Perth Voice Interactive

A BAYSWATER councillor has called on other local governments to step up and make their public property publicly known, listing council-owned assets on an online register.

Many councils possess vast holdings of land and buildings, but have traditionally been sheepish about letting the public know the extent of what they own.

Register

Bayswater councillor Elli Petersen-Pik was able to get colleagues to unanimously agree to upload an online register of the city’s assets in a vote last August 2023. But it was a long time coming: His first attempt in 2020 had zero supporters.

Back in August 2023 he told councillors: “Our ratepayers deserve to know what they own.

“And I would like to know that one day that I will not be a councillor, I will have the ability to know what councillors know, and that drives me a lot, when how I move things thinking about the day after.”

Cr Petersen-Pik said the asset register provided “basic information about the assets that each ratepayer owns and they might be able to question some things, and that’s good – it’s part of the discussion: why [do] we own that? Is it really maintained well?

“I think it’s good to remove that confidentiality, and currently this list is confidential and so I think it should be revealed and we should signal to ratepayers that are no secrets here, we’re not hiding anything 

About a year on without the sky falling, he notes there’s been no downsides to the list going public.

“The first time around, no councillor wanted to second it. It was decided that it was too controversial at the time,” Cr Petersen-Pik tells us. But with no ill-effects a year into the list going public, he says the asset register’s worked well and called on other local governments to take the same step.

As far as we can tell, Bayswater is the first state in WA to have a central register of all council-owned assets (some list public holdings like parkland on their map software, but it requires a lot of tedious clicking and manual searching).

by DAVID BELL