Two decades ago, the Kennett government revolutionised (by virtue of a guillotine) the number of local councils in this state. The reforms dissolved 210 councils and created, through amalgamations, 78 new ones (now 79). In suburban Melbourne, a tangle of 53 councils became 26 (now 31). The result of this overhaul (after all the fuss died down) was a better balance between efficiency and the right of citizens to shape their communities.


At the time, the chief executive of the City of Melbourne was Elizabeth Proust, who went on to become secretary of the Department of Premier and Cabinet. Ms Proust, who has therefore seen local and state governments from two key perspectives, has since called for further local-government streamlining, most drastically in Melbourne.


At the end of November, in the Planning Institute's annual Kemsley Oration, Ms Proust returned to her theme: radically, so. She said that Melbourne should slash its local councils from 31 to just one super-council - adding, for good measure, that Australia should cut its tiers of government to two (national and regional), thereby eliminating what she called ''too many units of local government which are too small to be effective or efficient''.


Ms Proust - like her Gallic namesake, the novelist Marcel - is ever-conscious of the passing of time and its effects on contemporary lives. In her speech, using the benefits of hindsight, she compared the 1993 council reforms to changing our 19th-century boundaries to those of the 1920s or 30s. Not much, she argued, has changed since then.


There is a lot of sense in Ms Proust's proposed reforms, especially considering the ever-expanding population of Victoria and the need for this to be matched by a refined, strong and representative urban authority. We are concerned that having just one Melbourne council is to wield the razor too much; a monster bureaucracy could threaten the community-based value of local councils.


Ms Proust cites Brisbane as the model mono-council city, but Melbourne has different, and far more diffuse, demands that would still require a modicum of local government. In this case, the The Age supports amendment, but stops short at abolition.


There could, however, be sensible and practical compromise. For example, redrawing the council map along more geographical lines - as against the redundant sociological matrix - could result in around 10 councils, with a greatly expanded City of Melbourne as its nucleus. Indeed, two years ago, Ms Proust told The Age she would be happy to see four to six supersized councils in the metropolitan area, perhaps aligned with the Legislative Council's provinces.


The virtue of expanded councils is twofold: it would enable more effective representation and more efficient responses to urban problems such as traffic congestion; and it would not only retain democratic powers, but increase them by making it harder for narrowly focused local lobby groups to gain control of decision-making - not an isolated practice. Larger councils could also prove more flexible in catering for rapidly increasing populations, especially in urban growth areas such as Point Cook.


With the advent of the government's ambitious Plan Melbourne, Ms Proust's timely proposals must form part of the public debate on our future.