After TRRA’s very successful ‘Meet the Candidates’ Forum at Soldiers Point on Monday night we moved on to the second scheduled Forum at the Community Hall in Anna Bay with a degree of optimisim. This was a much smaller venue than the Soldiers Point Bowling Club but we still got a full house of around 70 people who were obviously keen to hear from the Candidates, to question the incumbents and their record and assess all the candidates on their vision for the next Council.
Although the former Councillor Shirley O’Brien gave an eight minute address in the first section of the Forum, she then left to attend another function, before Questions from the Moderator or from the floor. Mayoral Candidate and two term Councillor Geoff Dingle fielded all the Moderators questions easily and the two new Candidates Caitlin Spiller (Greens) and up and coming 19 YO political student Shaun Mceachern made a valiant effort to cover the same ground. It was however, a pretty uneven contest because the rest of the field of Councillor and Mayoral Candidates were very conspicuous by their absence.
Questions from the audience covered issues such as Coal seam Gas, the Fisherman’s Bay Landcom development and other local issues.
TRRA is bitterly disappointed that Central Ward Candidates would treat their constituents with such disdain that they can not be bothered to turn up and address their concerns when they were notified well in advance of a well publicised, properly run public meeting for that purpose despite some of them giving a written commitment that they would attend. If they were personally unavailable they could have at least sent someone from their group to represent them, most of them have three or four on their team.
We have received a complaint from a Mayrol Candidate and a former Mayor that the first Forum raised too many negative issues, did not look at the positive achievments of Council in the last term, and felt that TRRA had launched an attack on their personal integrity. None of the topics were personsl. We feel that it is up to the Councillors to give their account of what they achieved, all our questions and questions from members were based on the 36 critical recomendations from the two State Government reviews, the recent Customer Satisfaction Survey conducted by the Council itself and the Council’s own Financial Balance Sheets and the Strategic Plan that the last Council recently endorsed.
A lot of the detail of these issues and our submissions on them are archived on this site.
We again invite all Central Ward Candidates to attend the last two forums at Medowie and Tanilba Bay. We have been requested by the various Community Groups to run these Forums so that the voters know who they are entrusting the future of this Local Government area to.
It is becoming increasingly obvious to us, that some of these Candidates are putting themselves forward as genuine contenders, but are in fact just preference harvesters for others hiding behind them, who are doing their best to avoid any public scrutiny in the lead up to the election. We call them ‘Cardboard Candidates’ because they put their pictures everywhere all over the Ward but never subject themselves to any public scruitny, debate or genuine evaluation by the voters.
Come on Candidates , come out from behind your cardboard signs and talk to your constituents!
Voters are invited to attend these last two forums and express their views on these phantom candidates, if they don’t turn up we will talk about them anyway…….
QUESTIONS TO ALL CANDIDATES ANNA BAY
1. Financial Management
2. Environmental Planning Performance
QUESTIONS FOR PANEL, TO BE ASKED BY MODERATOR
3. Councils Performance Report Card, DLG Review
4. Coal Seam Gas
5. Roads and Pot Holes
6. Proposal to Remove 14 Playgrounds
7. Transparency of Decision Making
8. Council’s Exposure to Litigation
9. Birubi Point Surf club
10. Protection of Koalas
11. Visual and Environmental Degradation Along the Approach Roads to the Tomaree Peninsula
