Representing people
I’ve been a councillor and Mayor of Roper Gulf Shire Council since 2008. I have also been a member of various councils such as ATSIC (the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission) for 15 years, serving as the Chairperson of Garruk Jarru Regional Council for most of this time. I was also the Chairperson of the Indigenous Housing Authority of the Northern Territory for six years and with Mungoorbada Aboriginal Corporation since 1990. Being on a number of boards enables me to take constituents’ issues to boards and information back to our constituents.
I became involved in local government when the NT Government decided to amalgamate all the community councils into ‘Super Shires’. I represented the Mungoorbada Aboriginal Corporation and took an active role in the reform process, which took 18 months to finalise. This process involved extensive consultations with stakeholders and a lot of talking and negotiating.
I also wanted to be sure people in my area were fairly represented and that constituents received the services they needed to better their standard of living. In July 2008 I stood for Council in the newly formed Roper Gulf Shire as I felt this was the best way to represent my community.
A resilient community
Roper Gulf Shire is an area with a landmass of 185,194 square kilometres, more than twice the size of Tasmania. This makes us bigger than many of the world’s small nation states. We have eleven townships, most in very remote areas. The challenge is in distances for all forms of communications and logistics. We have 2600km of largely unsealed roads and five main river crossings, which make transport and maintenance costs high. The wet season makes many of our townships inaccessible for months on end. Flooding and cyclone impacts are common in the annual wet season. We are, however, a very resilient community.
We are also a very young community. The Roper Gulf Shire population has a median age of 24, with 31 percent of our population under 15 years. Eighty percent of our population is Indigenous and we speak a range of languages. English is only spoken at home by 30 percent.
The river systems and gulf areas in our Shire are unique; when you travel inland we have many pastoral holdings which provide local employment and livestock to the meat industry. You see something different in every town. From Numbulwar on the beautiful Gulf coast to Mataranka with its natural thermal springs, pastoral and war history, there is real variety.
The many different Indigenous language and cultural groups, the varied landscapes and the scale of our Shire make it unique.
Big issues
Key challenges facing rural councils include: lack of funding to provide adequate services to remote areas; high unemployment, and the loss of young people from smaller communities to bigger cities; poor access to services such as education, health and communications; sub-standard roads; and a need for better coordinated and networked service providers working together to provide better services, particularly for the youth and the elderly.
Maintenance of core services and the need to provide better services to constituents are important to me. This includes improved health services to close the gap for our Indigenous constituents, access to higher education, training and employment and economic development for the Shire. I’d also like to see equity in access to the communications super highway.
Our Council is working on the establishment of consultative local boards in our townships, and the planned roll out of training to our local board members to improve skills and knowledge, to provide strong leadership through good governance. Councillors are completing governance training and a Certificate III in Business Administration, to assist them with performing and understanding their roles and responsibilities through strong leadership and good governance.
We have three Youth Voice Committees, which were established to assist in developing future leaders for our Shire. This year we held a Youth Leadership Forum. Council will support this initiative again in 2014 to encourage our youth to become future leaders who lead by example. The Youth Voice Committees are my greatest achievement on Council and I would like to see other shires develop their youth for the future.
