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Why councils confuse consultation with engagement

Community engagement vs community consultation are often treated as the same thing in local government, but they operate very differently in practice.

The difference shapes who holds power, when decisions crystallise, and why trust either grows or collapses.

Communities know the difference, even when councils pretend not to.

What community consultation actually does in practice

Community consultation usually begins after key decisions have already taken shape.

A proposal exists.

Timelines are set.

Constraints are fixed.

Institutions then ask for feedback within those boundaries. People respond through surveys, drop in sessions, or submissions. The process records participation. As a result, the project proceeds, sometimes with small adjustments.

Consultation can be genuine. Even so, it remains narrow by design. It collects opinion rather than shared understanding. Because of that, disagreement often gets framed as resistance. Frustration follows, on both sides.

Community consultation answers one question, what do people think about this?

What community engagement looks like in practice

Community engagement starts earlier and runs deeper.

Engagement involves listening before options are fixed. It brings people into defining the problem, not simply reacting to a solution. It recognises local knowledge and lived experience, including impacts that reports often miss.

Because engagement unfolds over time, it requires continuity and trust. At the same time, it demands that institutions accept discomfort. Engagement does not promise agreement. Instead, it builds legitimacy.

Community engagement answers a different question, how do we understand this together?

Why the two keep getting blurred

Institutions often default to consultation because it feels safer. It fits legal requirements, procurement cycles, and delivery schedules.

In contrast, engagement shifts control. It exposes assumptions. It slows momentum. It makes power visible.

So consultation gets relabelled as engagement, even when nothing structural changes.

What good engagement shows on the ground

Strong engagement appears in ordinary, practical ways.

Early conversations.

Clear explanation of limits.

Feedback that explains what changed and why.

Ongoing presence rather than one off events.

People may still disagree. However, they understand the process, the trade offs, and their place within it.

Consultation seeks permission. Engagement earns confidence.

Communities know the difference immediately.

Links

NSW Department of Planning guidance on community engagement

IAP2 Australasia Core Values for Public Participation

When family love stops you from speaking up

I have been estranged from my family for twelve years.

I grew up knowing I had little in common with the family I was born into. Later, I married into another family where the same gap appeared. Years after that, my son married into a family where it surfaced again. The pattern repeats. Honesty stays close.

Tradition insists that DNA overrides everything else. In practice, it often overrides values, curiosity, and disagreement. Because of that, difference gets framed as risk rather than reality.

Estrangement carries grief. However, it also creates room to act.

Over the last twelve years, I have taken positions I would never have taken while managing family approval. I have worked publicly on social and environmental justice. I have challenged institutions. I have stayed with issues that attract pushback rather than praise. As a result, my life reflects what I believe rather than what others can tolerate.

That determination comes at a cost. Putting your head above the parapet is mentally demanding. It brings scrutiny, conflict, and sustained pressure. My family worried about that. They often framed their concern as care, stress, health, too much exposure, too much risk. Meanwhile, I experienced those same pressures as the price of doing work that mattered to the public, even when it unsettled people close to home.

Psychologists who work with estranged adults describe this pattern clearly. Karl Pillemer defines estrangement as intentional distancing in response to a relationship experienced as damaging. In contrast, Sherrie Campbell writes about families that rely on control and dismissal while presenting it as concern.

That framing shapes outcomes. It allows families to describe public action as recklessness and persistence as fragility. It also explains why attempts at staying connected often shrink into silence rather than dialogue.

I care about taking action on things that carry weight now. I accept the cost of being an outlier. I accept the strain without pretending it was avoidable.

DNA explains origin. It does not dictate alignment.

Twelve years on, the life built outside family approval carries coherence, agency, and direction. It is not a consolation prize. It is the point.

A moment in The Choral that shows how lived experience changes everything

I recently saw The Choral . It is a magnificent movie. It broke my heart in a good way.

Partly because it is so beautiful. Partly because it is so powerful. And partly because of one moment that keeps opening out into other moments long after you leave the cinema.

A choir member who is also a Protestant minister stands and says there is no such thing as purgatory. In his faith, the soul goes straight to heaven or hell. No in between.

Then Clive speaks.

He has come back from the war with one arm. He says purgatory is real. It is the space between two sides fighting, the moment when you step forward and you don’t know whether you will live or die.

The room goes completely still.

