Dick Newman

Community Comes First

I love my home and family. Living in the Sunshine Coast Hinterland has expanded my concept of home to include our town and has expanded my family to our community. Just like my house, I want to maintain my ‘big’ home at a high level. This means looking after our rural roads, keeping our parks and gardens neat, tidy and safe for our kids. Keeping public facilities like our libraries and halls in good condition is important to me. It also means looking after our natural environment and all the creatures that also share our home. I want to make sure our individual houses can access clean water and that our waste water is properly treated. Your rubbish is important to me. I want it to be collected regularly, recycled where possible and that any landfill is properly managed.

To do these things, I need money from you and you give it every year. I want to spend that money wisely on a range of things that improve our home.

A lot of other people also like where we live and want to move here. Why wouldn’t they? During the late 90’s most of our towns agreed that some more housing development would be good to allow more people to live here. There’s nothing wrong with that, but planning even as recent as the 90’s wasn’t very good and now we starting to see some problems such as more cars use roads that weren’t designed to take them. For this reason, we will need to think very carefully before allowing any more residential housing to occur.

My extended family is also special. They have many interests from art and culture to sport and recreation and want to be involved in a lot of activities from environmental restoration to working at our information centres. Because we have chosen to live away from big population centres, we have to do a lot of things ourselves. We look after our own community halls, sporting facilities, environment and events. I want to help our family provide all these things and often provide direct funding or support with professionals employed by Council.

The last 4 years

I have looked after our home rather well. Our public assets have received over a $1m in maintenance and improvements. I have put a further $1m into footpaths. I have improved our drainage systems with $550,000. Apart from day to day maintenance, I have spent nearly $5m in upgrading our roads. Council has increased its maintenance budget for our environment and I have put a further $300,000 into environmental projects that were especially asked for by our community. Our parks have received $160,000 in upgrades. Our Maple Street streetscape will start soon with $670,000 for the Coral Street intersection.

I have put $350,000 into planning our future to cater for cultural, community and sporting facilities like our Neighbourhood Centre, Community Centre and Witta Sporting Grounds. But most importantly, I have put $750,000 into 90 of our community organisations to help them thrive and grow. Details of all these and more are here.

In Council, I worked on a number of projects and committees. The audit committee is your safeguard that ensures our Council works openly, honestly and efficiently. There are no questions that are too hard to ask or for you to get answered.

I have worked with our Finance team on Total Asset Management Plans. These plans safeguard our assets like roads, parks and libraries to ensure that they will always get adequate funding.

I have worked with our Arts team on the Regional Arts Development Fund committee and also created the Sunshine Coast Art Prize so that our artists could compete in a National competition in their own area.

I worked collaboratively with Maroochy Council on the Aquagen Board and also with Maroochy and the State Government to deliver the Hinterland Connect bus service to connect our community with coastal services.

I work with any number of community organisations to deliver assets like our Youth Bus, festivals like the Wood Expo or major projects like our new Neighbourhood Centre.

My aspirations for the next 4 years

The new Council will make some very important decisions for us. Our Town Plans are due for a review. Council will need to get out and engage with the various communities to make sure your voice is heard. We also need to use that review to set up further reviews such as public facilities, streetscapes and traffic management. Some of our towns may be improved by limited additional residential development. Some of our towns may have already over extended by accepting too much residential development. We need to work together to get the right mix whether it is trying to reduce, increase or maintain the status quo.

It is very important to me that we keep on supporting our community organisations who provide so much of our recreation. It is also important that we bring together like minded organisations like our environmental groups and help them with resources and funding.

Despite alarmist media statements, the new Council can continue to provide quality services and be financially responsible without alarming rate rises. We can manage with sensible policies.

How I will deliver

Some people think that engaging with a community is a mighty hard job – but it doesn’t have to be. Even in a community like Maleny that has a very diverse population and a reputation for being difficult can give me very clear messages that are supported by a substantial majority. My job is to bring information to the community that is open and clear. I also need to get as many people as possible to give me their response. Each time I have done that, I get a clear and very sensible answer. Sometimes I get very pleasant surprises when people give me a better solution than Council had considered.

It is unfortunate that with every issue there will be people who don’t agree. But my experience is that with goodwill, people can at least see why something has happened even if they don’t personally agree with it.

I will stay very involved in the Councils audit and finance process so you can be sure that your assets are in good hands. I will keep promoting the arts in our community. I will continue to be a strong advocate for our young people, whether it is to provide transport, jobs or recreation activities. I will continue to be a strong advocate for our Neighbourhood Centres who support disadvantaged people. I will bring environmentalists and Council representatives from Western Australia to the Sunshine Coast to show our environmental groups how they work collaboratively to get great environmental results.

A final word

I have been involved in many issues and sometimes its hard to think of all the wins, but here’s a small but important one. Our Maleny RSL has spent years trying to convince Council that they shouldn’t pay general rates. I agreed with them. They no longer pay. If you have a sensible request, I’ll go straight into bat for you.

See here how I intend to deal with some of the big issues in the next four years.