Pig’s breakfast
WITH local government elections just a few weeks away, I see the call for council divisions beginning to surface – again – from various sources.
Well I’ll give you the drum: it won’t happen and even if it did, you might be surprised at the outcome.
The following paragraphs are a “cut and paste” from my letter published in these columns on 16/05/19 in response to an early call from a now-declared candidate. Some of the population numbers might have changed a little, but the proportionality will not be significantly different.
So: here goes.
The Local Government Act states that changing a local government area is ruled on by the change commission, and only the minister can refer a proposal to change. So council would first have to adopt a resolution to refer a change proposal, and then convince the minister to refer the matter to the change commissioner, whose decision is final; no appeal is allowable.
The Local Government Act also requires divisions to contain the same number of ratepayers give or take 10%. So lets “do the maths” keeping the numbers rounded to the nearest thousand or so.
The total population of the whole region is 165,000; population north of the Warrego Highway (Crows Nest, Highfields,
Goombungee, Kingsthorpe, Oakey, Hampton, and a few smaller groups/hamlets) is about 21,000; population south of the Warrego Highway (Millmerran, Clifton, Pittsworth, Greenmount plus others) is 14,000; leaving the urban areas of the city and suburbs at 130,000.
Assuming a proposal for 10 divisions (i.e. one per councillor), divisions would have populations of about 16,500.
The most practicable solution would be that the city would get eight divisions with a single division for north of the Warrego Highway and one to the south.
Alternatively, with just five divisions (33,000 population and two councillors per division), there would be four divisions for the city and suburbs, and one for the whole of the rest of the region.
It doesn’t matter how you look at it, the present city-centric orientation of TRC would not be changed by the adoption of divisions.
Clearly, under the present legislation, the idea of divisions for the Toowoomba region is a non-starter, and you can thank the Beattie government for creating the underlying and skewed pig’s breakfast that compulsory regional amalgamation created in 2008. TONY LAKE, Meringandan West