By Gabriella Vukman
Deferred to this week’s council meeting on Tuesday 10 September, the motion for amendments to the Plaques and Memorials Policy were passed unanimously.
Concerns surrounding community consultation, consultation with First Nations people, the proposed structure of the panel, and the orientation of the report were raised by Sue Thompson.
Ms Thompson said, “The inclusion of this item in the last meeting’s agenda was accidentally discovered and led to several emails from concerned residents to the council. In this report, this has been taken as community consultation and I regard that as totally inadequate.”
“Only a handful of council staff were consulted and I quote from the report, ‘feedback has been sought from governance, recreation and sport infrastructure, design place, parks trees and trails, customer and communications.
“I’d stress to councillors that these parks and reserves belong to the community… so I believe the community must be widely consulted on them.”
In terms of First Nations consultation, Ms Thompson said, “nowhere could I find that First Nations people have been consulted. They have their stories which need to be told and understood and shared as well.”
Ms Thompson voiced questions surrounding the representatives who would be on the panel mentioned in the policy.
“Once adopted, this policy will oversee, and I quote from the report, ‘The plaques and memorials panel, including the representative government of parks, trees, and trails, the community’s directors and a senior policy officer appointed by the CEO to assess the applications.’ Which representatives and how many of each department will be represented on this panel,” Ms Thompson asked.
“The policy does not seem to want to include a heritage representative on the panel. Why not?”
Ms Thompson recommended the inclusion of an indigenous, heritage and community representative officer.
In response to the concerns raised by Ms Thompson, Recreation, Parks and Facilities manager Phil Murton said, “Materially, we are aligned with what Ms Thompson said in terms of the direction of the policy.”
“We acknowledge the concerns around a lack of consultation, however, this report was developed through the extensive bench-marking of other council’s plaques and policies.
“We agree that there could be some alterations in terms of including social and cultural representation within the policy.”
The following recommendations were made to the Plaques and Memorials policy between its appearance in the Council meeting on Tuesday 27 August:
– Endorse the plaques and memorials policy.
– Update plaques and memorials policy and any subsequent protocols with findings and feedback from heritage strategy upon its endorsement.
– An update to the policy be made to include a heritage officer and indigenous development officer as part of the panel.
The notion that the policy’s flexibility is one of its draw cards was brought up by councillor Tim Heenan.
Despite Cr Len Cox’s suggestion that the policy was a bit rushed and that it “may have been good to defer it a bit longer to give the public more time to give their feedback on this policy,” the motion to move forward with the Plaques and Memorials policy was passed unanimously.
