Perth Voice Interactive

STIRLING mayor Giovanni Italiano is joining a chorus of voices calling for the entire council merger program to be scrapped.

This week Colin Barnett conceded his plan to nearly halve the number of WA local governments from 30 to 16 had failed, after ratepayers in East Fremantle, Kwinana and South Perth formally rejected amalgamation.

The WA local government association withdrew its support for the process soon after.

Several councils—technically undergoing “boundary alignments” and not mergers on July 1—are now demanding the entire program be binned.

“You can’t have partial reform, it’s all or nothing and we are calling on the state government to be consistent in their approach and abandon the whole process once and for all,” says Cr Italiano.

“The city has already spent over $800,000 on this process to date and with the current declaration by the premier that if local communities don’t want to take part in the reform process they won’t have to, we believe the process should be completely scrapped.

“What is really frustrating is that more than 23,000 of my ratepayers, who are earmarked to move into other proposed local governments, were not afforded the right to vote on this.

“How is this democratic when you have somewhere like East Fremantle who has a population of 5178 residents who are (justly) afforded the right to have a say, but no, not our 23,000 residents who feel the same way.”

Bayswater mayor Sylvan Albert says his city has spent a cool $1.2 million preparing for the reform. Bayswater was to annex Bassendean and sections of Mt Lawley, Inglewood and Swan.

Cr Albert, a Liberal candidate at the last state election, was one of the few mayors happy with the planned merger, but is now left “very disappointed”. “The city supports local government structural reform and has done so almost from the beginning,” he says.  “We definitely need direction from the state government on where we go from here.  I am very disappointed at the lack of direction currently being provided on the way forward for local government reform.”

by STEPHEN POLLOCK