A direct correlation exists between the absence of meaningful community engagement in Kingborough’s land use policies over the past two decades and the volume of perverse outcomes those policies have produced. The Biodiversity Offset Policy, the LCZ nomination, and the Trees on Private Land Bylaw were all developed without genuine consultation with the communities most affected.
No land use policy, strategy, or bylaw will be adopted without direct, meaningful community consultation. Expert input is necessary, but it is not sufficient.
I have peers on council whom I respect who believe Kingborough over consults, and that as elected officials we should trust our own judgement, act swiftly, and get on with the job. I understand the argument, and in some cases I have sympathy with it. But my own experience points in the other direction. The greatest damage to the relationship between council and community over the past decade has come from moments when we failed to consult or failed to communicate, not from moments when we consulted too much.
Ask yourself a simple question. Do councils get into more trouble for over communicating with their community, or for under communicating? The answer to that question tells you exactly where the solution lies.
As Mayor I will institute the following:
- Mandatory community consultation before any land use policy, strategy, or bylaw is adopted
- Consultation must directly engage affected landholders, rural residents, and relevant local industries, not just subject matter experts
- All consultation processes to be publicly reported, with responses and outcomes documented
- Council must always remember who it works for. Significant planning and zoning changes must never again be pushed through without adequate community input
Residents are not an afterthought in the governance process. They are the reason for it.
What happens when consultation is skipped
In August 2026 council was asked to endorse the Bruny Island and Bonnet Hill Specific Area Plans. The version put to council was not the version the community saw. The plans had been redrafted after public exhibition, and council’s own report records that the modifications went beyond the independent review and that no additional public consultation was undertaken. Council was being asked to endorse plans no resident had ever had the chance to comment on. That is not a technicality. The Tasmanian Planning Commission has already acted on this ground in Kingborough, declining to include an unexhibited zone in our schedule and holding that residents have an independent right to have their interests considered. Good planning is done with the community, not to it. This was the third of the four reasons I gave in the chamber that night, and the full series sits on Priority 10.