David Rooks: Bass Coast councillor has attempted to gag the Bass Coast community

A Bass Coast councillor has launched a bid to try and restrict the community from asking questions at council meetings.

A Bass Coast councillor attempted to slice out a fundamental element of council meetings in what other councillors labelled an “attack on the democratic system”.

Councillor David Rooks put forward an amendment to the Governance Rules at last Wednesday's council meeting which would have seen public question time during council meetings scrapped. The motion was supported by the deputy mayor.

He claimed this was to “boost efficiency” within council as question time was an “archaic system” from which it should “move on” from.

Cr Rooks said there were many other means of contacting council these days such as email, phone and social media and there was a 76 per cent resolution rate upon first contact for community members contacting council in these ways.

He said only 0.27 per cent of the community use question time and over the past year the same seven people had submitted 45 per cent of the questions.

“Questions submitted to question time can be of the same importance as questions asked through other channels yet they are given an unwarranted high level of status simply because they were asked in question time,” he said.

Cr Rooks compared question time to an old milk bar. He said they “used to work great” but now we have supermarkets which have a larger range of products, are more convenient and are focused on customer service.

Councillor Rooks’ motion to remove question time from council meetings.

Deputy Mayor Leticia Lang was in support of Cr Rooks’ motion. She said with the rise of social media “the community is entitled to be very public about the responses they receive from council or council staff at any time”.

She said question time allows council to spend a “disproportionate amount of time on a very small portion of the community”.

However, the rest of the council sought to protect the right to submit questions via question time.

Councillor Bruce Kent said it was about the communities right to “put the questions there in the first place” not necessarily about the fact there were other ways to contact council.

Councillor Les Larke said the community should have the “choice” to pursue whatever avenue of questioning they like with council.

Councillor Ron Bauer called the motion an “attack of the democratic system” and said it cut to the “core values” of governance.

“Accountability and transparency are core values,” he said.

“We are elected by ratepayers and we are answerable to them.”

“Question time is a must not a maybe,” he added.

Cr Rooks addressed all of the councillors concerns in his reply by stating that he wasn’t trying to strip the right of speech but he was trying to get council meetings to “focus on high level policy” instead.

However council remained unswayed and the motion was lost.

Councillor Rooks and councillor Lang were the only two in support of the motion.