I am confident that minister would never stand up and say there is no purgatory again. I don’t think anyone else in the room would either and everyone who sees the film.

What moved me was not only the moment itself, but what it unlocked. How often lived experience cuts straight through belief. How two people can stand in the same place and see entirely different things, shaped by what they have lived, what they have lost, what they carry in their bodies.

It felt like a reminder to slow down in conversations. To listen more carefully. To leave room for the fact that someone else may be standing in a place you have never been.

Review: Heaven, My Home by Attica Locke is a Rare Crime Novel that Tells the Truth without Flinching

Heaven, My Home: Book 2 (Highway 59 by Attica Locke) is the rare crime novel that trusts the reader with complexity and tells the truth without flinching.

Attica Locke opens the book inside the fear of a nine year old white boy, Levi, alone on a lake after taking a boat without permission. The motor dies. The radio cuts out. Silence thickens under Spanish moss. Before race, before politics, before judgement, we sit with pure vulnerability. A frightened child. A bad decision. Consequences closing in.

That choice reverberates through the rest of the novel. Levi’s fear is immediate and personal, born of isolation and uncertainty. Later, when Ranger Darren Mathews reflects on what frightened white adults have done to the country, the contrast is unavoidable.

Fear in a child calls for care. Fear in those with power, left unexamined, becomes destructive.

Locke is unusually direct about the political moment she is writing into. She names Donald Trump repeatedly, refusing the safety of euphemism. Through Darren’s anger and his uncle Clayton’s blunt moral clarity, she captures the dread many Black Americans felt watching a far right wing president elected, a president perceived as excusing or emboldening Klan aligned ideology. This is not framed as abstract politics or partisan disagreement, but as a threat to safety, dignity, and belonging.

One of the book’s most unsettling achievements is its refusal to sanctify forgiveness. Clayton’s insistence that forgiveness has limits cuts against the comforting idea that moral grace is always redemptive. In Locke’s hands, forgiveness becomes something that can be weaponised, a habit that allows impunity to flourish when accountability is postponed again and again.

Place carries equal weight. The lake, the abandoned land, the back porch at dawn are not scenery. They hold memory, labour, exclusion, and loss.

Families stay, others are pushed out, time erodes even the most carefully laid plans. The land remembers longer than people do.

This is crime writing that places interior life at its centre. Marriage, desire, silence, and guilt are not side plots, they show how people seek safety when the world beyond their door grows hostile. Darren’s hope for the life of the child, his doubt about the country, his pull toward home, all sit in uneasy balance.

Heaven, My Home refuses to soften fear or smooth history. It names the moment it inhabits, honours Black interior life without explanation, and allows beauty and menace to exist side by side. It doesn’t tell you what to think. It shows you what it feels like to live there.

Review: Jane Harper The Last One Out

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Jane Harper writes Ro and Griff Crowley with such restraint that when their grief surfaces it feels almost intimate. Ro moves through the town with a kind of quiet damage she never names, and Griff watches her with that blend of care and regret that comes from a life reshaped by a single terrible night. Their pain is threaded through the small gaps in their conversations and the hesitations when they stand near each other.

What makes it so affecting is that their heartbreak feels lived. It’s the sort of sorrow that stretches across years, the kind people adapt to because there is no other choice. You see how parenting after loss has worn Ro thin at the edges, and how Griff carries his own sorrow like a weight he can’t put down. Harper trusts the reader to recognise that kind of bruising without explanation. It’s why you want to step inside the pages and hug them, offer something gentle where life has been so harsh.

The novel is also a stark reminder of what happens when mining rolls through a community. Harper shows the emotional strain, the economic fragility and the social unravelling that follow when a town is treated as a resource rather than a place where people build their lives. What unsettles you is how little the industry seems to care about the wreckage left behind. She doesn’t sermonise, she lets the truth sit there in the landscape, and the effect is quietly devastating.

#JaneHarper #LastOneOut #AustralianFiction #OutbackMystery #BookReview #MiningImpact #CommunityStories #LiteraryCrime

Review: The Seeker and the Sage by Brigid Delaney

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I read The Seeker and the Sage with a highlighter in my hand and my fixer brain running at full speed.

What The Seeker and the Sage taught me about being a fixer

On the surface it is Brigid Delaney talking to a Stoic “Mayor” about philosophy. Underneath, it is a book about people like me, people who see injustice, feel it in our bones, and then throw ourselves at it until there is not much left of us.

