Eleni: Vincent Voters Are Two Thirds of Your Electors

I took the opportunity (sadly unlikely to get such opportunity under City of Perth, if that comes to pass) to speak to the City of Vincent Council last night, in advance of the 'closed door' briefing of Mayors, Presidents and CEOs. Text below.

At the time, I didn't know about the vote in the Lower House - but this simply reinforces what I said.

Twelve months ago, nearly four out of five people who voted in the Vincent plebiscite said Vincent should not be abolished.

I suggest that would have been five out of five if they had been told that merging with the City of Perth would make them second-class citizens.

And yet that is precisely what Colin Barnett is now proposing – in order to salvage something from the wreck of his local government so-called reform.

So fearful is he that the Supreme Court will declare the whole process invalid, that he is attempting to pre-empt the Court by saying he will introduce a City of Perth Act to get what he always wanted for the City of Perth – a capital city bloated with assets stolen from surrounding communities.

To make this ‘work’ on his terms, he will put a Bjelke-Peterson Queensland-style gerrymander in place to disenfranchise the people of Vincent. After all, as he said last week, “you would not want residential voters to be able to control the central business district”.

What a gross denial of democracy – simply to protect property and business interests in the Perth CBD. This is on top of the existing weighting that already allows a ‘body corporate’ to have two votes.

I urge you, Mr Mayor, to ‘maintain the rage’ (to use the words of the late Gough Whitlam)when you attend the ‘closed-door’ briefing tomorrow.

If the opportunity arises, I beg you to move a motion of no-confidence in the Premier for his anti-democratic stance.

But the Premier still has to get his Act through Parliament – and he has already had a defeat in the Upper House on forced amalgamations.

It's time (There are Gough's words again) to remind Eleni Evangel, MLA for Perth, that her electorate includes the City of Vincent as well as the City of Perth.

It's time to remind her that two-thirds of her electors are Vincent residents.

The people of Vincent will not forgive her at the 2017 election if she doesn’t vote against Barnett's latest denial of democracy - or better still persuade him to give up his latest imperial delusion.

We should be forcibly reminding state parliamentarians that the WA Electoral Act requires one-vote one-value for state electorates.

We should be forcibly reminding them that the Local Government Act requires "the ratio of councillors to electors" to be a key factor in the establishment of wards.

Most of all, we should be forcibly reminding them that to vote for Col’s gerrymander would be a gross dereliction of their democratic duty and would see them held to account at the next state election.