Aurukun Deputy Mayor Craig Koomeeta, Councillor Jayden Marrott, CEO Jack Dempsey and Councillor Leona Yunkaporta have sat down with the Cape York Weekly to outline their priorities for the current local government term. Photo: Lyndon Keane.
The new chief executive officer of Aurukun Shire Council says listening is the short-term focus as he and the elected body set their sights on a number of key strategic goals over the current four-year term of government.
Former Bundaberg mayor and Queensland police minister Jack Dempsey commenced in the role in late July and said he had hit the ground running as he aimed to provide some much-needed stability in the council’s top job.
“We’ve got a fantastic community,” he said.
“The community of Aurukun is certainly a very resilient community; they’re a community that is strongly united, and the first six weeks and the many months ahead is about listening to the community, taking on all of the different issues, and just working hard.”
When asked how the remote western Cape York community ended up on his radar after failing to gain a third term as Bundaberg Regional Council mayor at the 16 March local government elections, Mr Dempsey said he had a longstanding relationship with Aurukun from his time in government.
“I’ve been to Aurukun a number of times in other occupations and certainly it’s always appealed to me, the Aurukun community,” he said.
“It certainly has a number of opportunities, and for me and my family, who will be here in the coming months, it’s a time where I’m able to utilise all of the learning experiences over many years to be able to then work and work hard, and listen to the Aurukun community to look at how we can improve the liveability and lifestyle.”
Mr Dempsey said he harboured an ambitious goal to mentor locals so the council could boast a homegrown executive leadership team within a decade, a vision welcomed by Deputy Mayor Craig Koomeeta and Councillors Jayden Marrott and Leona Yunkaporta, who sat down with the new CEO and Cape York Weekly to discuss Aurukun’s future.
“Hopefully, in 10 years’ time, I will work towards a leadership team here that is based from the Aurukun community, and I would love to be able to either mentor or bring in place a person, born and bred from Aurukun, as the CEO of this council,” Mr Dempsey explained.
The elected members identified community safety, public housing and education as the three key areas they wanted to see improvement in before the next council election in 2028, with Deputy Mayor Koomeeta saying stakeholder accountability was a critical element in the plan.
“We haven’t ticked any of the boxes that we are wanting to achieve [as a community],” he said.
“You know, we’ve been talking about the same issues all the time and every time; I’m hoping that with the leadership that we have here … we’ll start ticking some boxes.”
First-term elected member Councillor Yunkaporta echoed the accountability sentiment and said the more than 100 stakeholders sharing approximately $150 million per year in funding needed to work together for the betterment of Aurukun.
“We show the community, okay, this is what we are doing as the leaders of our community, but we also need to sit and listen with the community and have that yarn, so that if there are issues arising, then we can all say, okay, so there’s 120 services in the community, how are we working together with these services as leaders of our community?” she said.
