NOMINATIONS for the October shire council elections open soon, on Monday, September 9.
Most of the existing councillors are likely to stand for election again, but hopefully, there are also enough community-minded people willing to put their hands up and have a go so that we have a good choice come election time.
Why is it important that we all take an interest, and for community-connected people to consider nominating? Because it has a direct impact on where our shire’s increasingly scarce funding is spent.
And as the state government’s rate cap continues to squeeze the value of the money they collect in rates, or receive from government for necessary works and services, there’s even more pressure on councillors to identify waste, drive efficiencies in their own workforces, insist on transparency and drop personal agendas.
And the way you choose who to vote for, in the case of sitting councillors, is to look at their record, at what they have achieved, where they failed, and at what they’ve been prepared to put up with while in office.
Take the fiasco of the Environmental Audit Overlays introduced by the Victorian Planning Authority on hundreds of privately owned blocks of land and established houses in Wonthaggi’s North East Precinct for example.
Although the shire’s administration finally kicked into gear, three months after the debilitating and costly overlays were introduced on titles on January 18 this year, we still haven’t received a plausible explanation about how it happened, what the shire’s role was in the debacle and how much it cost to rectify, much less receive an apology.
The reality is that if the Bass Coast Shire Council, under CEO at the time, Ali Wastie, had been more open, more transparent and more genuinely engaged with the community, they would have gone public in August 2022, when the final draft of Amendment C152 was released, and we could all have called out the VPA on their plan for a broad application of EAOs.
So, what happened councillors?
The lack of transparency over that issue, as serious as the implications were for ordinary homeowners and those hoping to build in a housing crisis, is not an isolated incident.
Why, for example, did it take the Bass Coast Shire Council more than four years to release a full copy of the Bass Coast Shire Coastal Risk Assessment report recommending action on our dangerous beaches?
Where, for example, is the feasibility study on the likely use of the $7.7 million trail between Inverloch and Wonthaggi, and how it got so high up on the shire’s priority list?
And what about the annual Community Satisfaction Survey? Why isn’t that independent report released by Bass Coast as soon as it is made available by the Department of Government Services?
How has this conspiracy of silence and secrecy been tolerated by councillors, to the point where they themselves have been kept in the dark?
Ask them! And if you don’t get a satisfactory response, find someone else to vote for at the next election.
Lack of transparency isn’t the exclusive domain of local government. In fact, the state government has made an artform out of it but inevitably, your chickens come home to roost and regrettably, we’re seeing that in the fallout from their mismanagement of the state’s Big Build program.
