Are You Engaging With Banyule Council?

Banyule Council puts a lot of resources into attempting to engage with its 132,000 residents.

Despite good intentions and a considerable resourcing, the effort suffers very poor uptake rates from the residents and business owners of Banyule.

There are multiple topics, at any point in time, subject to what Council chooses to term " community engagement".

Why "consultation" as the name for this type of interaction is out of favour is anyone's guess.

This year there have been more than 20 Council strategies reviewed - it begs the question "when do they find time to do the work outlined in these strategies!"

The poor "turn out" or participation by the community causes a couple of problems for us all.

Firstly, it is simply not representative of all of the interest groups, demographic sectors or locations when so few people are involved.

Secondly, the few people who do consistently participate are looked at askance by some as a version of a wearisome "rent-a-crowd" movement.

Recently the clustering of matters concurrently subject to review has led to complaints by ratepayers about the gross amount of time needed to complete surveys and to make free text submissions.

This has led to time extensions being granted.

It has also led to frustrations approaching embitterment because of the design of the surveys, and the vast document libraries needing to be read.

Where are the good old-fashioned public meetings and public debates to gauge public sentiment?

Online surveys are no substitute for public discussion - they are merely a collection of one-on-one interactions, ticking boxes of someone else's choices of answers, giving character-limited responses to someone else's questions, doing nothing to allow ratepayers to hear and test other ratepayers ideas & views.

Opaque, not transparent.

The online mechanism itself alienates many ratepayers not comfortable with IT, and not willing to commit so much demographic information.

With such small sample sizes of survey participants is it legitimate to then ask gender, age, suburb, language group etc?

More attention could surely be paid by our Council managers and our elected members to the outcomes of the action plans associated with all these strategies - just what is being achieved with our rates money?

Workshops, forums and Zoom meetings are scheduled but too often cancelled because of poor enrolments.

Oh, and by the way, why do so many of theses strategy reviews need to be "consultant led"?

And do all metropolitan Councils need to have their own strategy document on every local government topic? For all of the staff time, all of the consultancies, all of the ratepayer efforts, is there any meaningful difference across Councils?

Then once the new strategic is adopted, does it make any measurable difference to our lives?