Victoria: The Place To Be

Dept. for Vic. Communities

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Welcome

Local Government Victoria works cooperatively with Victoria’s 79 local councils to ensure that Victorians enjoy world class responsive and accountable local government services. Through partnerships with councils and local government associations, Local Government Victoria encourages and supports best practice and continuous development in local governance and local government service delivery to all Victorian communities.

Community Satisfaction Survey 2008

The 2008 Community Satisfaction Survey, which is now in its eleventh year, provides participating councils with information about how their performance is rated by the communities they represent. The survey is conducted independently by Wallis Consulting, and is coordinated by the Department of Planning and Community Development.

The vast majority of Victoria’s councils participate in the survey, which offers a valuable benchmarking tool for measuring council performance. The trend in overall council performance since the survey’s inception in 1998 has been positive. The results in 2008 broadly reflect this trend, with 80 percent of respondents rating their councils’ overall performance as “excellent, good or adequate”, compared to 81 percent in 2007.

Town planning, economic development, and local roads and footpaths continue to be the key drivers of community satisfaction. Whilst local councils recognise the Community Satisfaction Survey as a valuable benchmarking tool in performance measurement, it is important that they continue to review and strengthen their own performance measurement systems. This ensures a wide and robust selection of measures is being used to measure council performance.

Read the results of the Local Government Community Satisfaction Survey 2008 (PDF 549 kb) or (Word 297 kb).

Council Elections - Saturday 29 November 2008

All 79 Victorian councils will conduct general elections in November this year, to elect councillors for a four year term. This will be the first time that elections for all councillors will take place at the same time.

Election Day is Saturday 29 November. For those councils running their election by attendance voting, voters will cast their votes at polling places on this day. For councils running their election totally by postal voting, voting closes at 6pm the day before Election Day.

Key dates leading up to the elections include:

• 3 October 2008 - Entitlement Day - the day the voters' roll for each election closes
• 28 October 2008 - Nominations from election candidates close

A number of councils will have changes to their electoral structures for these elections, having undergone independent electoral representation reviews or subdivision reviews in 2007 and 2008. Changes may include altered internal ward boundaries and numbers, or increases or decreases in councillor numbers.

Read more about the council elections and find out the details on postal and attendance voting, voter enrolment eligibility, nominating as a candidate, 'caretaker' arrangements for councils and more.

New Allowance Package to better support Councillors

On 10 April 2008 the Minister for Local Government Richard Wynne announced the new policy Recognition and Support: the Victorian Government's Policy Statement on Local Government Mayoral and Councillor Allowances and Resources (PDF 142 kb). Read Minister Wynne's media release (PDF 79 kb).

The Local Government (Councillor Remuneration Review) Panel Report (PDF 273 kb) was completed on 25 January 2008. The Panel's recommendations were considered by Government and the majority of the recommendations were endorsed. Read the Government's Response to recommendations of the Local Government (Councillor Remuneration Review) Panel Report (PDF 53 kb).

The new package and policy will take effect immediately after the forthcoming 29 November 2008 Local Government general elections. Read more about the Councillor Remuneration Review.

Other news

Read more Local Government Victoria news.

This page contains downloadable documents. In order to view PDF documents you will require Adobe Reader. To view other file types such as Word, Excel, Powerpoint and ZIP, other tools may be required.

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