ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on local government restructuring, the response of local communities, and the relationships between these responses and the attitudes of local councils and communities to economic development. Tasmania, a mountainous island with comparatively little lowland, was first divided into local government areas in 1907, when two cities and fifty municipalities were delimited. A striking feature of the inquiry was that in many municipalities the attitudes of councils and local communities to restructuring bore a close relationship to their experience of recent economic growth and to their attitudes to future development. The inquiry was charged with recommending measures, including territorial restructuring, considered appropriate and desirable for modernising the local government system. To maximise the benefits from the new system, State and Federal Governments need to be linked more closely with local authorities. Numerous functions performed by State agencies might more efficiently be performed by local government through devolution of responsibility or contractual arrangement.
