Weekly column from Council Courier e-newsletter by CEO Greg Hallam, Friday 20 May 2016.
A big week pressing the flesh for the LGAQ – we had staff everywhere across the state.
I played my small piece in engaging with our members by working with colleagues to present elected member updates (EMU) at both the Gold Coast and Moreton Bay Regional councils the first four days of the week, before jumping on a flight yesterday evening to attend the last day of the Roads Australia Annual Conference here in Sydney today.
This week alone, the LGAQ had staff at 20 events across Queensland, where we interacted with about 40 councils – more than half of our membership. We conducted EMU sessions, trained councillors and mayors, gave demonstrations of our Better Councils Better Communities performance benchmarking tool and attended conferences.
Be it in the big city of Brisbane, the mining hub of Weipa or the little gem that is Bedourie, we were there.
This drives home the fact that your Association values you and your council’s views and absolutely wants to hear what you think in your patch. That's why as organisation we have undertaken one million kilometres of travel doing just that each of the past two years.
Special thanks to LGAQ Board member Cr Ray Brown who very kindly stood in at an hour’s notice to replace President Margaret at the WQLGA conference in Bedourie earlier this week after she had fallen ill the morning of planned departure. I know the boss was really disappointed not to be making her last trip west as President – she was still discussing her speech with me at 8.45pm the night before.
For the newcomers to the LGAQ family you can be very confident that we live by our credo – Connect.Innovate.Achieve. It’s on all of our printed and electronic material; better still imprinted in our DNA.
We can’t do our job if we don't connect to you and understand your issues and aspirations. It’s only then we can harness the power of many, bring innovation through new ideas, business models and technology to bare on problems, add value and genuinely achieve for you folks.
A simple but hugely effective model that has worked for decades and delivered in spades for Queensland councils.