PS: Please read – https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/police-investigate-after-egg-hurled-at-councillors-mid-meeting-20231216-p5erx8.html

We should all condemn what occurred at Tuesday’s meeting. All it achieves is a further widening between residents and our elected reps and ultimately a further erosion of transparency and accountability.

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At last night’s Special Council Meeting, councillors voted 5 to 3 to close the 3 early childcare centres. The only concession was that it be delayed until the end of March 2024 instead of the end of this year.

Voting for closure were: Magee, Esakoff, Cade, Penniciuk, Parasol. Those who voted against were Anthanasopolous, Zhang and Szmood.

Much was made of the failures of both State and Federal Governments in funding appropriate childcare and how this impacted on council. Nor was much credence given by those voting for closure to the interest of parliamentarians and their promises to ‘assist’. There was doubt as to whether any funding would ever materialise. The over-riding argument by these councillors was the need to serve the entire community and to do so with sound fiduciary oversight. That’s the role of a councillor they repeated ad nauseum. It’s just a pity that fiduciary oversight does not encompass extravaganzas such as the Carnegie swimming pool and multimillion dollar sporting pavilions plus borrowings of $60M over the next few years to fund these projects. Nor do we have any idea of how much waste occurs each year and how council is attempting to rein this in.

The fundamental question was put by Magee – should council get out of early learning centres? The cited loss of $500,000 per annum is literally a drop in the ocean given council’s overall budget and revenue stream. Readers should remember that for nearly a decade Glen Eira had one of the highest rate increases per year – 6.5%!!!! To therefore argue that lack of federal and state funding and the rate cap is to blame is irrelevant in answering this question. If the community as a whole wants aged care and child care maintained then that should be the priority. This question has never been asked of the community.