The Buddhist Hour Radio Broadcast Archives

MAYOR'S MESSAGE

The elected Council of the Shire of Yarra Ranges has now been in office for over 12 months. This is our second Corporate Plan for the Shire and reflects the Council's commitment to the ongoing success of the Shire. We believe this will be achieved through sustainable development balanced with community aspirations, attention to lifestyle considerations and protection of the area's valuable natural environment.

In development this plan Council undertook an extensive community consultation process. There was also a comprehensive review of Council's achievements and a thorough analysis of challenges facing the Shire over the next five years.

The result is a Corporate Plan that sets a clear direction for the future, including a framework within which to achieve success. Our direction is expressed in Council's Vision for the Future and the four Key Result Areas that focus on the long-term priorities. The framework has been established after considering those strategies and actions which focus upon priorities over the next 12 months.

Within this framework Council's role to serve the community is paramount and it is clearly indicated throughout this Plan. We have identified various performance indicators, which are to be monitored to ensure the highest level of service is achieved within our available resources.

Council and Shire staff are committed to open government, and see ourselves as being in partnership with the community to meet the challenges before us. We are making a special effort over the next 12 months to improve our communication processes. We intend that the community will better informed about Council activities and be encouraged to increase feedback to us on issues.

This Corporate Plan is important to Council and the community. The achievements from the 1997/98 Corporate Plan, and the ongoing review process are the basis for this new Plan. They ensure that the 1998-2001 Corporate Plan addresses contemporary community needs, and its focus is relevant and targeted. I am confident that, with the continued support of the community, Council will achieve the Vision to which we all aspire.

David Hodgett
Mayor

CEO'S OVERVIEW

In their first year in office, the Councillors of the Shire of Yarra Ranges have achieved an enormous amount. Council has worked as a committed team to set clear directions for the Shire, to achieve agreed outcomes and to bring the Shire together. This Corporate Plan reflects that commitment.

The 1997/98 Corporate Plan established a number of directions and actions for the past year. Council deserves credit for the overall achievement of these outcomes in a challenging environment of limited resources. Yarra Ranges Shire faces significant challenges over the next five years. Council has set out a direction in this Plan to address these challenges in the immediate and medium term future.

One major challenge in the upkeep of the Shire's infrastructure. Rate capping and reductions in government grants have combined to create a funding problem for the maintenance and improvement of the Shire's infrastructure, particularly roads, drainage, buildings and swimming pools. Recent community surveys undertaken by Council and by the Office of Local government both highlight the importance of roads to the community and the high level of dissatisfaction with the quality of the Shire's roads.

Another major challenge facing Council is balancing economic development and the environment, in order to achieve a solid framework for the Shire's future sustainability. Council recognises the importance and value of the natural environment to the community. It also recognises that appropriate economic development is essential for increased employment opportunities and the financial security of the Shire. The Council's new Planning Scheme and Municipal Strategic Statement provide a framework for this balance. Yarra Ranges Shire processes the highest number of planning applications in the State each year, reflecting in part the effort inherent in achieving a balance between environmental concerns and development opportunities.

Council has placed a priority on improving communications with the community in order to improve service delivery, increase the community's awareness of Council and enhance Council's ability to consult with and advocate on behalf of the community.

Council's key priorities are contained in this Corporate Plan under the umbrella of four Key Result Areas (KRA's). The Strategies and Actions listed for each KRA provide more detail about what is to be done. These KRA's have been prepared thought consultation with the community and staff.

Council has set itself a challenging but achievable task. The success of any corporate plan is reliant upon the continued commitment and performance of our staff, constructive input from the community, and ongoing support of the Council. I am confident that we will meet these challenges and achieve the targets outlined in this Plan.

Eric Howard
Chief Executive Officer

Our response to the report is in the form of the following letter. The letter was addressed to Pam Harris.

Pam Harris
Corporate Plan Feedback
Corporate Strategy Unit
Shire of Yarra Ranges,
Anderson Street, Lilydale 3140.

FAX : 97395319

Dear Pam Harris,

Re: Corporate Planning

Further to my telephone call on Friday, 5 March 1999, I am putting forward suggestions that we found useful when we worked on our Corporate Plan. May you be well and happy.

