Following our analysis of the case presented by the Reform Commission in favour of drastic forced amalgamation in Queensland local government, what general conclusions can be drawn from the discussion? Three observations appear pertinent. In the first place, the analysis conducted in the Final Report falls in line with similar official reports prepared in other Australian states over a long period of time that invariably recommend compulsory mergers (Dollery et al. 2007b). Indeed, as we have seen, most of the arguments used by the Commission fit easily into the typology developed in Dollery et al. (2006b). We are thus obliged to reach the bleak conclusion that the Reform Commission seems to have learned nothing from the hard-won experience of other Australian states with structural reform.

A second feature of the Final Report resides in the fact that it completely ignores Australian and international literature on structural reform, as exemplified by the fact that no research undertaken outside of Queensland is even considered in the Final Report. It is as if Queensland exists in a separate dimension of the universe.

A third conclusion, intimately related to our first two observations, is that no empirical evidence is adduced to support the rosy view the Commission holds of amalgamation as a means of improving the effectiveness of local councils. Even a cursory recognition of developments in other Australian states would have obliged the Commission to take a much more dispassionate view. After all, the recent state-based inquiries into the financial sustainability of local councils in South Australia (2005), New South Wales (2006), Western Australia (2006) and Tasmania (2007), as well as the PWC (2006) National Financial Sustainability Study of Local Government, were all unanimous that structural reform most certainly did not represent a ‘magic bullet’ that could cure the financial ills of Australian local government. Indeed, the PWC found that local government both in states that had undergone large-scale amalgamation, like Victoria, South Australia and New South Wales, and states that had not experienced structural reform, like Western Australia and Queensland, continued to experience financial problems. In particular, local infrastructure across Australia was in such a parlous condition that only the injection of billions of dollars — far beyond the financial capacity of local government in all states and certainly light years away from savings attendant upon forced mergers in even the most optimistic — could remedy the situation. If structural reform in other states failed to remove financial unsustainability, why should it be expected to succeed in Queensland?