Referendum on wards a sensible choice: Troy Grant

MEMBER for Dubbo Troy Grant has told Dubbo Photo News he agrees with the option to hold a referendum that could remove the five-ward system that was controversially introduced for last Saturday’s Dubbo Regional Council elections.

Incorporating that referendum into proceedings of the next State Election is a sensible one, he said, and doing so could offset the cost to taxpayers.

“It’s a matter for the Electoral Commission but I support the call for it to go,” Mr Grant said. The ward arrangement brought out some disquiet in the community, he said, but “the imperative was to ensure equity across the new council area”.

“It lays in the hands of the new councillors now. If it is (changed to) a two ward system to ensure fair representation for Wellington, it is a local council matter, not state,” he said.

Dubbo Regional Council (DRC) was divided into five wards when the proclamation to amalgamate Dubbo City Council and Wellington Council was first announced in May 2016.

It was in an addendum to the proclamation that NSW Governor David Hurley made provision for the amalgamated council area to adopt the ward system.

According to the Local Government Act of 1993, the only way a council area can adopt a ward system is traditionally by referendum, and under that law, only a council can approve the referendum.

Dubbo City has been without a democratically elected council for 16 months and newly elected councillors may consider and act upon a referendum.

Successful Central Ward candidate, John Ryan, has called for the ward system to be dumped, after encountering confusion over the system and widespread lack of information forthcoming from the Electoral Commission.

“This Ward system is a disaster and has to go at the earliest opportunity,” Mr Ryan told Dubbo Photo News. “The NSW Governor passed a decree which formed the wards yet my advice is they can only be undone by a referendum at the next council election in three years’ time.

“This is not good enough. DRC ratepayers shouldn’t have to put up with this loss of democracy once, let alone twice, especially after more than a year of an unelected administrator making decisions for the benefit of the council’s unelected senior staff which included giving them all their old jobs back,” he said.

Ryan said he would lobby to have the state governor make a new decree which ditched the current Ward system in favour of two Wards, a small Ward for Wellington to protect that town’s representation on council and a larger single Ward for Dubbo voters.

“We can’t wait all that time only to have the Ward voting system for a second time, and that second time around people will only be able to vote at a booth inside their actual Ward – that’s even worse than what we have now,” Mr Ryan said.

“If we had a referendum before the next council election it would cost ratepayers hundreds of thousands of dollars for a blunder perpetrated by the state government.

“This isn’t good enough and ... I’ll be doing all I can to bin the Wards at the earliest opportunity,” he said.

John Ryan is also looking into whether the DRC area could stage a zero-cost referendum at the same time as the voters go to the polls for the 2019 state election if the governor won’t or can’t issue a decree scrapping the current Ward system.

“As one voter told me the other day, we’re living in a psychiatric ward, and I say it’s time we got out,” Mr Ryan said.

“We’re basically doing all this unpaid work to make amends for the state government’s massive stuff-up,” he said.

Confusion over the ward system may account for the number of informal votes received – these were 8.3 per cent (Central), 9.3 per cent (East), 8.9 per cent (North), 6.9 per cent (South) and 2 per cent in Wellington.

In the August 17 edition of Dubbo Photo News, official figures of enrolled voters received from the Electoral Commission showed the spread across the wards.

Central Ward (7013), East Ward (6951), North Ward (7592), South Ward (7368), Wellington (6951) with a total of 35,875 voters

By voting day however, only 5149 formal votes were received in Central Ward, 4775 for East, 5202 for North, 5594 for South, and 5437 for Wellington. These discrepancies could suggest a significant number of people didn’t vote at all.

At the time of going to print, elected councillors included John Ryan, Dayne Gumley, Stephen Lawrence, Ben Shields, Jane Diffey, Greg Mohr, Kevin Parker and David Grant.