Policies
1. NEW POLICY – REMOVE ALL PET REGISTRATION COSTS FOR THOSE WHO ARE OVER 65 YRS OF AGE
2. NEW POLICY- ENCOURAGE STRIP SHOPPING CENTRES TO BECOME COMMUNITY DRAWCARDS.
Reinvigorate our shopping strips with an emphasis on creating warm gathering spaces that encourage people to sit, meet and drink their coffees together. Charging traders who create these spaces is questionable. They are building community and they are making the area attractive and vibrant. They are also, importantly, trying to increase their trade and survive. They are bringing people into the shopping areas. Council should encourage this, not charge for the footpath space and make life harder for these businesses.
I will petition for such street fees and charges to be abolished. The fee structures (footpath rent) existing at present dissuades shopkeepers and traders from using the footpath. Safety requirements can stay. It’s the fees that should go. The street economy needs support. This is the way to support them.
3. NEW POLICY-BRING BACK THE BIGGEST RECYCLING FESTIVAL OF KINGSTON ONCE A YEAR AND ENCOURAGE EVERYONE TO SEEK THEIR TREASURE! THE KINGSTON MEGA RECYCLING FESTIVAL
I believe there is not enough said about the importance of beauty and order in our neighbourhood environment. Pride in my surrounds and in my home city is vital. Pride in the design of our streets and homes and the infrastructure around us. Good design raises our spirits. Makes us feel good about our world and ourselves. It civilises us. I therefore do not want or like to see our Kingston City turned into a year long rubbish tip with garbage piled up constantly on nature strips everywhere you look 24/7 and 365 days a year. The new on call pick up service for hard rubbish has done precisely this. It is awful. It insults every one of us and degrades our spirit and civic pride. It costs nothing to do things well, to clean up our environment at the outset. I will set out to tidy Kingston up! I will motion to bring back a new once a year Kingston Recycling Festival where residents are encouraged to put everything they don’t want on the nature strips at a certain time of year, even to display these things well, have competitions on displays, where residents and everyone can then pick up what they want or need! Encourage it! That’s real recycling and sustainable behaviour.
4. NEW POLICY-CEASE THE USE OF INTERNATIONAL AND LOCAL COMMUNICATION FILTERING PORTAL and SELECTION COMPANIES.
I will push to cease the use by Kingston Council of filtering portal companies which are used to manage incoming communications into Council and harvest the data of people who provide feedback.
I will push to cease the use of overseas companies 10,000 miles away to select people by special algorithm to sit on our internal consultation groups here in Kingston. This algorithm filters the community applicants by skewing and increasing the representation of minorities in the population.
The consultation group Kingston Represents was so selected in 2023.
Kingston Council says it uses these ‘consultation groups’ to ‘inform’ their decision making and uses this selective feedback to guide “the strategic future directions of the Council”.
Consultation groups within Kingston Council should not be chosen by special algorithms, and especially not by overseas companies.
This use of companies who use algorithms for selection of citizen groups is highly problematic and essentially antidemocratic.
(Question-. Ref Pg 9 Minutes 11 Dec ’23)F
5. NEW POLICY-INTRODUCE AN OPENING PRAYER BE SAID AT THE BEGINNING OF KINGSTON COUNCIL MEETINGS
I will Motion that an opening prayer be said at the beginning of Kingston Council meetings that goes:
“We give thanks, Oh God, for the Men and Women of the past whose generous devotion to the common good has been the making of our City.
Grant that our own generation may build worthily on the foundations they have laid. Direct our minds that all we plan and determine, is for the wellbeing of our City. Amen”
If not this then any suitable other variation.
6. NEW POLICY-ACKNOWLEDGE AND ENCOURAGE THE RIGHT OF RESIDENTS TO PLANT AND PRODUCE THEIR OWN FOODS.
To underscore the right of the people of the City of Kingston to produce, process, sell, purchase and consume local foods they have grown, thus promoting self-reliance, self sufficiency, the preservation of family farms, and both local and cultural food making traditions. We recognize that family farms, sustainable agricultural practices, and food processing by individuals, families and non-corporate entities offers stability and self sufficiency to our way of life and enhances the economic, environmental and social wealth of our community. These backyard food gardens and food hobbies are especially important for the seniors amongst us.
7. NEW POLICY- THE YOUTH SHED PROGRAM AND THE SPORT ENGAGEMENT PROGRAM CALLED ‘WELCOME TO SPORT’.
The ‘Welcome To Sport’ Program
Sport and physical fitness is an important vital part of our community. It is especially important to the physical and mental growth of children. Sport engenders teamwork, bonding, character building and one gets fit in the process. You become a part of a group. You end up belonging. When you ‘belong’, the path that leads criminal behaviour is diminished.
It is important to include and invite the young children who are at schools in our area into the operations of the sporting centres in our city. A close relationship between all the sporting clubs and the schools around them is important. When parents are not involved with sport, their children can miss out completely. These sporting bodies can have open days where the public and especially children are shown the lay of the land. But one of the most effective introductions to sport and getting involved would be for actual school visits to be organised to go to the clubs where they learn just how you get involved, how much it costs, what timetables there are etc. Have a visiting program which shows the children around. Migrant children would most benefit from this scheme. Parents of such children may have difficulty being included into our Australian sporting culture. They will naturally feel like outsiders. It comes easily to Aussies, but not easily to migrant families and their children. It’s time to change this and support getting these children into activities that will make them feel as if they belong to our culture and belong to Australia. This could also play a role in getting some children off the streets and stop them falling into criminal behaviour. Crime rates would go down. Those 12-14 year olds robbing cars could just become our sporting heroes of the future. Let’s give them that chance. The cost of engagement and joining, which is a huge barrier for some families, must be brought down as well. We have a part of the solution to youth crime here in our hands. So l advocate that councils support this very special ‘inclusive’ program and liaise between the schools and the sporting clubs.
Youth Shed – The ‘Mentor Me’ Program
One of my biggest passions is for aiding the hopes and dreams of all children and young people to achieve the potential of their lives. The young, must be encouraged and given the opportunity to grow and flourish. Family is best but in the event that that is not possible, I believe the encouragement of the young should extend into a practical mentoring community program which can be organised by Council to bring together volunteer skilled retired experts who have so much to offer in so many fields e.g. engineers and designers and other experts where the young are exposed to mentors in their fields of interest in a situation similar to the men’s sheds but called the ‘Mentor Me’ – The Youth Shed Program.
This could be the new practical direction that Youth services at Kingston could get into. Mentoring of the young by older skilled people could be lifechanging and important to set them on the right path. Exposure to good knowledgeable people who want to share these skills would be amazing. Keep the young really busy, if not with sport, then with this, and they won’t have time to roam the streets. It will be too exciting being in the Mentor Me program instead.
