Where should the lines between councils fall?
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Metropolitan Perth was being redrawn. Twenty-four proposals were on the table, each one a different answer to which communities belong together.
Twenty-four proposals for reconfiguring metropolitan local government boundaries were compared through demographic and economic geospatial analysis.
A statistical method weighed the two pressures against each other: keeping distinctive communities of interest inside a single council, while stopping any one council diverging excessively from the others in its socio-economic characteristics.
The analysis gave the department a like-for-like basis for comparing proposals that had been argued for on very different grounds. The wider 2014–15 Metropolitan Local Government Reform process was abandoned by the state government in 2015, and no metropolitan boundaries changed as a result: all thirty metropolitan councils the study examined remain intact.
