Our Priorities, Our Future

What is Our Priorities, Our Future? 

Our Priorities, Our Future put the Glen Eira community at the centre of a challenging conversation to shape financially sustainable decision making.

This multi-channel, widespread engagement project gave our community the time, connections and knowledge to discuss and decide on Council’s key spending priorities — bringing high-level planning and community empowerment to people from all walks of life.  

Like families, businesses and councils across Australia, we are feeling the impacts of rapid inflation and rising costs. We needed to look at the best — and most responsible — ways to spend the money the community trusts us to manage.   

We wanted our community to better understand the challenges and help us find the solutions. So, we asked the community: Which infrastructure or services are priorities? How can we best raise money, or make savings, to pay for what we value most? 

Who did we talk to? 

Council received feedback from thousands of residents in a range of ways. We received nearly 2,000 community survey responses and conducted more than 2,300 conversations through 17 pop-up engagements.   

To make sure diverse voices were heard, we reached 420 people across four harder-to-reach cohorts. Together with translators, carers, teachers, advisory committees and community champions, we worked directly with multicultural groups, refugees, people with disabilities and seniors through 14 targeted engagement activities. We connected with 152 young people across five targeted pop-up sessions and held creative drawing activities with 54 children. 

Our Community Priorities Panel, a deliberative panel of 35 people, reflected our community’s demographics and diversity. It had access to a wide range of information and technical experts, and recommended to Council maintaining community wellbeing services, reviewing these services every four years, maximising existing assets and improving digital customer experience. 

Whether people had their say online, participated in the panel or drew a picture of what they like about Glen Eira, every response counted.   

What did the community say? 

The community was asked to prioritise our infrastructure and services, and provide ideas around raising money and making savings. 

The Our Priorities, Our Future community survey indicated the following services are most important to our community:

1. Open space
2. Recreation
3. Roads, footpaths and cycling
4. Waste
5. Libraries
6. Climate action

The community survey also showed:   

• The services that are least important to our community are business support information services; seniors programs; diversity and inclusion programs; permits for building and planning; and community groups, grants and support.   
• The community may be open to increasing fees and/or charges to maintain current service levels, with 52 per cent of the community responding in the ‘maybe’ range, but ‘no’ is the most common single response at 37 per cent.   
• Sponsorships and partnerships are the preferred option for Council to raise money to maintain current services, followed by increasing user fees. 
• Postponing building and/or replacing facilities is the preferred method for making savings. There is limited appetite for Council to reduce the range of services it delivers. 
• The community may be open to Council reducing spending on some services if it means the same range of services could still be provided but to a lesser standard. 

What’s next for Council? 

Council unanimously committed to using the findings from Our Priorities, Our Future to inform future planning and decision-making — a genuine demonstration of increasing participation and bringing shared values together to respond to shared challenges and influence future prioritisation, spending and revenue raising.