Our Community Engagement Strategy is a dedicated framework that reflects our commitment to transparent and meaningful communication with our community. It outlines how we will connect, listen, and engage with you, ensuring that you are informed and involved in decisions that may affect your lives.

Our engagement strategy sets clear expectations for the community. It explains the tools and methods we use to communicate with different groups, shows how we identify engagement opportunities, and ensures we meet required timeframes for public exhibition periods, so you always know what to expect.

A Community Engagement Strategy is a required element of the Department of Local Government’s Integrated Planning and Reporting Framework as outlined in the Local Government Act.

The Community Engagement Strategy is our commitment to the community on how we will communicate and engage with them and outlines our goals and objectives to improve these interactions over the life of the strategy.

The draft Community Engagement Strategy 2025-2029 was placed on public exhibition between 27 February and 6 April 2025.

This was communicated to the community through a number of channels including social media, media releases, the weekly New Wrap and community databases.

During the public exhibition period a total of 12 submissions were received from the community.

The following changes to the document were made as result from the submissions received:

• The Community Engagement Strategy outlines all the considerations of Council when making decisions in addition to community feedback. An additional sentence has been included in the strategy (page 13) to explain that Council not agreeing with or accepting a position of an individual or group does not mean the feedback was not considered.
• The strategy has been updated to include regional/agricultural communities as a specific stakeholder group