1.0 Some questions we consider when we review our corporate plan.

Does the plan suggest medium and long term economic sustainability?

*Our mission is to stay viable on service delivery for 500 years.

Does the corporate plan suggest at least one standard deviation difference in outcome from known competitor's roll-out plans?

* A question of not being too old-fashioned.

Does the plan include the prudent means to contract, expand or change course in services promised?

* A question of rapid response to opportunities.

Are the present corporate planners likely to stay with the organisation long enough to drive and implement the plan?

* A question of involvement and induction of new Members.

Obviously, we do not the time to undertake the research needed to answer these questions from your viewpoint.

2.0 Who is your audience?

We think the Shire's current plan machinery needs stronger emphasis (e,g. value propositions) to target a national corporate audience who will invest in the Shire to bring job creation for future prosperity to the Shire.

To do this, you must send a welcoming strong signal.

We suggest a potential strategy which may be explored is where you create through the application of current Shire resources a value proposition that will attract technologists, entrepreneurs and 3rd level post industrialists who will build an eco-technology park in the Shire.

We suggest the Shire plan to create at least two distinct value outcomes which will create propositions of value that will attract both current and new visitors to the region and additional visit generated revenues by spending on two event destinations in different parts of the Shire on each visit.

This means we think the Shire corporate plan must be grounded in tactics designed to bring more private money into the area i.e. it must create more tourist, service and technology/eco-technology jobs.

In general, we rate local tourist services as underdeveloped compared with what we have seen on overseas visits to peak enterprise performers.

At our peak events, we provide translators to explain what is happening in one or two languages.

Intrastate competition in Victoria is becoming substantial.

A Grand Prix or a Casino in Melbourne may not cause a flow-on of added wealth to our local Shire traders or take revenue for the local Shire.

At the moment, we have an impression that such events may well result in local money flowing away from the area as net capital towards Melbourne city.

In general, without disparaging the intellect of local persons, we see unskilled tourist operators exercising rustic charm in the area not generating sufficient vision in their financial schemes.

From inception, decades ago, we have believed the Shire is an ideal place to operate our Centre.

Many of our Students think so too and have been encouraged to buy property in the area.

The Shire itself needs to define core business as getting more know-how on how to develop value added products for their local goods and services.

Good current global thinking is if you cannot add value by developing your existing services, they should be unbundled as such services are non-core business.

We are happy to know in recent years the amount of global thinking or cultural lag we see as existing between the Shire staff and ourselves in practical matters is closing.

We desire for more information development from serving visitors.

For example, although our web-site was on line before the Shire, we are happy you have caught up and are running this technology.

3.0 An invitation for joint enterprise next year.

We have ceased inviting your staff in recent times, because some functions run in weekends and you appear not to have enough staff to offer them flexible working hours.

You must be willing to move your guidelines to test yourselves.

An example of a lag, as we see it at present, is that the Shire fails to realise the cultural significance of the Chinese New year to billions of persons in the world.

As you are aware, for many years, we created opportunities in the Chinese New Year season to gear our organisation's blueprint by forcing ourselves to develop more and better Asian know-how so we could add culturally adaptable events where the non-racist values of tolerance were taught for all sections of Australians.

Last month, by continued quiet devotion from our serving Members, we generated about $4000 profit by hosting and catering for short visits by thousands of persons who have a cultural need to visit a Temple for an hour or two during the Chinese New Year.

They admired our new images and recent improvements in our garden.

The will and expertise we develop shows we can recognise such an opportunity to create PR values designed to lift the profile of this Shire area.

It has taken us 15 years to gain mastery of this Chinese festival.

Our Chinese and other visitors make videos of our peak performance and this performance is seen by many persons and written about in many countries information sheets.

With Shire as co-sponsors and co-operation, we could increase the scale by a factor of two with poise.

Accordingly, it appears to us that the Shire's corporate plan does not have a high priority to the implementation on such matters as the Chinese New Year.

But, this would require a cultural shift of you opening up your resources and requesting your staff to attend our festival in real time at weekends.

