Pushing the Boundaries

Most of us will know by now that Council are conducting a survey on the local Government electoral divisions in an effort to determine whether or not they should be abolished altogether.

For those of us who consider ourselves moderately cynical as to the Councils past polling techniques, there is some kind of good news this time. This survey is not like the Waterfront survey, this one is semi-auditable (that’s right - you can tear your name and address off at the dotted line for privacy reasons ;-), funny thing is though, on the form you only get to choose yes, no, undecided or suggest other.

Guess what? I am suggesting other…

There appears to be both pro’s and con’s with each divisional model however to-date nobody has really offered any alternative to yes or no. I am hoping that I can do just that.

Imagine our Councillors as wheels, our local electoral divisions as Trailers, and the residents as the load.

This would give us the proverbial equivalent of three trailers, each with two wheels. The problem with this model is that as the load moves around the balance is ultimately affected.

So what would happen if for instance we were to put all six wheels underneath one trailer, the ride would be firm but as a divisional model it would be extremely difficult to manoeuvre.

So now you might be thinking “Why don’t we just make two triangular trailers each with three wheels?”

Well I say, why not indeed… Seriously though, one of the biggest problems our Shire faces into the future is that we have these three local Government divisions with two Councillors in each. This creates an overall distortion of the many and varied community dynamics at work within the Shire.

By keeping the same amount of Councillors at six plus the Mayor and by reducing the number of Divisions from three down to two we will increase the constituency base that each Councillor represents without totally bogging them down with shire-wide requests, it should also mean an increase in the number of Councillors working together on any given local topic thus diluting the special interest groups into a more manageable arena.

Sometimes it is best to just take one step back than two, losing all of the divisions would mean two steps back.