Zooming in on a virtual opportunity

By Anthony Judd, Chief Executive Officer, Buloke Shire Council

Buloke Shire Council held its May Ordinary Meeting virtually, thanks to Zoom, and livestreamed the meeting. Both achievements were firsts for Council. 

The COVID-19 pandemic will no doubt identify many opportunities for small rural Councils, but for Buloke in the state’s northwest, with its sparsely populated and large land mass, our meeting had never been so accessible. 

Buloke Shire Council was born from the amalgamation of four shires and parts of a fifth - and encompasses a total area of 8,000 sq km, occupied by just over 6,000 people. Council meetings are traditionally conducted in Wycheproof, the most central of five major townships in the Shire. However, some parts of Buloke are more than 100km from Wycheproof. Consequentially, meetings are often conducted with small galleries or in front of nobody at all. 

Streaming this month’s meeting saw around 60 people ‘attend’. People who may not be prepared to travel and commit the time to do so, pulled up a chair and engaged. 

While Council has the opportunity during the pandemic to continue to meet virtually, there may be an opportunity to better engage its community in Council business by broadcasting meetings - virtual or physical - into the future. 

The facilitation of the recent broadcast and the tools supplied to give Councillors the confidence they needed to undertake the meeting, was an excellent collaboration between staff from the Executive Office, Information Services and Governance teams. 

The managers from these areas also took the time to understand the process required by reaching out to other Councils who had already broadcast a virtual meeting and by utilising resources supplied by the Municipal Association of Victoria and LGPro. 

As they say in showbiz, “It’s gotta be right on the night”, and thanks to the hard work of all involved not only was first night was right, it may not be the last.