August 21st, 2023Kyle’s Rant…

I am not much for Facebook in fact my FB friends could be dead and I wouldn’t know, but the other half told me recently of a post that made me wince from the Hepburn Shire Council (HSC).

Have you received a letter of invitation to be part of the Future Hepburn Engagement Pool?  

Just over 1,000 letters were sent out to randomly selected community members inviting them to register for the Future Hepburn Engagement Pool. Engagement Pool members will be randomly selected to join the township structure plan Community Panels with the purpose of developing structure plans for the townships of Clunes, Creswick, Daylesford-Hepburn Springs, Glenlyon and Trentham. Other opportunities for involvement include interviews, webinars, workshops and activities relating to all Future Hepburn projects. Don’t worry if you don’t receive a letter, you can still participate!

Now, I am not usually one to participate in these sorts of ventures, I am normally quite comfortable and better advised with my own committee of one. But back at the beginning of the pandemic when if a pig had of flown past the window, I would have simply accepted it as fact and waived at it, the world was that out of kilter, and in a much weakened confused and hazy state of mind, I put my hand up for the HSC business recovery committee. We were a bunch of well-meaning local business owners who had their hands full, pivoting and rerouting their own businesses and no time to waste. But one and all in the group thought it was a hugely important task to make sure all the local businesses had the resources to weather the storm.

After a few meetings, which lead nowhere, the committee was disbanded without notice or even an explanation. Emails to the HSC were met with the sound of silence. So you can see the reason for my wince when it comes to another HSC committee being announced.

If you have been around long enough and paid attention you find these committees don’t ever achieve much. The makeup of the participants that put their hand up to attend these assemblies are (and please allow me to generalise) folks with a bit of time on their hands, well-meaning certainly, but naïve to the fact that they are powerless. And then there is a sprinkling of other residents that will join, who will be pushing their own barrow containing a few well-ground axes.

For mine it is an old fashioned consultation method used by governments to check off the community consultation box and not much comes of it except tea and biscuits. It also seems to tick the box of community consultation, which is fantastic when it comes to the 2024 community satisfaction report.

Don’t get me wrong, our council do a lot of things well except they forgot to pick up my recycling for a couple of times in a row last month, but it turns out that is outsourced and it is impossible to get on the two way radio and call the bloke back. It has to go through a process – according to the very nice lady manning the HSC phones. And I must say a special shoutout to that lady (the name escapes me) who I told I was going away, and she offered to drag my bin in, another fabulous human working for the HSC.

But I would like to suggest that instead of ploughing human and biscuit resources into these type of aforementioned turnouts, HSC simply do what they are there to do. And that is rubbish, rates and roads. The portfolio did include looking after our elderly and vulnerable has even been outsourced and reasonably unsuccessfully I might add.

Anti-committee rant over…