Councillor Kylie Wright will ask the council to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land at the beginning of council meetings and workshops.  

“It’s something that we don’t do, but I think is very important,” she said. 

“Most of the other groups, meetings and conferences that I go to, where there is any degree of officialdom, they have an acknowledgment of traditional owners.” 

Cr Wright moved a motion last month to have the council fly the Aboriginal flag outside the council offices, but it did not pass.

She had always planned to raise the two different motions.

“I really, fully expected the flag one to get through and I’d already intended to raise this one at a future meeting and I just thought might as well just do it now,” she said.  

While Cr Wright doesn’t expect this motion to pass, she is hoping for the best.

“I think that it’s important that we do either the flag, the acknowledgement or both,” she said. 

“It’s something we should be doing without question. There shouldn’t even have to be a conversation about it.”

Cr Wright said there was a lot of community support for the flag motion. 

“I’ve had quite a lot of people come up to me and say they can’t believe they knocked the flag back,” she said. “Nearly everyone that I’ve spoken to has had the same opinion.” 

Cr Wright said she had not received any community feedback about her traditional landowners motion yet, but said it would be interesting to see what happens at the August 21 council meeting. 

“Just having one councillor down can make all the difference in the outcome. We have nine councillors and even if we have a vote four and four, it’s still technically knocked back if there is no majority decision,” she said.  

“There were two other councillors that were about to put a similar motion forward, so there is at least support from two other councillors.” 

Councillor Margaret Osborne will not be able to attend the meeting, that starts at 10am.