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Wednesday 4 April 2012

The Maranoa Retirement Village - An exercise in poor community consultation...

The Maranoa Retirement Village is a prime example of where council got a decision completely and utterly wrong. While the final outcome from the exercise may be desirable, the process by which the end result was reached was nothing short of a disaster.


Council failed to adequately consult the community, they failed to interpret community sentiment and they wasted vast sums of money. Given that they claim to be losing $400,000 per year, and that they started the review process in excess of 18 months ago and that they are still quite some time away from the establishment of a new facility, one must ask why the council didn’t just get on and build the Multi Purpose Health Facility 2 years ago. We would now be 2 years closer to the new facility and thus $800,000 better off as well as not having alienated the community in the process. It should be noted that we are still losing money and construction still has not commenced. It would be fair to deduce that the funds spent keeping the old facility open all this time would have more than paid for the MPHS at the hospital.


Community Consultation is something the current council has not done well. They have paid lip service to it, but when push comes to shove, there has been some poor decisions made that have cost a lot to fix (if they have been fixed) or cannot be fixed.

Community consultation is the background of good democratic decision making. Even if the outcome is an unpalatable one, it is more likely to be accepted if the community has been part of the decision making process. There is no denying that community consultation is hard, people often do not seem willing to attend meetings to discuss decisions or complete surveys and the like, but it is important that people be given the opportunity.

It is better to say, “we had a survey, held some meetings and did a street walk and the issue you have identified didn’t come up, why didn’t you tell us then?” than to say “We didn’t think of that but we didn’t think you’d mind”

You are never going to make everyone happy even with community consultation, but it is better to have some of the people happy than none of the people happy. You have to do Community Consultation until you are blue in the face.... And then do it some more.





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