Tonight’s Meeting is a Special Meeting of Council where the Mayor and Deputy for elected for the next twelve months. I am pleased to announce that I will be serving at the Mayor of the City of Port Phillip for the next twelve months, alongside Cr Bryan Mears who was re-elected as Deputy Mayor.

Mayor Makin addressed the meeting:

Thank you very much. This is a truly humbling experience, both in terms of the optics in sitting in this chair, but also going through this process, and thank you to each of you for your confidence in me over the year ahead.
I do want to open by acknowledging the year that was, the dedication of Councillor Crawford as Mayor, the dedication of Councillor Mears as Deputy Mayor. This year has been a lot about building the foundations and the scaffolding that we will be able to build in future years.
That is not an easy task in bringing together 9 strangers in coalescing around a vision and what our priorities are in the year ahead. So can we please just once again acknowledge Councillor Crawford and Councillor Mears for their work. A lot of that work is hidden and the coalescence of nine individuals. It is working with the Council officers, setting that vision and being the front face which is a really challenging position at times. So I do just want to once again acknowledge the dedication of Councillor Crawford and Councillor Mears by the those roles. They are very, very big shoes to fill in keeping, once again, nine individuals together and building on the momentum that has been created. If there is a theme I would like us to capture for the year that will be it is now we have an opportunity to be bold, but we have that opportunity to be bold based on the foundations that have been built.

It’s not always widely appreciated that as Councillors we have many competing priorities. We have Council commitments, we have work commitments, we have life commitments, we have family commitments, pet commitments and a whole range of other commitments. In between it all we have had a dedicated group of Councillors who have come together and given the time that they’ve been able to provide, being able to really mobilise and articulate what our priorities are.

There has been comments around the online commentary and I if I can ask our community, please be respectful of the competing demands on our times. Be respectful of the fact that at the end of the day we are nine individuals. Local Government is a Council for a reason. We are not a Parliament, we are a Council of people with disparate lived experiences coming together to negotiate the best outcomes for the Community. That is truly what unites each of the nine of us, not because we all think the same way, but because trust me, if all of us thought the same way, it would be a very scary place. But because we have a difference of opinion because we’re able to articulate that opinion and represent the issues and the communities that matter to us. That is why we are here. So please, in terms of the online commentary, let’s be mindful of those demands. Let’s be mindful of the fact that there are many juggling priorities that we need to coalesce around in being able to look in the future ahead.

I’ve mentioned about being bold. We have such great opportunities here in the City of Port Phillip. We have the opportunities to build on the good governance that we have come together and united upon in terms of how we make the City of Port Phillip lead into the future.

My Council ward, as many of you would know, covers Fisherman’s Bend, an area that is forecast to have an additional 80,000 people by the year 2050. We have challenges around climate change and rising sea levels and what that means to our foreshores and other areas.

We have a whole range of organisations that need our support. I want to reach out to our peak community organisations, meet with each of you and understand what your visions are so that we can start to continue the dialogue. Not because we’re necessarily going to solve everything in this year, but because we’re going to put together the road map.

One of the initiatives I’ve spoken really highly about is our Community Infrastructure Plan. It is a road map that sets us up for the future. It is the road map that will allow us to look back and say, look at what we’ve been able to achieve, look at how we’ve been able to build from our successes into the successes of Councils of the future. As a Council we want tomorrow to be better than today. We want today to be better than yesterday. We have done a lot of that work in building the good governance, building quality assurance, building processes so that we can be confident in today. Now we can focus on tomorrow. How do we shape tomorrow so that the City of Port Phillip can be the best municipality it can be. We’re going to have an exciting time. We’re going to have times of highs, times of lows, but together we can achieve marvellous and amazing things and I look forward to working with each of you, including Council offices in the journey in the years ahead.

Thank you very much. Once again a truly humbling experience. Thank you once again for the confidence in each and every one of you. Thank you to our community in the confidence that you’re putting to me. I hope to be able to build on my experiences back in the City of Maroondah back where I was Mayor, and learn from those experiences. Being Mayor is very, very intensive and exhausting and it was a challenging process back when I was in the City of Maroondah. I was 25 when I was elected, I was 30 when I was Mayor, I left Council when I was 32. Upon reflection, what I’ve been able to find in this term in the City of Port Phillip, and because of each and every one of you helping me along that way, is that balance. We all need to find that balance. We all need to use our time as wisely and effectively as possible so that we’re not working harder, we’re working smarter.

We’re going to have an exciting year ahead. We’re going to have a year of challenges, but together once again we can achieve fantastic things.

Thank you to each and every one of you. I really look forward to the year ahead. Thank you.

Agenda and minutes of the Port Phillip Council meetings are available at Meetings and Agendas – City of Port Phillip