DOES the Visitor Information Centre need to move?
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According to a Gunnedah petition, the answer is no.
The Visitor Information Centre has raised a question central to communities, towns and cities around the world - is the government there to reflect popular opinion or to act in what it believes is the community’s best interest?
What would someone who loved their country think? Someone like Dorothea Mackellar?
Councillors who voted to move the centre say they are making the tough decision in the best interests of Gunnedah.
At its existing site, three separate studies have shown the centre is not attracting as many visitors as it should.
One thing all did agree on at the recent council meeting was that tourism was not thriving in Gunnedah, and that something needed to be done. This was not laid at the feet of the Visitor Information Centre, but seen as a shire-wide problem.
In the meantime, the decision is being made - and remade - about the VIC.
It is unusual for a town to feel so strongly about an information centre. The answer to this seems to lie in the fact that it was supported and created by the community and that the community feels it has invested itself in the centre - and specifically in this building.
The community obviously feels passionately about the site, including the surrounding attractions of the pool, the Dorothea Mackellar statue and the museum.
Advice from the council’s general manager is that the decision to relocate the service was not obliged to go to councillors in the first place. As an “operational” matter, it could simply have been progressed.
The ironic thing is that now council has involved the community, surely there is some obligation to listen to it.
Council has chosen to ask people what they wanted. Now it has chosen to vote against what they have said.
This is interesting in light of another matter soon to come up through council - fluoridation.
Councillors have said this is a matter they need to hear from the community about before a decision is made.
History has shown that we rely on our leaders to lead. It is true that sometimes this does not mean simply following the prevailing feeling of the day.
If that is the case with this council, however, do not continue to tell the community - as in the case of fluoride - that a decision will not be made if they are not what the community wants.
The VIC debate is not over. The rescission motion will again bring the beliefs of councillors about their own roles out into the light of public scrutiny.