THE King Island community is being left in the dark about the upcoming Murchison Legislative Council election because of a legislative flaw the Government has failed to fix.
An election will be held for the Upper House seat of Murchison in just three weeks time – Saturday, May 6 – but most King Island residents would be unaware of this fact. Legislative Council elections are held only once every six years and Islanders could therefore be forgiven for being unaware of this one.
Despite this, the Tasmanian Electoral Commission has declined to put any advertisements about it in this newspaper.
When questioned as to why there have been no local advertisements, the Electoral Commission cited arcane law requiring that these advertisements be placed in a “daily” newspaper circulating in the area – in this case the Burnie Advocate, which has low circulation on King Island.
A similar law applies to King Island Council, meaning that things such as planning applications must also be advertised in the same daily newspaper, rather than locally.
While King Island Council usually also places such notices in the Courier because they understand the importance of communicating locally, they are under no obligation to do so.
In 2019, the Tasmanian Community Newspaper Alliance (of which the King Island Courier is a member) put in a submission to a now long-abandoned local government review process urging this arcane law be updated to include the option of advertising in local weekly or bi-monthly newspapers where appropriate.
However, like most other government reviews of this nature, nothing happened and in this case the review wasn’t even completed.
Too often, the State Government and their agencies such as the Electoral Commission are more than happy to use local newspapers to communicate with the community when it comes to news stories. But when it comes to paid advertisements which help keep the newspaper viable, they prefer to advertise in the mainland owned newspapers, or US-owned companies such as Meta.
King Island residents can be assured that despite this, we will faithfully report on the upcoming Murchison election and keep you as informed as we can.