The line that hooked me early is the one I keep coming back to, that

our actions, our character and how we treat others are the only things we can control. Everything else, including what people say, what they click on, what they believe, is outside our hands.

As a truthteller who writes about power and abuse of power, that is both confronting and oddly comforting. I am used to working as if the outcome depends on me, as if more effort will eventually force the world to behave. The Mayor calmly points out that this is a recipe for misery. If your peace depends on the right verdict, the right headline, the right council decision, your peace is always at risk.

What the book keeps circling back to is the idea that the reward is doing the thing. The effort is the reward. You can line up your arrow, take care, use your skill, but you cannot control the wind. For someone wired to fix, that is a hard sentence to swallow. But it has also helped me see that my job is to tell the truth clearly, act with courage and fairness, and then let go of everything I never controlled in the first place.

The other idea that hit a nerve is about reality. Do you live in the world as it is, or in a story in your head that makes everything sweeter or more dangerous than it needs to be. As someone who spends a lot of time inside systems that are genuinely fraught and dangerous, this felt sharp. The Mayor’s answer is not to pretend things are fine, but to accept reality, think critically, and work within that reality instead of fighting the fact that it is hard.

The book is also strong on character. Courage, justice, wisdom and temperance are not abstract words here. They are habits. You practise them. You pick them up again when you drop them. You decide how to respond when you are angry, frightened or exhausted. As someone who is passionate about injustice, it reminded me that fury alone will not build the coalitions needed for change. Calm is not capitulation, it is a condition for good decisions.

Most of all, The Seeker and the Sage has helped me see my boundaries with clearer edges. I am still a fixer. I still care about corrupt systems, silenced voices, unfair outcomes. That part of me is not going anywhere. But this book has nudged me to shift the centre of gravity, from “Did I win” to “Did I act with integrity, did I stay true to my values, did I treat people well, including myself.”

If you are someone who carries the weight of the world, who feels responsible for outcomes you never fully controlled, this book offers more than ideas. It offers a way to keep your heart open without letting it be consumed.

The hero of today’s story is the photograph

Moos in the Mist

The past couple of weeks have been full on, and my head has been running its own agenda. “The book” has taken over completely. It does not seem to matter if it is two in the morning or two in the afternoon. The scenes arrive when they feel like it, and once they land, I have no choice but to deal with them.

And of course, in a book written by me you can expect strong female leads. That was always the plan. No Tess of the d’urbervilles anywhere to be seen. What I did not plan for was the problem I have now created for myself. I think I have fallen a little in love with the male lead. I am turning him into the perfect man and now I cannot stop thinking about him. If that is not a sign that I need to get out of my own head occasionally, I do not know what is.

And speaking of the male lead, my book might be fictional but it is based on true facts. On Friday I discovered that his first name was far too close to the real man’s name. Too close. A name I had used four hundred times. Thank goodness for Control F. I hit that button, held my breath, and watched the entire manuscript light up like a Christmas tree. Then came the not so romantic part. Control F Replace. Fictional man reborn.

It is much safer when these scenes arrive at two in the morning. Nobody sees me wandering around the house writing and rewriting them, half sentences in the dark. When they arrive in daylight, it becomes a public event.

A few weeks ago I went to Minnamurra for coffee with friends. I got out of the car thinking about a scene and stopped right there in the middle of the road to record it on my phone. Thank God it was Minnamurra and not Terralong Street. I can only imagine the commentary if I tried that in peak hour.

And then there are the drives home. A scene arrives, I need to catch it, and I start looking for somewhere to pull over. If you know the roads around here, you know how unrealistic that is. You cannot pull over. Not safely anyway. Ask the bicycle riders. They could give an entire TED Talk on the subject.

So yesterday morning, when I stood on my veranda, I felt grateful for my little piece of paradise. It gave me a short reset before diving back into all the things demanding attention, including one fictional man who is taking up far too much space in my head.

And that brings me to the hero of today’s story – the photograph. I have taken many photos from my front veranda, yet this one sparked something. A couple of people have already asked if they can paint it. I am not entirely sure why this particular image resonated more than the others, but it did.

What do you think, readers?

