The Mount Barker Boobocracy: A Study In Municipal Imbecility

In the grand circus of human governance, where the clowns of federal and international politics usually hold the spotlight, I turn my jaundiced eye to a humbler ring: the local council. We classical liberals—those rare souls who still cling to the quaint notion that government should be a flea, not a leviathan—prefer our overlords small, scattered, and impotent. So, with a spirit of masochistic inquiry, I set out to plumb the depths of my own Mount Barker District Council, that petty fiefdom in South Australia, to see if it could rise above the universal stench of inefficiency. Spoiler: it cannot.

Before consulting the oracle of facts, I, in a fit of whimsy, concocted a yardstick to measure these municipal mandarins—a scale or scorecard to gauge their worthiness of the public teat. Responsiveness to the bleating herd? Two points per councillor reply, capped at twenty. Efforts to lighten the ratepayer’s yoke? Two per vote, up to twenty. Slashing the council’s debt, that monument to profligacy? Two points per councillor vote, same ceiling. Resistance to the bureaucratic octopus-strangling initiative? Two per Freedom of Information probe or push against the pencil-pushers’ gluttony, max twenty. Shrinking the council’s bloated carcass? Two points per vote to trim its girth, up to twenty. A perfect hundred score marks an “efficient” council; zero to twenty, a drooling failure. Simple enough for even a councilman to grasp, one would think.

On 6 March 2025, I dispatched epistles to the Mount Barker worthies—ten in all, minus a vacancy contested by some eager simpleton in a by-election. My queries were modest: What do your ratepayers, those downtrodden serfs, beg you to fix? Which of your 2024-25 budget’s gilded boondoggles fail to justify their cost? Where do you, in your rare lucid moments, spy waste? Could you prune the council’s payroll of redundant drones? And how much fat might you carve from next year’s budget, if you had the spine?

The roster of these sages included Mayor David Leach, a progressive with a forensic accounting past; Deputy Samantha Jones, who flip-flops from conservative to progressive; Ian Grosser, a Das Kapital Greens activist; Rowan Voogt, Labor’s lapdog; Jessica Szilassy, unaligned but advocated $80 billion in government projects and a 5.6% rate increase; and the conservative brigade—Bradley Orr (Liberal), Rebecca Hewitt (One Nation), Narelle Hardingham, Harry Seagar, and Simon Westwood, all allegedly right-leaning yet suspiciously mute.

To supplement this, this scribe extracted confessions from fourteen council underlings, their anonymity a shield against retribution. The verdict? Six of eleven of the elected yokels are financial illiterates, drowning in the minutiae shovelled upon them by staff—a tactic straight from the Sir Humphrey Appleby playbook. Budgets sail through on rubber stamps, scrutiny be damned. The Mayor, a political first-termer who toppled a two-decade fossil, fancies himself a fiscal hawk, clawing at CEO Andrew Stuart’s spendthrift schemes. You’ve got to love the optimism. Two years ago, the council’s debt was a pristine zero; now it’s a staggering $100 million. Every probe into this morass meets a wall of obfuscation. The bureaucrats, those smug parasites, reign supreme.

Waste abounds, as predictable as flies on carrion. Reports to me paint a picture of council drones sipping booze at midday meetings—on the ratepayer’s dime, naturally. The median Mount Barker household scrapes by on $84,500 a year, per the 2021 Census, while Australia’s middling masses muster $92,040. Rent or groceries? A grim choice for the plebs, while the CEO, gorging on $313,705-plus, and his seven lieutenants, each pocketing $200,000, toast their largesse. Fresh flowers grace the council’s reception—charming, if flour wasn’t a luxury for the constituents funding this farce.

The “Contractors” budget line? A cavern of secrecy. Either the councillors are too dim to demand answers, or they’ve surrendered to apathy. Whispers—unverified, alas—hint at contracts doled out as favours, not merit. Arms-length bidding process? Pleeeeese. Then there’s the $40 million library folly—a 1500 m² Taj Mahal when the current one suffices. Current market-rate construction costs at $5,000 per m², you say? That’s $7.5 million, not $40 million. What’s the extra $32.5 million for—gold-plated shelves? A moat? Waste, thy name is Mount Barker.

Among South Australia’s 68 councils, Mount Barker ranks eleventh in extravagance—not Norwood, not Glenelg, but this rustic backwater, where households limp along below the national median. And the conservatives—those supposed champions of thrift? They nod through budgets like trained seals, clutching a $140 million wastewater plant when SA Water or a pension fund could take it off their hands. Big government in local garb, unscrutinised, untrimmed, a fiscal trough for the bureaucracy to guzzle. I’d expected better from the right-wing rabble, but naivety is my cross to bear. Not one replied to my missive—not one!

Thus, the scorecard: Mount Barker District Council, a pitiful 8 out of 100. A council so wretched it barely registers as “poor.” Here, in this microcosm of democratic rot, we see the eternal truth: government, at any level, is a machine for squandering treasure and crushing spirits. The boobs rule in name only, the bureaucrats triumph, and the ratepayer foots the bill. Hallelujah.