Quiet Time

It's been a bit of a quiet time in local government amalgamation land (and, frankly, I needed a bit of a break from it), with the slow progress (not yet complete) of the Local Government Amendment Bill through the WA Parliament - punctuated only by the presentation of a petition by the Dadour Group. Thanks to Adele Farina, MLC, for presenting this petition to the Legislative Council.

The petition refers to the provision in the Amendment Bill to remove, for the time being and for metropolitan local government only, the requirement for the Local Government Advisory Board to call for public submissions for at least six weeks on any proposal presented to it. It's good to see that, rather than wait for the outcome of the Bill, the Local Government Advisory Board has stated that it will abide by the current process for all of the proposals currently before it.

It's a pity that the submission period is likely to be over the Christmas/New Year silly season (a well-tried tactic of governments when consulting on controversial issues), but the onus is now on all of us who oppose specific proposals and/or the process by which they have been arrived at to put down in writing that we do so object and why.

The Board is required to consider all submissions and to have regard to:
- community of interest
- physical and topographical features
- demographic trends
- economic factors
- the history of the area
- transport and communications
- matters affecting the viability of local governments
- the effective delivery of local government services.

So the opportunity is there to make the Board fully (even painfully) aware of the strength of feeling about these largely ill-considered, and sometimes contradictory proposals. The eight points above provide a template for expressing your views.

I can see people having a field day in respect of community of interest (or, rather, lack thereof) for many of the proposed changes.