in this direction has al ready been accomplished, notably in Brisbane and Melbourne by the recent absorption of one or two adjacent suburbs, but the movement generally can hardly be said to have yet passed much beyond the embryonic stage.
In the metropolitan areas of Sydney, Mel bourne and Adelaide there are respectively 41, 22 and 19 municipal governing bodies with be wildering codes of bylaws and methods of ad ministration, and it has been well said that on the score of economy alone the an absurdity which tolerates within a 10-mile radius of the centres such an enormous num ber of local governing bodies — each separate, distinct. and independent of the other — to man age the affairs of from 160,000 to half a million of people with, of course, as many staffs of municipal officers, all working in isolation, and of ten unable to agree about matters of vital concern to all. Experience has shown that occa sional conferences are at best but an inadequate substitute for a permanent body with a fair representation of all interests and smoothly working machinery. Whether reform takes the shape of federation or unification, whether it comes with a rush or gradually, as the dwellers outside the city bounds awaken to the advan tages of co-operative effort—come it must, in order to permit the carrying out of work at present impracticable, such as the control and working of tramways, gas and electric light con cerns and kindred undertakings. With the
example of the London County Council before us it is obvious that it pays to concentrate as much as possible the municipal work of cities in one central body. Lord Roseberry has said that °the larger the sense of municipal responsi bility which prevails the more it reacts on the community itself. And men outside the munici pality, or who have hitherto held aloof from municipal government when they see the higher aims of which the municipality is capable, when they see the wider work that lies before it, when they see the incomparable practical pur poses to which the municipality may lend its great power, are not inclined any longer to hold aloof.° The broad policy of the London county council is proof of this where the finest intel lects in England take their share of the work in common with those who are attracted to the Council of the Nation at Westminster. .
Notwithstanding its shortcomings the de velopment of municipal government in Aus tralia exhibits an upward and progressive tendency. The cities have always been free from that gross corruption which has been such a marked feature and has wrought such per nicious results in some other countries. Mu nicipal government in Australia stands for probity and purity and as a recent Australian writer in 'The Annals' of the American Acad emy has put it: "We are undoubtedly further advanced to-day than we were 20 years ago, and we may reasonably hope that the silent evolution which is working out its eternal pur poses in the social, as truly as in the physical world, will equip us for the achievement of higher things in the future?' Consult Ellery, 'Health Ministration of the Health Act' (1907), and Murdock, 'The Australian (1912).
See also General Bibliography under AUSTRALIA - POLITICAL