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From the heart PETITION TABLED PAGE 3
Four lifelong e school friends, Tayna Cunningham, Marie Few, Ana Pranjic, and Gemma Lambe from Sale and Stratford took on the 20-kilometre Coastrek challenge while fundraising for o The Heart Foundation. STORY - PAGE 8 Photo: Contributed
BIG SCREEN TO STAGE PAGE 10
50-YEAR REUNION SPORT
Wellington wards updated Erika Allen and Tom Hayes
WELLINGTON Shire is among 10 Victorian councils, including four in Gippsland, whose ward boundaries will be altered for the 2024 council elections after a review by the Victorian Electoral Commission (VEC). It will have an impact on nine per cent of the shire’s voters: 1370 from the current Central Ward and 2592 from the Northern Ward will vote within a modified Coastal Ward in October this year. Wellington's incoming nine councillors will still be divided into three wards (Northern, Central and Coastal), with three councillors assigned per ward. This structure was adopted in 2015 when the VEC conducted the last electoral review. However, in February 2023, the VEC advised that Wellington was projected to have an imbalanced councillor-to-voter ratio in at least one ward by the time of October’s general election.
Currently, there are an estimated 43,875 voters in Wellington Shire, with an approximate ratio of 4875 voters per councillor. However, the VEC forecast that by October 2024, the voter-tocouncillor ratios of Central and Northern wards would be outside of a +10 per cent deviation (greater than 5300 voters per councillor), and the voter-to-councillor ratio of Coastal Ward is forecast to be outside of a -10 per cent deviation (less than 4400 voters per councillor). Under the Local Government Act 2020, the number of voters per councillor in a ward should not vary by more than 10 per cent from the average number of voters per councillor for all of the wards. In April 2023, the Minister for Local Government, Melissa Horne, asked the VEC to conduct ward boundary reviews. The review aimed to ensure fair voter representation across the Shire’s diverse communities. The VEC released its preliminary report in February this year, proposing
changes to the boundaries of all three Wellington Shire wards. To balance out the voter-to-councillor ratios, the VEC proposed increasing the size of the Coastal Ward by extending its northern boundary north up to the La Trobe River (north of Longford), and then to the Thomson River and the Traralgon-Maffra Road (north of Rosedale). In a submission to the Victorian Government’s Ward Boundary Review Panel in March, Wellington Shire Council's Chief Executive, David Morcom shared that a drawback of the proposed change was that the model would divide towns and voters from their “communities of interest” - where voters work, shop, send kids to school and spend much of their time. Specifically, Council raised concerns that moving Denison and Nambrok from the Northern Ward into the Coastal Ward would separate voters from “communities of interest” such as
Heyfield and Maffra, which are (and would remain) Northern Ward towns. Mr Morcom said, “the Commission needs to be aware that rural farming communities like Nambrok and Denison (part of the Northern Ward) use adjacent towns (under 10kms) like Heyfield and Maffra for shopping, health services, schools and so on. To effectively force these communities into the Coastal Ward, where their ward councillor is now likely to be over 80kms away in Yarram, is in contrast to a ‘community of interest’.” While the VEC acknowledged in its final report that the ward boundary adjustments in these areas were not ideal, it also said they were largely unavoidable. Similarly, the Council submission noted that Longford is also effectively part of the Sale community and that the model placed Longford in a different ward to its community of interest.
Continued - Page 4
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