Cr Drylie speech

Cr Tim Drylie gave the following speech at the Special Council Meeting on Tuesday 15 November 2022. 

Watch a recording of the speech.

It has been an honour to lead the Council team and serve my local communities as Mayor and I thank everyone involved for their support and advice over my term. It has, as we know, been a difficult year for many people as we emerge from the extended stresses of the Covid pandemic and the trauma of three major storm events in the shire. Combined with rising interest rates and cost of living pressures, the past year has presented its fair share of painful experiences, which for many continues to be of daily concern.

I have also been involved in some difficult decisions along the way including the exiting of local aged care services, the selling of The Rex building and making necessary deferrals and cancellations to projects to help keep our fragile financial situation above the line. However, without diminishing the significance of the challenges we have faced I’d also like to focus on a sense of gratitude I feel at the same time.

I am grateful to have met and been invited to join with so many incredible local community groups and individuals. It has been a privilege to have shared in their stories, to better understand their histories and challenges and to have grown with them as a result. It has also been important to stand up and advocate for these same people, to challenge myself to become a better leader and to cherish the gifts of being enmeshed and engaged in the lives of people in my local community.  Together, I think we can be proud that coming out the other side of this year, there is a sense that we may be collectively a little stronger, a bit better prepared, and that a sense of renewal, and a new identity may be forming out of all the change and uncertainty.

I have also gathered greater respect and appreciation for the beauty and power of the land and place I call home and to want to continue to heal this upside-down country in partnership with our First Nations custodians. I respectfully acknowledge Dja Dja Wurrung people as the custodians of the land and warmly embrace the indigenous wisdom shared with us by elders past and present as we up our game to protect the ecosystems that sustain us, reduce our impact, and regenerate what has been degraded. I look forward to walking together in a continuing partnership on a path to treaty, to participate in truth telling, acknowledge past injustices, to pay the rent and heal country together.

I’m also grateful that during my term as Mayor there have been numerous successes that I’m happy to celebrate and remember. These include launching several strategies including Sustainable Hepburn, Positive Ageing, the ACE Youth Strategy and Early and Middle Years Strategy.

We have also embarked and continue important pieces of work that promote greater social justice in our communities - these  include an Affordable Housing Strategy, fighting for local people for a better outcomes and a different route for the towers associated with the problematic Renewables Link and VNI West projects, and undertaking a massive town structure plan review to better plan and create certainty for our future sustainable development and growth.

We also commenced some major projects including the Hammon Park mountain bike trail head in Creswick, the Trentham Community Hub, and a new pavilion at Trentham Sports Ground Reserve. We received some positive news that Creswick will host the mountain biking at the 2026 Commonwealth Games.

I’m proud that we are renaming Jim Crow Creek to Larni Barramal Yaluk as was the wish of our first nations peoples.

We adopted an Aquatics Strategy and appointed our first LGBTIQA+ Advisory Committee – along with the Big Rainbow coming to Daylesford.

I am particularly proud of our Sustainable Hepburn Strategy which involved significant input from our community reference group and 400 community members. This new document goes further than just treating sustainability as fringe issue, an inconvenient truth, or something we should do in our spare time. Sustainable Hepburn attempts to integrate, remodel and weave sustainability and circularity as fundamentals concepts that underpin everything we do as an organisation and for better outcomes shire wide on issues of climate change, biodiversity, rethinking and reducing our waste burden and provide better ways for us to adapt to and prepare for these changing times we are evidently in.

I am thrilled and love that in these last weeks of my Mayoral term I have been able to be so directly involved in community life and I have attended and participated in multiple events across the shire. I encourage you all to continue to be kind to yourselves and others through these unprecedented times and to reach out for help if you need it and to lend a hand to others in your community where you can. We all have a meaningful part to play in shaping more sustainable future pathways, both physically and spiritually, in this wonderful part of the world we call the Hepburn Shire.

I’d like to thank Deputy Mayor, Jen Bray for her unwavering support and wisdom. Cr Bray brings such a passion and energy for community and lives it with every fibre of her being.  Thanks also to my fellow Councillor colleagues, CEO Bradley Thomas, and all the incredibly hardworking and dedicated staff of Hepburn Shire Council. I’m also eternally indebted and grateful for the love, joy and patience of my family and friends who have been there on the journey, through thick and thin, over the past year.

I wish the incoming Mayor and Deputy, whoever they may be, all the very best for the coming year.