Compared with most other developed nations, Australian local government policymakers have traditionally relied heavily on structural reform based on compulsory council consolidation as their chief instrument of municipal reform. Western Australia (WA) launched its most recent attempt at local government reform in November 2017 with the appointment of a Local Government Review Panel to make recommendations on improving its Local Government Act 1995. The WA Government released the Final Report: Recommendations for a New Local Government Act for Western Australia prepared by the Panel in August 2020. The Final Report offers a host of recommendations for improving the Local Government Act 1995, the great majority of which represent uncontroversial improvements to the Act. However, Recommendation 8 calls for the establishment of a Local Government Commission empowered to make recommendations on municipal mergers and Recommendation 10 proposes the formation of community boards to facilitate municipal representation in large councils. This practice insight paper critically examines these two contentious recommendations in the light of extant empirical evidence. This serves to highlight the contrast between the weight of empirical evidence in the literature with the ‘evidence-free’ nature of Recommendations 8 and 10.

与大多数其他发达国家相比，澳大利亚地方政府政策制定者传统上严重依赖以强制理事会合并为基础的结构性改革，作为市政改革的主要工具。西澳大利亚州 (WA) 于 2017 年 11 月启动了地方政府改革的最新尝试，任命了一个地方政府审查小组，就改进其 1995 年地方政府法提出建议。 西澳大利亚州政府发布了最终报告：对新地方的建议小组于 2020 年 8 月编写的西澳大利亚州政府法案。最终报告提出了许多改进 1995 年地方政府法的建议，其中绝大多数是对该法的无可争议的改进。然而，建议 8 要求设立一个地方政府委员会，有权就市政合并提出建议，建议 10 建议成立社区委员会，以促进市政在大型议会中的代表权。这篇实践洞察论文根据现有的经验证据批判性地审查了这两个有争议的建议。这有助于突出文献中经验证据的权重与建议 8 和建议 10 的“无证据”性质之间的对比。