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There is a pathway for the Central Coast community to put ‘LOCAL’ back into Council, according to the three speakers who will be part of an important webinar this Thursday, 2 March, from 6pm to 7.30pm.
Pip Hinman, from the Residents for De-amalgamation movement in Sydney’s Inner West mega-council Local Government Area, says changes made to the Local Government Act in 2021 give communities a pathway out of the 2016 forced council amalgamations.
She will be speaking in more detail about that pathway during the Zoom Webinar to be hosted by The Point ESG News Site on Thursday, 2 March.
Hinman will talk about how the residents from the former Marrickville, Ashfield and Leichhardt Councils campaigned to make their new amalgamated council vote on holding a referendum at the 2021 council elections to determine whether or not residents wanted to go back to their old local government boundaries.
She will share the results of that referendum, and what’s happened since, with the Webinar attendees on Thursday night.
The Point’s executive producer, Jackie Pearson, says Pip Hinman’s experiences will resonate with anyone who has lived on the Central Coast since the forced merger of the former Gosford and Wyong Councils in 2016.
“Listening to Pip Hinman will make Central Coast residents feel less isolated and alone. The Inner West of Sydney is a very different community to the Central Coast but they’ve lost representation, lost services, they’re paying higher rates and they’ve lost their voice,” Pearson says. “It’s a very familiar story.”
Glen Moore from the Gundagai Council in Exile will share how he ran a successful campaign for the demerger of the Cootamundra-Gundagai Council.
Both Pip and Glen, along with former Central Coast Council Mayor, Jane Smith, are members of the Demerge NSW Alliance which has strong support from all of the 20 remaining merged councils across NSW.
“The fact that Minister Tuckerman and Premier Perrottet have both made election promises that there will be no more council mergers if they remain in government after March 25 is a strong indicator that they are under pressure from their own political base,” said Jane Smith, who now operates Central Coast Friends of Democracy.
“The NSW government and the opposition have both underestimated the importance of local government to communities in NSW. Our community wants their local voice back,” she said.
Pearson said the Webinar would be an opportunity to hear from grass-roots campaigners who have succeeded in starting a demerger process in their areas.
“I’ve had a couple of chats with Pip Hinman during the past week and it has been like playing a game of snap, the Inner West Council has even had periods when it has been placed under administration,” Pearson said.
Pip Hinman who has lived in Marrickville for over 30 years, has been active in many campaigns and said she “was very aware of it when the ‘fit for the future’ council mergers were being pushed by the Baird Coalition Government.
“People had to register to go to this ‘consultation’ and I think virtually everyone who spoke was against it. It wasn’t what we felt was fit for the future and I got involved at that point because of the fake consultation the Baird Government was running in 2015.”
She said community concerns at that time were “around questions of representation, how many councillors would be left, how many workers would be left or put on the scrap heap, what would happen to our say in our local area.
“We used to have 36 councillors across those three areas, it has now been slashed to 16 so accessibility of residents to counsellors and counsellors to residents has been reduced.
“Jobs have been lost. There was a great big reshuffle which involved people opting to take a redundancy and others feeling like it wasn’t what they signed up for. Councils were being encouraged to contract jobs out as they still are.
“Even if you define fit for the future in their neo liberal terms two of the three councils were fit for the future. They were in the black,” Hinman said.
Marrickville Council was in the black and Hinman recalls how that council would collaborate and support its community.
“A gas company announced it was going to continue looking into using its drilling licence to drill for coal seam gas right in the middle of the city, slightly out of the area for Marrickville Council but alongside us.
“Residents formed a group to get this company’s licence for drilling stopped. It was 5km from the city and we didn’t agree with CSG anyway. We got together and ran a campaign and eventually successfully got that company’s licence, which actually covered the whole of the city of Sydney which nobody knew about, got it canned.
“Marrickville Council supported the campaign and was the first LGA to declare itself a CSG free LGA,” she said.
“This is an issue right across the state – resident driven campaigns about accessibility, about having a voice is not unique to one brand of politics.
“A lot of us went to the first meeting of the amalgamated council only to see Labor and Liberal pat each other on the back and Labor became mayor and there was a Liberal deputy.”
Another of the many similarities between the Inner West and Central Coast experiences were the promises of efficiencies, more funding and no need for rate rises.
“As far as I know no one’s rates went down and everyone was slugged hard.
“The promises didn’t wash on us, they were all on the financial lines but council is more than a financial entity.
“Making councils into a rubber stamp of state government is not going to cut it,” Hinman said.
Join the conversation to learn how the residents of the Inner West campaigned to have their councillors allow them to hold a referendum on de-amalgamating. Find out the results of that referendum, which was held in 2021 and what has happened since.
It’s fascinating and empowering.
Registrations are open now via Friends of Democracy
