A large crowd were on hand to join our Australia Day celebrations last week and for the most part the feeling at the event was positive and warm.
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Congratulations to all the worthy recipients of our Australia Day awards. It’s wonderful to be able to formally recognise the time and efforts that these inspiring citizens give willingly and selflessly to make our community a better place.
I was also honoured to be able to welcome 14 new Australian Citizens as part of the event. One of the highlights for me was the 200-strong crowd joining in the national anthem led by local talent Lucy Barber.
Since the event Council has received feedback from a small number of community members seeking clarification and expressing concerns about the event process.
The Australia Day Committee is a committee of Council of which the nine Councillors are members. For this year the committee took the decision to introduce finalists for the first time in the respective categories, due to the large number of nominations.
For example, in the Citizen of the Year category we received 12 nominations and the Committee selected five finalists.
All nominees were invited to attend and were acknowledged as a group, however only finalists were individually recognised on stage. This change in format has caused distress to some nominees who were in attendance and felt they weren’t publicly honoured.
Council apologises for any offence caused and will take on board the feedback received. We will be seeking to review our procedures for the Australia Day Awards in 2020. We have also sought clarification from the Australia Day Council on its protocols for contacting nominees to ensure we are aligned with what is done nationally.
I’m committed to improving the process and the event for future years. The summary of each Award recipients’ achievements, along with a list of all nominees in each category, is available on council’s website.
