Lake Macquarie remains stand-alone in a "commonsense decision"

“My heart was pumping, my pulse was absolutely racing and I had a huge smile on my face when I looked at the map and it showed Lake Macquarie as a stand-alone council,” Ms Harrison said on Friday after the NSW Government released merger plans for local government.

“I just said to some of the staff who were with me: ‘Well done you guys’.”

The government’s decision not to push ahead with a Lake Macquarie/Newcastle merger, after threats that councils that failed to propose voluntary amalgamations would face forced ones, was a surprise, Ms Harrison said.

“No, I wasn’t expecting it,” she said.

Lake Macquarie independent MP Greg Piper, who argued strongly with Premier Mike Baird and Local Government Minister Paul Toole for Lake Macquarie to stand alone, said he was “absolutely delighted” because of a decision that made logical sense.

“Clearly the finding that Lake Macquarie wasn’t fit for the future was a nonsense. How can you have Port Stephens, with a population of 65,000, found to be fit for the future when Lake Macquarie, with a population of 200,000, was found not to have size and capacity?” Mr Piper said.

“I strongly lobbied the case with the Premier, but when it seemed the government was determined on amalgamations I proposed a regional solution that I thought was the second-best option.”

Mr Piper’s proposal for an amalgamated Newcastle/Port Stephens council, and for Lake Macquarie and Gosford to shift their boundaries north and south to form expanded councils where Wyong would disappear, was put to the government.

In the end the government accepted Lake Macquarie’s argument that it could stand alone, merged Gosford and Wyong and decided Newcastle and Port Stephens should amalgamate, Mr Piper said.

“They’ve taken a bit of a hybrid of what I put and I think it’s a good sensible outcome,” he said.

Mr Piper said he understood if Port Stephens mayor Bruce MacKenzie was upset by the merger proposal for his council, but “this isn’t an attack on the council of the day, but a decision about what’s best for the future”.

Ms Harrison and Mr Piper said Boundaries Commission hearings would determine if there were localised decisions to be made about small fringe communities around Lake Macquarie including Mannering Park, Chain Valley Bay, Gwandalan and Summerland Point, and other areas near Newcastle.

“There’s parts of Lake Macquarie where you can’t get into the area without going through Newcastle,” Mr Piper said.

“Let’s wait for the dust to settle and then we can have those discussions.”