Firstly the timing of this meeting left any people thinking of nominating with little if any time to:

Get through the mass of paperwork involved and get it posted and returned – which with current postal times could be an eight-day turn around.

Get their faces out in the community promoting what they stand for. Close of nominations is Wednesday, August 10, giving nominees only 14 days to get all this done.

On asking a question about this I got a lot of smoke and mirrors about it being the electoral commission’s fault.

Any senior staff of council and councillors with any vision would have been well aware when the election would probably be and could have put this meeting on three months ago.

Makes it very easy for the incumbents including the Mayor to get re-elected as they have had a lot of time to work on their campaign and no-one knows much about the prospective councillors.

Some of the handouts that were given in relation to accountability and engagement were interesting. Things like:

Councillors are accountable to the community and open and transparent decision making. If this is happening why does this paper carry so many complaints about these issues?

Did council take any notice of the majority of residents’ complaints about moving the clock? Did council take any notice of the complaints about the destruction of Littleton Gardens? Did council consult with the community about the purchase of the Old Bega Hospital with our rate money and no logical vision of its future uses?

You can’t have a partnership without a relationship and you can’t have a relationship without a conversation. Why bother having a community engagement officer if you are not going to actually engage with community in a meaningful way and actually put into action what you have heard.

“We consulted community” are the three most overused words in the vocabulary of councils. Give them their due, sometimes they actually consult. Problem is they usually go away and do what they were going to anyway.

I would suggest also that the mayor needs to be popularly rather than politically elected.

Our Probus Club members were quite perturbed by the cessation of the funeral notices at 6.57 each morning on our local ABC radio as it was a valuable community announcement which many relied on to find out about the death and funeral of friends and relatives.

Attached you will find a copy of the petition we set up and signed at one meeting (Editor’s note: The petition sent to me has 30 signatures).

We are hoping that you may be able to influence the ABC to reintroduce this three-minute community announcement each morning.

Reading letters to the editor, still after months of “no reply” from the manager of the ABC in Bega, what will it take for the ABC to realise it got it wrong?

It seems as a government department it just bunkers down and waits for the heat to dissipate. Well trust me ABC,  this will not go away. You got it wrong.

You will gain more respect from the community by admitting you got it wrong and now reinstate the two minutes at 6.58am for local funeral announcements. 

We all make mistakes in life, me included, so c’mon and fix it.