Hi Editor, 

A big “thankyou” for your campaign against the Council’s move to the Masters building. Having worked for a council in Victoria (The City of Greater Geelong) that underwent amalgamation, this is the way it panned out: 1. All the smaller councils moved in to Central Geelong. 2. Services to outer lying areas of the council declined because council officers no longer wanted to travel the vast distances involved. 3. More and more work started being tendered out to private industry. 4. Workers eventually lost their jobs due to private industry putting in unsustainably low tenders (to remove councils envolvement). 5. The large council offices that all the taxpayers money had been spent on were now half empty – contract administration was one small department that stayed. 6. Overall, a vast reduction in services to taxpayers. It is my belief that this is an orchestrated campaign to take the control away from local people, and to give the power to State governments, whose ultimate goal is to tender everything they can to private industry to profit from……A very Liberal ideology.

Wayne Brissett