This might seem obvious to you, but even a smart dog can have trouble working out the new ward system — one that nobody seems to want but where everybody has to scramble to find out where they fit.
We now have nine separate wards where we used to have one big, unsubdivided municipality — and it’s not obvious, even to me, why we needed to change.
At the same time, a few of our neighbouring shires went back the other way — from a ward system to an unsubdivided one. The reasons for that aren’t obvious either. Strathbogie, Campaspe and Gannawarra did that. Strathbogie is under a cloud at the moment, after its councillors couldn’t agree on anything much — so it might have needed tinkering with — but the other two are working okay, according to The Boss.
He tells me 30 other Victorian councils are also changing to a single-member ward structure, just in case we are feeling like we’re being picked on. They include a number of regional cities such as Bendigo, Ballarat, Mildura, Wodonga, Warrnambool and Wangaratta. It looks like I’m being included in that list for the sake of neatness, rather than because I need it.
I keep asking The Boss why the government did it, but he can’t see how it makes any sense. Then again, he’s the old-fashioned type who reckons “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” whereas I usually prefer to upset the apple cart, just for fun.
Apparently, the local government minister likes doing that too. She concluded that a bunch of councils weren’t compliant with the Local Government Act, because the act makes single ward structures the “default” electoral structure “to enable residents to receive direct representation and to ensure councillors are more accountable to local communities”.
Even so, we had an out. The act says all 31 rural councils are permitted to have any of the three permitted structures — single-members wards, multi-member wards or an unsubdivided structure, like we now have.
The act recognises the impracticality of dividing large geographical areas with relatively small populations — but this must have looked untidy to the ERAPs.
The ERAPS were the Electoral Representation Advisory Panels the minister asked to review 39 councils, including ours, and they gave us nine wards whether we needed them or not.
The new wards have largely sensible names: Lower Goulburn, Midland, Goulburn River, Pine Lodge, McEwen, Balaclava, Poplar, Kialla and Yanha Gurtji. They are supposed to have a similar population as each other, within a margin of about 10 per cent.
That is why my Goulburn River Ward and Pine Lodge Ward, both of which have more sheep than people, are the biggest. And it’s why some of the urban wards have weird shapes — like Yanha Gurtji, which runs from Knight St down to the Broken — and from the river in the west to Archer St — but takes a bite out of Archer St north of Wilmot Rd to confuse everybody.
At least I know where I am — good luck to the rest of you. Woof!
