“…This resulted in it becoming progressively harder each financial year for local government to balance their budgets during the “Age of Austerity” (Ferry et al., 2017, p. 221), amidst concurrent and competing rationales and programs (Ahrens et al., 2020). The financial sustainability of local government was therefore a serious issue, which escalated longer term issues around local government audit and accountability arrangements (Ferry & Ahrens, 2022; Ferry et al., 2015) and importantly local government solvency (Ferry et al., 2015; Ferry & Murphy, 2015, 2018; Muldoon‐Smith & Sandford, 2021; Murphy et al., 2019).…”