Council elections Victoria 2020: Mildura results
The star of a former ABC cooking show is among five new faces on Mildura Rural City Council, which is set to take on a more progressive tilt.
Mildura
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Mildura voters have elected five first-time councillors to office for the next four years.
Long-time councillor and former mayor Glenn Milne was first elected, while Jason Modica (fourth), Mark Eckel (sixth) and Helen Healy (seventh) were also returned.
Stepping up for the first time will be Millewa farmer Ian Arney, publican Liam Wood, cook Stefano de Pieri, hypnobirthing practitioner Cyndi Power and geologist Jodi Reynolds.
Mr Arney put his name forward after gaining experience working with the council as his region battled drought in recent years.
Mr Wood, the brother of former Melbourne Deputy Lord Mayor Arron Wood, was well supported in his second tilt at local government.
Restaurant owner and celebrity cook Mr de Pieri hosted ABC show A Gondola on the Murray in the 1990s and wanted to push for better services and funding from other tiers of government.
“We need to bring a fresh approach and new ideas,” he told his social media followers.
Ms Power, a dual Australian-American citizen, spoke about being a voice for women and health services during the campaign.
One of the first candidates to announce, Ms Reynolds did enough to secure the final spot on council.
Cr Milne, who amassed almost 17 per cent of the first-preference vote as a runaway leader, said he was “humbled” by the result.
“I was kind of the target of a lot of the pressure, but that community support is just fantastic,” he said.
“I think I really concentrated on what are the real issues that the community is facing, one of those is rates and I’m still determined to see a change in the rating system, because it just doesn’t work.”
Other topics he would continue to push for were returning cars to the mall, planning, increasing community satisfaction and fixing the rail line, after the Victorian Government scaled back the Murray Basin Rail Project.
Cr Milne said the new council was a diverse mix.
“The thing you want is diversity and that’s what you’ve got,” he said.
“My view on council is that councillors shouldn’t do deals, they shouldn’t say to one another ‘I’ll vote for this, if you support that’ … what you need to do is look at every item and vote exactly how you think you should vote.”
Cr Healy, elected on countback to fill a vacancy in the previous term, was elected outright for the first time.
She described the campaign as “quite negative at times” and said work would need to be done to rebuild trust in councillors, but was pleased with the mix that had been elected.
“I’m super pleased with the team, especially having three women, and Jodi and Cyndi are strong, smart intelligent women,” she said.
Cr Healy said her priorities for the term would include standards of conduct between councillors, rebuilding trust and getting genuine input from the wider community.
An issue she wanted to explore was “future proofing” the region, including investigating how waste could be turned into something different instead of being shipped away from Mildura.
Cr Healy had each of the five new councillors in the top nine on her how-to-vote card.
Four of the five were also preferenced by Cr Modica and Cr Eckel, who reliably vote in favour of progressive causes.
“I think the whole world is ready for a change,” Cr Healy said of the results.
“Doing business as usual post COVID, post the kind of summer we had, it just doesn’t seem to apply any more.
“So I think maybe people were ready for some new faces, new energy, maybe a shift in the way councillors manage transparency.”
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