Sunday, March 16, 2008

A sobering result

The result of Saturday's mayoral race is a sobering one. With 43 per cent of the vote Mick Kruger was elected on Saturday as the first mayor of the Fraser Coast Regional Council.
The result also showed that 57 per cent of the region's voters wanted someone else. A fact I hope Mr Kruger reflects on during the next four years. Those voters still have to be convinced that he deserved the job. Preferential voting could have delivered a different result.  

Given there were a number of quality mayoral candidates in Saturday's election line-up, and Mr Kruger's less than mayoral performance at Hervey Bay's Meet the Candidates on Thursday night, it was hard to believe the Chronicle's Friday editorial could claim there were no star performers and we should settle for the "default position" of a "pair of steady hands".  Mr Kruger's of course.

Hopefully the donkey vote was not as large as feared and the results of the Councillor's poll will deliver ten independently-minded, unaligned people who will make decisions in the best interest of ratepayers and the community.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

In all fairness, getting 43 percent of the primary vote when there's 5 candidates running isn't too bad. After all, in theory, he could have won with as little as 21 percent.

Anonymous said...

Who decided first past the post rules would apply?
Who decided there would be no divisions?
Maryborough City one of QLDs oldest has been reduced from city status to an distant outer suburb.Woocoo disappears without trace and with no right to representation.
Queensland has no house of review, the MLC was destroyed by the ALP in 1929.Effectively the same system as Cuba.One man (woman)rule.

Anonymous said...

I've only just become aware of the various blog sites on the Fraser Coast, and I don't know much about blogging, but it seems to me that there is a lot of complaints about the Chronicle newspaper and its lack of objectivity, and so on. People seem to think the paper should be objective, fair, democratic, etc etc. I ask, why?

Newspapers are there to make money, so are tv stations. The only one we really should be calling on to be fair and objective, is the ABC which is funded with our taxpayer money.

The solution is, to stop buying it, and stop publicising it by criticizing it on your blogs!!! Choke the air out of it. It is privately owned and operated, and they can say what they like, be mean, be non objective, push their own agenda and so on, as long as the people who own it are happy. Those who are criticizing it, must be buying it to read it, and thus giving the paper their money!!!

As far as the council amalgamations and elections are concerned, blind Freddy can see that this is a technique of the State Labor Government to make it impossible for people who do not have money, or do not have a large organisation (ie Labor Party, union funds etc), behind them, to run.
The Fraser Coast is also even more disadvantaged, by having no ward system, so no councillor is accountable to anyone except their funder.
ps. I am using the anonymous pseudonym as I do not wish to join Google.
Pepper

Anonymous said...

Jim MacKellar
To clear up some issues about the electoral system in the FCRC. Firstly, the single council, no wards or divisions, system was chosen by the HBCC and the MCC.

As it turns out they have actually done us a favour. Under the single member statistically equal division sytem of the state governemnt ther would have had to of been 7 councillors from HB, 2 from Maryborough and 1 covering Tiaro, Woocoo and part of Maryborough.

The result of the election will see one each from the 2 rural shires and 4 from each of the cities. The voters have shown that they have a much better idea of fair representation than all the politicians put together.