editorial Welcome to this week’s editorial, Elec5on weekend for Eurobodalla and… half of the community have no idea it is on and most of the other half have no idea who to vote for. So who will win is anyone’s guess. Vol 16 15th 2017 Due toSeptember the Covid7th, Rules there will be no gauntlet of eager supporters thrus5ng how to vote leaflets at you. 28 April December Vol 48 27th 20182017 You might even be hard pressed to find a Democracy Sausage stall other than the ever present BBQ marquee at Bunnings.
There will be posters around the polling booths that might offer hints that there are Blue, Red and Green teams. If you haven’t already driven past one of the many posters nailed to trees up and down the shire, posted by the team of a current councillor (who really should know be@er) you will be seduced at the Polling Booth by smiling faces on the corflutes invi5ng you to scan a QR Code for their How to Vote sugges5on. In all the visual sugges5on of an elec5on has been low key. So much so that there may well be a higher than normal number of the community facing fines for having not voted. Whatever happens will see one new mayor and eight new councillors elected. We might not know the results straightaway due to postal vo5ng but all will be revealed in good 5me. Hopefully we end up with a good council as there is much to do and we need Councillors who represent the community, bring vision and turn around the toxic rela5onship that the Council of old has allowed to fester. Already the new candidates are looking at the history of Council staff a@emp5ng to control the narra5ve. It is understood that the General Manager was surprised to learn that many of the key Mayoral Candidates have indicated they won’t be a@ending Council on Christmas Eve (Dec 24th) for a three hour induc5on. The schedule to the leF might be what the General Manager wants however, to send this out, without any consulta5on, to candidates that haven’t even been elected saying “I wish to advise that if you are successful in the elec5on, we have the following sessions scheduled to assist you with your transi5on as a Councillor” has riled candidates, geIng them off to a bad start believing that the General Manager has forgo@en she is actually an employees of the new Councillors. And what is Councillor Induc5on? The Office of Local Government describes the Induc on program as aiming “to equip mayors and councillors with the informa5on they need to perform their role effec5vely over the first few months and has a par5cular focus on building posi5ve, collabora5ve rela5onships between councillors and with staff”. So far this hasn’t got off to a good start. The Induc5on process has been likened to an Indoctrina5on process where the staff introduce layer on layer of Acts, legisla5ons, policies and guidelines that, one aFer another, begin to strip away any ideas new councillors had of bringing change and a fresh approach. The Sir Humphrey Appleby approach will be present that the “Community knows what the community knows” and that “Councillors only need to trust in the staff as they are the professionals and know what they are doing”. Translated it means “You are just rubber stamps so enjoy the ride”. So let’s see who is elected and then, as we saw with the Innes Era, watch the seduc5ve “Vote for me” promises fade as the ever-mighty bureaucracy steps in to “educate” the newbies. Un5l next—lei beagle weekly : Vol 236 December 3rd 2021
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