We think you should try the learning experience by joining us next year and we will teach you how we "operationalise" such events and promote the Shire. A great measure of our success is because our planning teams have access to about five locally qualified MBA's.

Our Corporate Plan required much rethinking over the last decade as we forced ourselves to create a better culture climate that put more emphasis on attending to "wider communities" essentials.

Our good information network operates in more than 37 countries.

If we are encourage the fortunate 3% of the Buddhist Australian population to join in our "local" communities festivals, it would not take much local incentive to encourage them to buy hectares of land.

We know other Shires give encouragement for both private use and are encouraged by their councils to set up tertiary research industries on such housing sites.

We are privy to one Victorian Buddhist initiative which will include a $ 500 million medical research institute.

This first stage of this project starts this year because it was fast tracked by Mr. Kennett. If our local Shire Corporate plan had a different tone and more commercial scope, I think I could have encouraged our friends to set up that development in this region.

It is too late now. I feel sad when I tell why your policies are not working globally.

4.0 Where are you coming from? Where are we coming from? Do you wish to close the gap?

As we see it from our performance, we have globalised our thinking one level above the Shire officers at present. Your officers require deep and significant cultural change to contemplate the future directions we are suggesting and to get more references and better grounds to disclose exactly what is the cornerstone of your planning.

We are unable to find any reference in the Shire's Corporate Plan which discloses the paradigm of its drafting or any meta-structure suggesting it arises from some coherent theory unifying its composition.

As a teacher and adviser of many years standing and someone with years of working for the benefit of the many with self help groups in 14 countries of the world, I can understand that there is a felt need as a local political demand for council officers to stay with old paradigms.

Nothing good happens while stakeholders are afraid of taking a univocal policy stance at least more than one standard deviation away from "what they think they know to be acceptable".

We empathise with your organisation when you get "hate mail" in public space with a CSMP Survey Result in April 1997 of 59%.

Your business plan target for 1998/99 of 60% is noted.

The 40% section of the community in this Shire that sounds off about the inconvenience some ratepayers may experience when the council moves away from a paternalistic stance towards a more cost effective stance of "user pays" is not in the public interest.

We do not see why local tax payers should fund the type of luxuries demanded every day in Australian communal life.

Followers of Buddha Dhamma are practical and believe in "user pays" notions because they know cause and effect (karma) means "there is no such thing as a free lunch".

We find no social injustice or magic or "luck" in the actuality that decent persons live longer and have happier life styles than impoverished persons.

As you are aware, some years ago, the Henderson report established a poverty line in Australia.

In our analysis, we do not use classic Marxist theory of class action because we do not feel our organisation can be viewed in 1999 as either an oppressor or as the oppressed.

Actors in Weberian theory may well be fictitious "puppets" because the depicted consciousness of such actors "is not subject to the ontological conditions of human existence" (Schultz 1962).

We can understand this old fashioned Marxist perspective may be held by some ratepayers when the Shire reviews processes.

We are pleased we have found some overlay where we can work in harmony with the Shire of Yarra Ranges since its inception.

5.0 How we suggest you break the nexus for the 40% "dissatisfied".

As we see it, you need a 10 or 20 year focus strategy.

You must move away from belief in the old-fashioned dialectical materialism as a basis for discussion.

Without a steady 10 or 20 year focus, I fail to see how you could expect to ground your views sufficiently to devote full analysis of the sociological foundations of the matters we raised.

We appreciate you are in the nexus of having limited resources to critique your own developed Corporate Plan.

You must somehow raise funds to break this nexus.

Although you seek feedback, the nexus makes it difficult for you to accept the time constraints before you have to produce something. It is difficult to ask a mother to digest her own baby.

We have the luxury of planning using proven models without too much pressure over a longer time period.

Last November, I delivered a peak paper to delegates from about 70 countries at the World Fellowship of Buddhists Conference in Australia of what are the risks and opportunities to be had in the information age. The paper was developed over 6 months.

It was so well received. I was elected as a Vice President of the WFB. I hope to finish my latest book this year. It includes a plan to teach responses to the 1998 current international analysis paper.

