Ms Catherine King (Ballarat, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Treasury) Share this | Hansard source

He certainly does. But I am certainly very happy with the towns that have stayed within my district. Golden Plains Shire is quite unique and a great example of a local council area where, with council amalgamations that occurred in the Kennett era in Victoria, a large group of very small towns that had very little connection to one another were placed within one boundary. Some of them were very closely connected to Ballarat; the majority of them were very closely connected to Geelong, and this conglomerate of smaller towns was put together into Golden Plains Shire. They have done some terrific work trying to make sure that everybody within Golden Plains Shire feels a part of the shire while maintaining the unique identity of their town. They made sure that individual towns were allowed to have different signage and so, whilst the overall logo of Golden Plains Shire reflects all of the industries within the area, each of the local areas were allowed to have their own town signage, which enabled them to develop unique identifiers as people entered their districts.

The other thing that the council area has done quite well is to develop community plans and set up strong community advocacy groups within each of those small towns, which then work directly with local council to develop the infrastructure needs and the social service needs for each of those very many disparate towns within the district. I would have to say that, if anyone has a council area that has lots and lots of small towns within it and needs to work out how to work together, Golden Plains Shire is certainly one of those areas that is a very good case example.

Just this weekend I attended a council funded event in Haddon. They had funded the local community action plan committee to the tune of only $1,000, which does not sound like a huge amount coming from local council, but it enabled the local community of Haddon to put on a three-hour event to thank the volunteers. That was very well organised by Richard Parsons and his hardworking team of people in Haddon. It was really the first time that any of the volunteers within the Haddon community had the opportunity to get together. The CFA talked together with the parents and friends council from the local Haddon primary school—the students of which are here, I understand, in Canberra this week—and were also able to talk closely with some of the 80 or so other community volunteers within the Haddon district.

Haddon is a town. It has a primary school and a general store, but that is pretty much all it has within its public infrastructure. So being able to get all of those volunteers together was a terrific credit to the Golden Plains Shire Council, who funded that local community plan group to put it together. Again I want to recognise the efforts of the Mayor, Councillor David Cotsell, and the staff at Golden Plains Shire for the terrific work that they are doing building and strengthening the Golden Plains district. Again, with a significant amount of growth in the commuter population from Geelong to Ballarat, they have really managed to pull that community together in a very strong way.

As I said at the start, local government is the sphere of government that is closest to the population and most able to adapt to change and to be flexible in its approaches to the community. It does a terrific job in working with local communities on projects and developing their needs. There are greater opportunities that exist for partnerships between the three levels of government, in relation to such things as population health. In particular the areas of environmental health and the development of health and wellbeing are a very important part of what local council does. There are opportunities that exist for funding to be directly given to local government around some of those areas. We do that already with a number of separate, different projects, but, certainly within the realm of population health, there is a long way that federal and state governments can go to make sure that we actually have a better and more diverse base for funding for population health.

I want to commend the motion that is before the chamber at the moment. I think it is a terrific initiative to be debating the role of local government here. I know, prior to the election of the Howard government in 1996, there was a very strong move to get local government actively involved within COAG. That stalled somewhat as COAG stalled, and I am very pleased that the government has now taken up that initiative and started to bring local government back to the table. But I also think that the idea of putting a motion before the Australian people to get them to recognise local government within the Constitution is a very sound thing to do as well.

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