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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2022-09-28 Daily Xml
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Community Consultation

The Hon. A. PICCOLO (Light) (15:53): Today, I would like to touch upon an important issue in our communities, which is community consultation and the way governments go about community consultation, and not only governments but institutions as well. I think it is the difference between what is right and just doing things right. One is doing the right things—in other words, making sure we do the right things to engage—and the other is where you tick a box and just meet the requirements.

One of the trends in our community that concerns me and I am sure concerns others in this place is the increasing lack of trust in public institutions. It does not matter what level you are at, there is an increasing distrust of public institutions and the way we do things. To some extent, we are at fault for that because of the way we do things. We need to engage with communities and trust our communities and work alongside them.

This is particularly true at the local level. When you actually do community forums, as all MPs do, probably 80 per cent of the issues are local issues. They are not big world issues or big national issues but those things that impact people's lives day to day and that grate on them. People get really annoyed when either the state or, in most cases, local councils do not engage with them.

I think it is very important that we understand that we need to shift from just consultation, where you have essentially made a decision and just want to then ratify it, to actually engaging with community in the early stages to make sure that what you are doing is the correct thing and the priority.

Today, I would like to highlight a couple of examples. I did speak about this at my local council last night, although it was by phone because I was here and unfortunately I could not be there, and I raised some issues that have been raised by a number of residents in my area. There are three different issues: firstly, the issue of the proposed change to a code amendment in Evanston Park.

There is nothing wrong with code amendments; they happen all the time. The comments I am making are not about the merit or lack of merit of this code amendment or the person who owns the land—far from it. My concern is about the way the council has gone about this. The council was approached by a proponent who wanted to do a code amendment. There is nothing wrong with that. What is wrong and interesting, though, is the decision the council made.

The council made a decision to actually support initiation of this code amendment after only speaking to the proponent. There was no engagement with the community at all. There was no engagement with the community whatsoever. This is the decision the council made do this:

2. Notes the presentation provided by the proponent's consultant…

4. Notes the administration's preliminary synopsis of issues needing to be addressed…

The decision also delegates to the CEO to work with the collaboratively with the proponent in the best interest of the community. Nowhere are the community included in that decision. You can understand residents in the area are outraged. Not only are they outraged but there is also a lot misinformation. When I had a meeting with the residents in the area, I spent most of my time trying to correct the misinformation. There was not a conspiracy theory; it was just bad decision-making.

It is very important that councils, government—it does not matter who it is—do community engagement right. Another example is dealing with the southern rural areas of Gawler. The southern rural areas of Gawler have been the subject of a whole range of discussions for many years between the community and the council and government. To say that it has not been resolved is an understatement.

This current council, the Gawler council, has a particular view about the area that is significantly at variance (using planning terms) with the view of the community. The council has initiated a whole range of reports, some of which they refused to make public when the reports were not favourable to the council but to the community, and, more recently, as part of their community consultation, they had this technical report prepared and put out for community consultation—a technical report of many pages.

The fact is a lot of people would not be qualified to make any comment on a technical report for a whole range of factors. Again, this is bad, poor community engagement. Engagement is about sitting alongside people, making decisions together, not imposing your will on the people. I raise these issues because you try to engage the council and actually suggest that they might want to do things differently, but it does fall on deaf ears. This is my way of saying we all need to do better and in this case, the example I have given, the Gawler council needs to do much better if it really does want to engage the community and get good decisions for the community.

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