Just under 60 per cent of residents who voted in the ‘Sunbury-out-of-Hume’ ballot want the town to secede and get its own shire.
Only 51 per cent of the 118,708 voters of Hume returned their ballot papers in the non-compulsory postal poll.
Of the 60,576 who did, 36,327 (59.96 per cent) voted for breaking away from Hume and 23,630 (39 per cent) were against. There were 619 informal votes.
Close to 60 per cent of voters in Sunbury itself returned their ballot papers.
Ballot papers were colour-coded to reflect 13 postcode districts of the Hume municipality to enable the Victorian Electoral Commission to distinguish between votes from Sunbury ratepayers and those from other districts.
Interestingly, at Craigieburn – with Sunbury, once part of the former shire of Bulla – the vote was slightly more in favour of a Sunbury breakaway. But the hamlet of Oaklands Junction, which is between Sunbury and Craigieburn, was decidedly against the move.
How Local Government Minister Jeannette Powell will assess the poll results will become clearer this week.
Ms Powell commissioned two independent reports to assess the viability of a stand-alone Sunbury shire. They found the town was being well served by being part of Hume and that rates were likely to rise steeply if it broke away.
Sunbury councillor Jack Ogilvie, a prime mover behind the breakaway push, had predicted 70 per cent of Sunbury residents would be in favour of secession. He also suggested the Local Government Minister would appoint commissioners to run Hume council and organise a redistribution of assets and the final boundaries of the new Sunbury shire. A spokesman for the minister described this as “speculation”.
The ballot fulfilled a promise by the present Coalition government in the run-up to the last state election to let the people decide whether a separate Sunbury shire would be viable. It was run as a commercial poll by the VEC.
