Energy. Enthusiasm. Fairness.
It’s council campaign time again. And again I hear these common questions:
Here’s the insider’s view of why.
Read More »There’s a proposal before council to investigate ripping out the few trees and bicycle racks in Buckingham Ave, Springvale and replace them with cars.
Do you agree they should be saved? Sign the petition
The trees and bicycle racks now
Councillors provide input and give final approval to council policies, and the council’s annual budget.
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This is a uniquely worded and complimentary email I received in 2015. It is about councillors’ executive assistant.
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The drafting of a Planning Scheme; State, Local and Municipal planning policies, as well as the determination of what land within a municipality gets which zonings, are all undertaken as part of a democratic process. This statement is not an invitation on the relative virtues or not of a democratic system (or our democratic system), it is simply a statement of fact. The Greater Dandenong Planning Scheme is an example of but one of many Planning Schemes state-wide which are part of this land use management and development process, which includes the rights to apply for the development of land in accordance with those democratically developed process, or to object to them through a fair process if one feels aggrieved at what is being proposed or approved.
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In response to the Coronavirus pandemic, some local councils have announced, or are planning, an across-the-board rate freeze.
A rate freeze is a bad idea for these reasons:
Council rates are a “wealth tax”, not an income tax. Rates are calculated using property values. To quote a council CFO, six out of seven ratepayers are not negatively affected by COVID. A general rate freeze gives a benefit to the maximum number of voters, but most of the relief dollars go to the wealthiest landowners.
Most people won’t keep their distance. I have been in a few public places in the last few days and haven’t witnessed any discernible difference in people’s behaviour.
That is why the “social distancing” policy is mostly ineffectual because:
Unfortunately, shut-down is the only next step worth taking. This removes places that people can come together and transmit the virus.
I wear a mask whenever I come within two metres of another person. If you come within two metres of another person, you should be wearing a mask.
People are infectious with the virus for four days before symptoms appear. The most common transmission occurs not from surfaces or hands, but from breathing. It surprises me that more in my local community are not wearing masks – in other countries, it is default behaviour to wear a mask even if you have no symptoms. Given that there are now projections for 50,000 to die in Australia, you could save a life by wearing a mask.
A four day incubation period with no symptoms. Any mask is better than no mask. Act as if you have the virus.
The way that news is propagated to the public has changed.
Before social media, important government announcements in Australia were efficiently transmitted via:
Now, a large proportion of the public’s primary source of news is via social media channels. News-related posts are mixed in amongst posts about cats and selfies.
This makes it more difficult during crisis situations for government to communicate a consistent message to the public. There is no consistent timing for social media posts to appear in a user’s feed, so it can happen that news stories can be out of sequence in a user’s news feed, resulting in misinformation and confusion.
In future, government should legislate so that in a crisis:
I’ve put together a draft guide on the council planning process. Please don’t hold me to the complete accuracy of it. I’ve just done it to try to explain the quite complex process when residents object to a planning application.