After being discussed for five days at the Conference some of the 25 global issues raised in my paper, many responses are being researched overseas as to what 21st Century responses should be made to the challenges that lie ahead for followers of Buddha Dhamma. Our Upwey Centre is the test bed for new sound thought.

6.0 How diversity can create local wealth.

Our corporate plan is to encourage a critical mass of 100 new persons over the next 20 years who we have trained to live in the area.

These persons will bring funds and tertiary job skills into the Shire to help catalyse the art of the viable development.

Such persons did not attract too much verbal mischief from others in the community as they form centres of influence.

It is valid to start from the global viewpoint that verbal mischief reverberation comes from a local demographic of having between 15% to 30% of the population who are poorly educated, lack life skills and may be either idle or underemployed.

U.S.A. and Polish research suggests such persons hinder urban development because they carry the culture of poverty and transmit it to whoever will listen to them in their ghettos.

"Redneck" mind set profiles are well researched and popularly understood by terms such as "dumbing down".

In the local Shire case, the survey results could be "explained" by the appearance of this mind-set being held by some of the 40% of the " dissatisfied" residents.

Nowhere else in the world, do we find this reverberation is taken seriously by community leaders when they plan development.

Persons who believe the "red-neck" mind-set tend to take themselves seriously but, unfortunately, they also tend to turn to suicide when the going gets tough.

The suicide rate of persons in Australia indicates we have the worst mental health in the world. Poor mental health leads to and from the culture of poverty.

Australia has one of the world's most generous allowance schemes to reward persons for not working. The popular "red-neck" ignorant view seems to be why should someone work for a living when they get on quite well without. Their preferred work is in heavy industry.

Since there seems agreement heavy industry will not be welcome in the Shire to create local jobs, the Shire should rethink the basics that decision has on the preferred employment of "red-neck" persons and job establishment.

This is an area of expertise of our organisation where Members are given training that motivates them to an average four times more income level than when they first came.

We believe our success in this culture change is due to our Centre's location of our workplace training in the Shire.

We do not believe we could achieve the same attitude shift if we were in a population of high density living.

As you may be aware, our 2026 corporate plan covers the next 20 years and we will plan to set up other small training units in the Shire helped by our LAN and WAN servers.

7.0 Sending welcome signals to tertiary trained persons.

We think it would help us to create quality information jobs in the Shire if all tertiary industry in the Shire employing professionals were made exempt from all rate payments for ten years starting next year.

Another change we would like to see is the government to review the notion of private residential zoning that excludes training organisations should be amended to allow up to, say, 80% use of private premises in the Shire for professional use.

We suggest that be staged in over six years, say from the supposed 25% to 50% in all cases, then 60% then 80%.

The need to generate affordable local business change matches internet business well. Throughout Asia, home and business premises have been on one site for a thousand years.

Analysis shows the error of divided work sites brings social chaos caused by forced splitting of work space from living space.

We service 100 more worldwide clients ("virtual visitors") a day on our internet site. This is more than persons who physically visit our site. We also make contact via KNOXFM.

Should you set up a Shire radio information outlet?

We expect internet to rise to 1000 contacts a day this year.

We are pleased the Shire has a website.

To show cooperation with a peak community group, we suggest you hot link to us to give others further information of what we have.

Members who create wealth buy local houses as a first priority.

If we did not teach our Members to become wealthy; they could not afford to live in the Ranges near our Hall of Assembly.

Finally, I might mention you appear to be breaking the law with your publications.

Publications in Australia, by law, should have an ISBN or ISSN from the Federal Government and this number should be printed on your publications. A copy of your publication should be lodged with the National library and the Victorian State library.

We look forward to more PR joint cooperation of the type we used on FOUNDER's DAY ( 9 September).

If you require further information, please contact me.

Wishing you every success with your review,

With kind regards,

John D. Hughes Dip. App. Chem. T.T.T.C. GDAIE
Founder.
Buddhist Discussion Centre (Upwey) Ltd.

May all beings be well and happy.

This script was written and edited by John D. Hughes and Leanne Eames.

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