No community of interest with western hinterland

The wards for the new Central Coast Council have been drawn with about as little thought as could possibly be given to them.

For all practical purposes, they follow the boundary lines of State electorates, without the slightest consideration that voting for a State Government and providing a representative spread of interests for a municipal region might be somewhat different in their priorities.

This is lazy-mindedness of the first order, and one can only hope that, when the new council takes office at the end of next year, a redistricting will be high on the agenda.

For instance, it is utterly absurd that the Woy Woy Peninsula is lumped in with the whole western hinterland of the region, regardless of the fact that there is no community of interest between these two parts of the ward and that this grouping will undoubtedly lead to conflicts of goals that cannot be resolved.

In fact, the Peninsula should have been included in the Gosford East ward, and the three coastal wards: Budgewoi, The Entrance and Gosford East, should have been narrowed to keep the population numbers in balance with the other two wards.

Using Census districts, this exercise could have been easily carried out by any half-competent geographer.

Since the opportunity to include Lake Macquarie in the new city has been lost, the rump section of the Budgewoi ward should have been hived off and incorporated into its northern neighbour, giving some semblance of logic to the boundaries between the two municipalities.

Furthermore, it is not at all clear why the hinterland areas are part of the new Central Coast city at all.

This plainly is just a political convenience, and I can well imagine that the residents of these rural parts would be more than happy to separate from a Council that is likely to give them very little attention.

On the whole, this is definitely a B- project that reflects little credit on its formulator.

My suspicion is that anything other than financial issues was almost completely ignored in the exercise and that the new Council is going to suffer from internal conflicts that could have been ameliorated by a more thoughtful consideration of the governance requirements of the region.

Email, 17 May 2016

Bruce Hyland, Woy Woy