I am a bit partial to this one

#writinglife #novelinprogress #writersbrain #creativeprocess #rurallife #aussiestorytelling #amwritingfiction #strongfemaleleads #scenesfromtheveranda #lifeonafarm #writinghumour #behindthebook

When the question is bigger than blame. Let’s invite our Kiama community to be part of the solution

If you have been following my recent blog posts, you will know how we arrived at this moment. It began with a simple and reasonable question about what will happen to Kiama’s CBD once construction begins on the Akuna Street site. The more people asked the same question, the clearer it became that this is a conversation the whole community wants and deserves to have.

So I set out to explore what good planning looks like, drawing on world leading models such as Singapore where community involvement and long term vision guide every decision.

That work was never about debating the past. It was about understanding the situation we are now facing, because hindsight alone will not solve this. Akuna Street is going ahead, and the CBD will be disrupted for years.

The real question, the one that matters now, is this.

What can we do together to learn from places that have faced similar challenges and come out stronger?

Kiama is not the first town to lose its central parking.
We are not the first community to face a long construction period in the heart of the CBD.
We are not the first to feel let down by decisions made without clear long term planning.

So instead of sitting in frustration, let us shift the conversation to the shared work in front of us. Let us ask what other towns and councils have already learned, and how we can apply that knowledge here.

If we were sitting around the table together, where would we start

If I were a local councillor facing this situation, the first thing I would do is invite the community into the problem solving. Not as a gesture, but as a genuine partnership. Kiama is full of smart, resourceful people who care deeply about this town. We do not need to wait for a single expert to hand down answers. We can build them together.

Here are a few places we could start.

Identify examples of towns that have survived CBD shutdowns
Regional centres, coastal towns and small cities have all faced similar situations. Some handled the disruption well. Others did not. We can learn from both.

Look at temporary parking solutions that actually work
Examples include park and ride systems, business priority spaces, off site options, shuttle loops and temporary decks on cleared land. These solutions already exist. We do not need to invent them from scratch.

Keep the CBD alive during construction
Other towns have protected their small businesses with coordinated activation programs, weekend events, pop up markets and targeted support. Kiama’s traders deserve the same level of care.

Advocate for staged or sequenced construction
Councils elsewhere have negotiated construction conditions that avoid full closures or allow parking to be phased. Could we secure something similar.

Design a communication plan that treats residents as partners
Timely information, plain language updates and clear explanations are not optional. They are essential for keeping frustration down and confidence up.

Build a shared, forward looking vision
Instead of reacting only to the disruption in front of us, we can also ask what Kiama will need in ten years. What will traffic look like. What will our population need. What will businesses need. We can plan for that now.

Why this matters now

The CBD disruption is coming. That is a fact. How we respond as a community is the part still within our control.

We can choose frustration or collaboration.
We can choose blame or solutions.
We can choose to repeat the mistakes of others or learn from the places that got it right.

Kiama deserves a plan that draws on global best practice and local wisdom. It deserves leaders who look outward, learn widely and plan with courage. And it deserves a community that has a genuine voice in shaping what comes next.

Your turn

So I am asking you, as neighbours, ratepayers and people who love this town.

Where would you start.
Which ideas do you want on the table.
Which towns should we study.
Which solutions could work here.

I am listening. I know you are too. And judging by the speed of recent media releases, Council is watching this page just as closely as the rest of us.

#KiamaCBD #CommunityFirst #AkunaStreet #KiamaFuture #SmartLeadership #LearningFromOthers #FuturePlanning #LocalGovernment #CommunityVoice #PublicTrust

Review: Conversations with Friends shows the terror of needing love before you can feel hope

Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends is a book that creeps under your skin. It is not loud or dramatic, yet it leaves you uneasy, as if you have glimpsed the raw interior of a life that could, in moments, be your own.

At its centre is Frances, a young woman who seems self-contained and clever but is deeply unmoored. She hides behind analysis and irony, believing that detachment is strength. When she begins an affair with Nick, a married man, the relationship becomes less about desire and more about power, a testing ground for her own sense of worth.

Rooney writes this unraveling with quiet precision. Frances’s physical illness, her emotional withdrawal, and her hunger for love all speak to the same condition, the terror of being unseen. In her need to be chosen, she gives herself away piece by piece, mistaking pain for proof that she matters.

