Kyle’s Rant

IAM not much for Facebook, in fact my FB friends could be dead and I wouldn’t know. But the other half told me recently of a post that made me wince from the Hepburn Shire Council.

Have you received a letter of invitation to be part of the Future Hepburn Engagement Pool?

Just over 1000 letters were sent out to randomly selected community members inviting them to register for the Future Hepburn Engagement Pool. Members will be randomly selected to join the township structure plan community panels with the purpose of developing structure plans for the townships of Clunes, Creswick, Daylesford-Hepburn Springs, Glenlyon and Trentham.

Other opportunities for involvement include interviews, webinars, workshops and activities relating to all Future Hepburn projects. Don’t worry if you don’t receive a letter, you can still get involved.

Now, I am not usually one to participate in these sorts of ventures. I am normally quite comfortable and better advised with my own committee of one. But back at the beginning of the pandemic if a pig had have flown past the window, I would have simply accepted it as fact and waved at it. The world was that out of kilter.

And so, in a much weakened, confused and hazy state of mind I put my hand up for the shire's business recovery committee. We were a bunch of well-meaning local business owners who had our hands full, pivoting and rerouting our own businesses and with no time to waste. But all in the group thought it was a hugely important task to make sure all the local businesses had the resources to weather the storm.

After a few meetings, which led nowhere, the committee was disbanded without notice or even an explanation. Emails to the HSC were met with the sound of silence - so you can see the reason for my wince when it comes to another HSC committee being announced.

If you have been around long enough and paid attention you find these committees don’t ever achieve much. The makeup of the participants that put their hand up to attend these assemblies are, and please allow me to generalise, folks with a bit of time on their hands, well-meaning certainly, but naïve to the fact that they are powerless. And then there is a sprinkling of other residents who will join, who will be pushing their own barrow containing a few well-ground axes.

For me, it is an old-fashioned consultation method used by governments to check off the community consultation box and not much comes of it except tea and biscuits. It also seems to tick the box of community consultation.

Don’t get me wrong, our council does a lot of things well - except they forgot to pick up my recycling a couple of times in a row last month - but it turns out that is outsourced and it is impossible to get on the two-way radio and call the bloke back.

It has to go through a process, according to the very nice woman staffing the shire's phones. And I must say a special shoutout to that woman, her name escapes me, who when I said I was going away offered to drag my bin in. Now that is service and one of many fabulous people working behind the scenes for the shire.

But I would like to suggest that instead of plowing human and biscuit resources into these type of aforementioned turnouts, the shire simply does what they are there to do. Rubbish, rates and roads. The portfolio did once include also looking after our elderly and vulnerable but even that has been outsourced, and reasonably unsuccessfully I might add.

Anti-committee rant over… 03 5338 8123

Catherine.King.MP@aph.gov.au

CatherineKingMP

@CatherineKingMP