ARARAT Rural City Council has welcomed news that it will be reviewed by the Victorian Electoral Commission.
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Earlier today it was reported that the commission will undertake the review from January 30.
The council is one of 31 to undergo reviews in the 2019-20 period.
Councils are subject to reviews before every third council general election, and the last one in Ararat was conducted in 2007.
The commission report from 2007 recommended that seven councillors represent the municipality and that it not be subdivided into wards.
This review will look at:
- the number of councillors;
- whether the council should be subdivided into wards;
- if subdivided, the number of wards, ward boundaries, and the number of councillors per ward.
Chief executive Dr Tim Harrison said the review was timely with population and demographic changes that have occurred in the past 12 years.
“Ararat Rural City Council welcomes the representation review being conducted by the Victorian Electoral Commission,” he said.
“The VEC conducts these reviews on council areas across the state approximately every 12 years, and as our last review was in 2007, it is now our turn again.”
Dr Harrison said the timing of the review was coincidental to the ongoing presence of a municipal monitor following a Commission of Inquiry in 2017.
"The review will look at representational issues including whether we have the right number of councillors and whether the council should be subdivided or not,” he said.
“The review will not consider the internal structure of the organisation, and is totally separate to operational matters.
“It is coincidence that this representational review is happening at the same time the organisation is going through a period of change.
"All feedback on the review should be directed to the VEC, which is holding a community session on January 31 in Ararat. We encourage the community to have their say there or online via the VEC website.”
Public submissions to the 2007 review supported council remaining un-subdivided, stating that a regional municipality divided into wards sometimes meant that voters had limited choice in smaller towns with fewer candidates.
Others argued that the division of the municipality into wards would ensure equitable representation between rural and town residents.
Ararat Mayor Peter Beales said other ideas to subdivide the municipality had been floated but wouldn’t work well in practice.
“I’ve lived under both – when I was councillor at Yea it was un-subdivided like here, and at Murrindindi it had wards,” he said.
“But you might have pretty large population groups there so it was easy to have a blocks.
“The problem with Ararat is you’d almost need to have wedges out of the town to have equal representation – if there were seven wards there’d be roughly 1700 people in each.”
Cr Beales said it was the quality of the candidate that was important.
“I’m not too convinced that we could do any better than we have at the present moment even though it does have it’s faults,” he said.
Former mayor Paul Hooper said rural residents were already favoured by the current arrangement.
“With the consideration that the municipality’s population broadly is 10,000 in the towns and 2500 within the region, roughly you would say that the current representation favours the rural population because they’ve got three out of seven representing them,” he said.
“The councils I’ve been involved in have always had a pretty good rural representation.
“My view as a councillor was always that a good decision is a good decision. Whether it’s (of concern to) rural or urban, it shouldn’t matter. You make a decision on the issue.
“I don’t think there’s a need to change but it’s not my decision to make.”
Willaura resident and 2016 Citizen of the Year Heather Fleming said a councillor’s location wasn’t the most important factor in determining their capacity to govern well.
“The main criteria of a councillor is that they have a good understanding of their governance role, and their address is no guarantee of that,” she said.
“My view is that it’s preferable to have councillors who are prepared and able to reflect the views of their entire rural city.
“It’s heavily populated in Ararat and sparsely populated in the rural areas and the only way to get fair numerical representation would be to divide Ararat itself into a pie.
“I think that would be an awkward thing to do, where suddenly you’ve got a ward where it’s bits of Ararat and bits of the rural area.”
Anyone interested in finding out more about the review can attend a public information session.
The session is at 6.30pm on January 31 at Alexandra Oval Community Centre, 1 Waratah Avenue, Ararat, with more information available here.
Preliminary submissions will close at 5pm on February 27 and the final report will be released by May 22.
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