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Australia notably was one of the few developed nations to avoid a technical recession subsequent to the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). However, the fact that the nation escaped a technical recession doesn’t mean that citizens and local governments were not subject to some of the measures associated with post-GFC austerity. In particular, intergovernmental grants – an important source of revenue for Australian local governments – were frozen by the federal government seeking to mitigate large deficits over the forward estimates. This chapter compares and contrasts the budgetary outcomes for the local governments of Australia’s two most populous states – New South Wales and Victoria. We find that the disparate regulatory controls in the two municipal jurisdictions were strongly associated with the budgetary outcomes of the individual municipalities: In particular, we present evidence which suggests that taxation limitations and lax investment guidelines in New South Wales can be associated with relatively inferior budgetary positions and higher budgetary volatility. By way of contrast, Victorian councils had the flexibility to vary rates of taxation to the changing conditions and largely avoided investment losses associated with the financial failure of Lehman Brothers. In New South Wales the regulatory response to deteriorating municipal budgets (subsequent to the GFC) has been to execute a radical programme of forced amalgamations. Somewhat ironically, the Victorian state government has recently imposed taxation limitations on its municipalities. In summary, this chapter demonstrates the saliency of regulatory constraints on municipal resilience, in the context of post-GFC economic challenges.

The hospital practice of placing male and female patients in the same room in general wards, and sometimes in adjoining beds, is an index of the extent to which lack of respect for patient dignity remains a key issue within our hospitals notwithstanding the popularity of ethics as a formal subject and topic of discussion, and the rise of ethics as a career subspecialty in our healthcare system. In this study, we examine responses from those who consider the practice acceptable notwithstanding patients’ objections. These can be classified into the following groups: (1) a necessary trade-off in the interests of economic or efficiency factors such as staff shortages or bed shortages or bed-block, (2) failure to see what is wrong with the practice such as “wonderful free health system,” “patients should be grateful for what they get,” and “the insured can go elsewhere,” and (3) it is the patient’s fault for not objecting. The fact that the practice has continued for 15 years, means there is now an entire generation of hospital staff who accept it as normal and participate in it, to the detriment of patients. Accordingly, this paper is a cautionary tale with regard to allowing what is generally regarded as “off-limits” to occur and relying on protocols to contain the activities they unleash.