NEW boundaries and nine new names have been announced for 11 single-councillor wards on the Mornington Peninsula.
The changes will be used in the October council elections and replace the existing six wards, three of which have more than one councillor.
The names of the shire’s 11 wards are Beek Beek, Benbenjie, Briars, Brokil, Coolart, Kackeraboite, Moorooduc, Nepean, Tanti, Tootgarook and Warringine.
Briars and Nepean are the only existing wards to retain their names, although each will be reduced in size and represented by one councillor. Briars ward currently has three councillors and Nepean two.
The panel rejected changing Briars to Tichingorourke Ward and Nepean to Monmar.
Ward names to be dropped are Cerberus, Red Hill, Seawinds and Watson.
Six of the new ward names were on a list of 15 suggested by the shire.
The changes to the municipal structure were announced in a December report by a three-person electoral structure review panel appointed last year by the Local Government Minister Melissa Horne.
The panel said it decided the peninsula should continue to be represented by 11 councillors after considering the size and shape of wards along with the number of candidates who had contested past elections, incidences of uncontested elections and rates of informal voting.
The panel said it had suggested Aboriginal ward names if it was the name of a place within a ward; the name was commonly used; and if it was registered under the Geographic Place Names Act 1998.
The report said Cr Steve Holland had told a panel hearing last November that he believed reducing the number of councillors from 11 to nine would save money and “allow equitable representation” throughout the shire.
The panel said it found “no justifiable benefits in any nine single-councillor ward models to offset this increased [councillor] workload”.
However, the panel had “agreed with the suggestion made by Cr Holland to simplify the names of wards based on significant features within wards”.
Along with the new ward names and boundaries have come claims that the results may be subject to gerrymander, or manipulation, by political parties.
“The result is a gerrymander because it is not based on the democratic, well established in Australia, system of only having a plus or minus deviation of 10 per cent to keep electoral areas as close as possible to even numbers,” Red Hill Ward’s Cr David Gill said.
“My geographical area went up by nearly 10 per cent. It was 50 per cent of the shire, it’s now 60 per cent.
“I believe only having [the local government minister] in charge of electoral boundaries for local government leads to the possibility of the first political gerrymander in Australian history.”
(“Aboriginal name for youth hub” The News 20/2/2024)
First published in the Mornington News – 20 February 2024
