Boroondara Council votes to indefinitely shelve our petition to change the date! But we keep going!

Hi everyone, about 380 of you on Change.org, among over 600 in total including those who signed locally.

The petition, from Boroondara Reconciliation Network, was delivered to the November Council meeting but they said it was too late to do anything about changing the date of citizenship ceremony on 26th January this year.

Then two Councillors put a motion to the Council meeting on Monday of this week, just to have a public consultation on changing the date of the January 26 citizenship ceremony for 2025 and beyond.  But the opposers of any change used a procedural motion called "laying it on the table" to get the matter shelved indefinitely, so they would not have to have a debate on it!  Six Councillors voted for it to be shelved, with 5 against (those with their hands raised in the photo). 

You can see the recording of the meeting here. The section on this is from 11:50 to 23:28 minutes.

We'll have a new Council at the end of this year and maybe the numbers will be different then and we'll get more action in support of reconciliation. We are working on it by planning a campaign to elect supporters of reconciliation.  In the meantime, we have another petition, for all three national flags to be displayed in the Council chamber - only the Australian flag is there now, it should be joined by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags!  You can add your name to that petition here via a google form or here on change.org

Thanks again for your support - we will not give up on holding Council to account.