Local election: the final ten

CONGRATULATIONS to the ten newly elected councillors who will serve the Dubbo region for the next few years.

There’s a “Thumbs Down” in today’s paper which I think reflects how many local voters are feeling about the campaign. Let us know if you agree.

At 8 or 9 per cent in some wards, the informal vote was alarmingly high. There’s no official word yet on why that was the case, but we’d have to suspect confusion over the new ward system would have played a part.

Our report on page 17 suggests there could also be a significant number of people who simply didn’t turn up to vote.

I refrained from commenting here last Thursday about the election. I was finding it disheartening – and embarrassing for Dubbo – to see the negativity and sometimes brutality and vulgarity of the campaign and I felt reporting it here would only be paying attention to attention-seekers.

My editorial team reported well on the election campaign – they did their best to inform, clarify, and report the facts, and the warm feedback we’ve received from our readers on that is appreciated.

I see it as this newspaper’s increasingly important role to report to you what’s happening in our community, staying positive as much as possible, and being constructive in our critiques where we need to be critical.

Congratulations to our journalist John Ryan who was one of the ten elected. John and I have already discussed how his position as a councillor may effect his duties as a reporter with this newspaper – for now, the main thing I can assure you is that we will be open with full disclosure in any of John’s reporting on local council matters. I’m not asking him to stop having an opinion or expressing it; where appropriate he’ll point out when he’s commenting as a councillor.

John is not the first journalist to be elected a councillor in this country (although we aren’t aware of it happening before in Dubbo) so we will draw on the experiences of others to guide us. - Until next week, Keep Smiling!