Alexander offers advice on choosing councillors

THE outgoing chair of the City of Greater Geelong’s administrators has given voters some advice about they should be looking for in their new councillors.

Dr Kathy Alexander, who will step down from the role following the October 27 election, was speaking at the Geelong Business Network’s latest breakfast forum, held at Little Creatures Brewery yesterday (Wednesday).

She said the administrators had done much work at the city, but there was still much to do. “If I was to be absolutely honest, I would say we’ve built a platform, the walls aren’t up and we haven’t even designed the roof.”

Dr Alexander said voters should judge how informed candidates were about the plans put in place by the administrators, such as the Our Future strategy.

“A few candidates have already made it clear that they haven’t necessarily asked for information before they’ve come out and said ‘I support X’ or ‘I support Y’, so be very clear that we have informed decision-making in Geelong.”

Responding to a question from the crowd about whether voters should go for “personalities or policies”, Dr Alexander said they should choose neither.

“What you should be voting for is a person who’s really capable of listening effectively to their constituency and understanding what the issues are, a person who’s then capable of being able to articulate those issues to their colleagues in the council, a person who can work as a team because if a council is a bunch of individual personalities then they’ll probably end up being sacked.”

She said the best councillors were those who knew the 80 per cent they held dear as well as the 20 per cent they were willing to compromise on, but disagreed with a suggestion that the state government-appointed monitors would be restrictive on the new council.

“They’re on no tighter a leash than any other council in Australia.

“All of the governance procedures that have been put in place by us are absolutely standard practice in most major cities.”

She said the job of the monitors was not to engage but to observe compliance with those procedures.

“Had we had four-and-a-half years (as originally recommended by the commission of inquiry), it would have been completely unnecessary; the roof would have been on.”