Welcome to the April edition of LGAT News. It’s been a busy two months since our last newsletter, with the State election being called more than a year early.

LGAT prepared an election priority statement of our key asks on behalf of the sector to provide to political parties and independents. In addition, we were successful in generating broader media interest in a number of our asks. This included:

• An article in The Advocate regarding the Heavy Vehicle Motor Tax.
• An opinion editorial published in all three major newspapers regarding housing.
• An opinion editorial regarding mandatory disclosure for property sales published in The Advocate.

There was also very strong engagement with our social media campaign to support our priority statement, with our posts receiving almost 8,400 impressions during the election period.

These priorities will form the basis of our discussions with the incoming Government. In addition, we will be raising increased funding for the Office of Local Government to enable them to accelerate and extend the current suite of reforms underway as well as implementation of the priority recommendations from the Future of Local Government Review. This will include a request for appropriate sectoral support for the review implementation.

LGAT hosted our first General Meeting of 2024 last month, with a number of resolutions passed. You can find out more in the Communique from that meeting. This new initiative aims to provide all councillors with a synopsis of the key decisions from each of our General Meetings. On the day before our General Meeting, we hosted the first ever joint Mayors and Deputy Mayors workshop. The day involved a morning session of speakers before splitting into separate sessions for a roundtable discussion in the afternoon. The day was very well attended, and feedback was extremely positive, so LGAT will look to run a similar session at least once per year.

LGAT also hosted a workshop on Financial and Asset Management in March. While the number of participants was disappointing, the feedback from those who did attend was overwhelmingly positive.  Work is well underway for our next two events for councillors – a workshop on emergency management and recovery on the 5th of June in Launceston and our Elected Members Professional Development Workshop (following our AGM) on Saturday the 27th of July at Devonport.  I encourage all councillors to consider registering for these events via our events page.