The book’s most unsettling truth is that love, for Frances, becomes the only route to meaning. Without it, she feels erased. Rooney does not offer redemption or comfort. What she gives us instead is a portrait of a young woman beginning to see herself clearly, learning that self-destruction is not romantic and that the need for connection is neither shameful nor safe.

The title Conversations with Friends feels deceptively mild. It gives no hint of the emotional turbulence beneath the surface, of how love and longing can twist into self-erasure. The conversations that matter most are not the witty exchanges between friends, but the ones Frances has with herself — the ones that hurt.

Conversations with Friends is less a love story than an exploration of intimacy and selfhood. It asks what happens when you reach for love before you have learned how to stand. It is bleak, brilliant, and profoundly human, a reminder that for some, the search for love is really a search for hope.

and this further thought

Not everything needs to be explained

I came across the official reading group questions for Conversations with Friends and found they ask readers to dissect Frances’s choices as if she were a case study to analyse why she did or didn’t do certain things, or to decide whether her behaviour was justified.

Who are we to judge? That kind of questioning misses what Sally Rooney does so powerfully. Her characters aren’t meant to be explained or fixed. They move through life in all its confusion, making mistakes, protecting themselves, reaching for love in ways that don’t always make sense. That’s what makes them real. Sometimes a book like this isn’t asking to be analysed. It’s asking to be felt.

Maybe this is why I don’t join book clubs. I’ve always found it easier to write than to speak about what I’m feeling. I need time to let a story settle before I can make sense of it. In conversation, I struggle to find the right words, but on the page I can follow the threads of a thought and discover what I really mean. I feel some books, Conversations with Friends among them, deserve that kind of quiet space. For me they’re not for debating, they’re for sitting with.

#SallyRooney #ConversationsWithFriends #BookReview #ModernFiction #EmotionalRealism #Relationships #Loneliness #Identity #Hope #Purpose #LoveAndPower #BookBlog

Graham Richardson. Whatever it takes and what it costs

When I was young, I thought Henry Kissinger was something special. He seemed calm, clever, powerful, the man everyone turned to when the world was on fire. The media made him sound like a hero. Only later did I learn about the secret bombings in Cambodia, the support for dictators, and the way real people paid the price for his so-called strategy. The shine came off pretty fast once you understood what those decisions meant for ordinary lives.

“Henry Kissinger is one of the worst people to ever be a force for good.” Nicholas Thompson, editor of newyorker.com

Graham Richardson came later, but I was never a fan. Different stage, same play. He was the backroom operator who knew how to pull the strings, the man everyone said you had to have on your side. Yet somehow, despite all the questions and all the deals, he stayed above it all. The media made him a character, not a cautionary tale.

“There were no true believers in Richo’s world, only those who could deliver. It was effective, certainly, but it left behind a smaller kind of politics, one that taught us how easy it is to win the game and lose the point of playing it.”

It’s funny how age changes what you see. Back then, power looked impressive. Now I look at it and wonder who was writing the story, and why we all believed it. Instead of lifting public life, he made it narrower, more cynical, more about winning than governing.

In the end, the commentators probably summed him up best.

“Richo was the ultimate Labor numbers man, brilliant, ruthless, and utterly transactional. He turned survival into an art form, always one step ahead of the fallout. To many, he made politics look like a business deal, where loyalty was negotiable and purpose optional. “

Addendum

News that Graham Richardson will be given a state funeral has stunned me Honouring him in this way feels less like recognition of public service and more like confirmation of how skewed our political compass has become.

There was a time when state funerals were reserved for those who lifted the country, people whose contribution went beyond party or personal survival. Now it seems the test is different: power itself has become the virtue.

It’s not about denying grief or denying that he mattered to many. It’s about what we, as a nation, choose to honour. When a life spent mastering political deals is celebrated as public greatness, it tells us more about our leaders than about the man in the coffin.

For me, it’s another reminder of why integrity still matters, and why we need to keep asking the hard questions about who gets remembered, and what for.

Investigative reporter Kate McClymont’s story in SMH today 11 Nov 2025 is behind a paywall but it is so spot on it’s worth a subscription. ‘Long lunches, Swiss bank accounts and a kangaroo scrotum: My decades pursuing Graham Richardson”

#PowerAndPerception #MediaInfluence #Realpolitik #AustralianPolitics #GrahamRichardson #HenryKissinger #WhateverItTakes #PublicAccountability #LessonsFromHistory #CriticalThinking