Talk:Yarra Ranges Shire

Suburbs and towns - what's the difference?

I don't understand what particular characteristic of a locality places it in one or the other of the first two columns. For instance, why is Sherbrooke under Suburbs and Sassafras under Dandenong Ranges? HiLo48 (talk) 10:30, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

In an Australian context, towns are non-contiguous, suburbs are contiguous. All localities in SoYR are technically suburbs, but there is some debate as significant parts of it are located outside the Melbourne Urban Centre/Locality defined by the ABS. Powelltown is a good example. As such, "towns and suburbs" or "towns and localities" is often used in titles but without saying which is which, as that would be original research. The exception is those which are clearly part of the UC/L, which get put in the "Suburbs" column. Hope this helps to explain it. Orderinchaos 11:31, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

I think the goal is clear enough, but the current results are very unclear. "Suburbs and towns" is fine as a heading. It's the column headings under that which appear silly. My original question still stands as an instance of that- "...why is Sherbrooke under Suburbs and Sassafras under Dandenong Ranges?" What purpose do those column headings serve? HiLo48 (talk) 23:51, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

Sherbrooke is the odd one out in that list, as it doesn't appear to be in the UC/L. Re your question: "Suburbs" is the contiguous suburbs in Melbourne's east, while "Dandenong Ranges" covers anything beyond Melbourne's suburbs which fits in that specified region. Orderinchaos 06:04, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

Sassafras is a difficult one as one tiny part of it (next to The Basin) is part of the UC/L, but the great majority of it, and its population, are outside. Tremont is in almost the same boat, except the section outside is completely unpopulated, so I've included it under Suburbs. Orderinchaos 06:19, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

I agree with HiLo48. The way that this information is constructed is unclear. Sometimes these kinds of tables are useful, but as currently constructed the information will simply be confusing to the average reader - I know it is to me. AngoraFish 木 01:52, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

Yes, I haven't changed my mind either. Arbitrary legalistic definitions won't help a new reader. It's still confusing. And illogical. One list would be better. HiLo48 (talk) 02:35, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

The name change and the logo

In the Australian place infobox we have a logo that says "Shire of Yarra Ranges", the old name for this article. I accept that the name change for the article is correct, as "Yarra Ranges Shire Council" is the name currently used. And the shire now uses a logo which just says "Yarra Ranges Council". As a long time resident (for the whole life of the shire) I reckon the name we used to have here was correct and that it has been changed at some stage. A good article would tell us when. And can we use the new logo? HiLo48 (talk) 02:31, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

Working on it as you wrote. :) The correct title has always been "Yarra Ranges Shire Council". The Shire by convention used "Shire of Yarra Ranges" as its public title up until a 2009 rebranding exercise. Why "Shire of..." was used originally is not something I am clear on, since most formal state government material has always referred to it thus. See, for example, VEC results for previous Council elections. AngoraFish 木 02:50, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

Ah. It's good to know that my rates are being spent on such a critical rebranding exercise! Thanks for the clarification. HiLo48 (talk) 02:54, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

I just saw this after changing the article back to the "standard" form used for all other Victorian LGAs. It is worth noting that "Yarra Ranges Shire Council" is not the official name of the LGA, but only the council; the official name of the LGA is "Yarra Ranges Shire" (and in like fashion the official name of the City of Moreland is "Moreland City"). Seeing as this article, in appropriate fashion, is about both the council and the area, and that all similar articles are about both, there is no reason to use an inconsistent title format for this one alone. —Felix the Cassowary 19:05, 13 March 2011 (UTC)

Per WP:NC-GAL, the official name is Yarra Ranges Shire Council. The term "of" is not used in official reference to other Victorian LGAs either. Articles using "of" in the title are incorrect and also need to be reviewed. See authoritative sources such as the Victorian Electoral Comission and Department of Planning and Community Development. Although WP:NC-GAL is the relevant guideline, several criteria under the more general WP:Name also apply including recognizability ("of" is used in no significant current information referring to Yarra Ranges Council), naturalness, precision, conciseness and consistency (per the correct titles rather than current incorrect usage on Wikipedia). I would also add that the article is clearly about the LGA and not the geographic area, which is in any case only defined with reference to the LGA and therefore the distinction is meaningless - "Yarra Ranges" is not a registered place name. AngoraFish 木 05:13, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

This article is about the Local Government Area, not just the managing body (Shire of Yarra Ranges Council) of the LGA. I think you have confused the LGA with the body as the LGA is the geographic area. I suggest that you use the WP:RENAME. Bidgee (talk) 08:49, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

If this article is about the area, who gave the area it's name and why is its name different from the LGA? Why does the article include the organisation's website, logo and mayor in the infobox? Where is the article on the managing body? The whole distinction seems to be a wikipedia editor's invention. Neither the name of the area, nor the name of the managing body is "Shire of Yarra Ranges" or "Shire of Yarra Ranges Council". If you like, perhaps the "area" is "Yarra Ranges", although the "managing body" is most verifiably "Yarra Ranges Shire Council" (by all means, however, free to supply references to the contrary). I have suppled multiple quality sources to support the correct name. Please provide your references or I will seek arbitration. For what it's worth, I'm fairly confident that the policy on changing one's username is irrelevent here. For your reference I stronly suggest you refer to the actual relevant policies WP:NC-GAL and WP:Name that I have referred to repeatedly in my comments and summary. AngoraFish 木 09:45, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

Some (admittedly OR but hopefully helpful) input from a resident of the shire for nearly 40 years - I don't recall the name Yarra Ranges having any local significance at all until the creation of the new shire through mergers in 1994. It doesn't reflect a local historical name for the area or any part of it. It was a political concoction in the early 1990s, presumably from what ARE two historical names in the shire, the Yarra Valley and the Dandenong Ranges. HiLo48 (talk) 10:16, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

(ec - agreed with HiLo) The confusion here is between the Local Government Area (LGA), which is what these articles are about as subsets of a state, and Local Government Authorities, which are in charge of LGA's and are called Councils and have the logo, common seal and other attributes of being a legal authority capable of signing documents and contracts. With the exception of some New South Wales and South Australian LGAs, due to ambiguity in the Act (NSW) or specific provisions (SA), people do not live in a Council (unless they are homeless and particularly desperate), nor is a Council a subset of a state; in both cases they are LGAs. The logo is for the authority, so is not relevant here.

Part of the confusion arises on Wiki because the councils themselves aren't notable except in some very limited cases, so tend to be written about in brief sub-sections of the area articles. If a council becomes notable in its own right, then one ends up with two separate articles - one for the area, and one for its governing authority. This is the case of course in all states - we have Victoria (Australia), Government of Victoria (Australia), and Parliament of Victoria as three separate articles, and even sub-articles under Government for certain departments.

With reference to this *particular* one, the Yarra Ranges Shire Council has enacted a Shire of Yarra Ranges Disability Plan and Shire of Yarra Ranges Footpath Trading Policy and Shire of Yarra Ranges Cultural Plan, uses "Shire of" branding on its youth services portal (makes sense as it is facilitated, not run by, the council and is a property of the community - the Shire), and has even made a submission to a federal government inquiry under the name. There's ample evidence just quickly looking through Google that the name is in regular and common local use by community organisations. Where there is an alternative, it is "Yarra Ranges Shire". And finally, the General Procedures of the Council as currently in force specifically refer to the "municipal district of Council" as separate from the "Council" itself. Orderinchaos 10:27, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

The relevant gazette(?) should be definitive here per WP:NC-GAL, however the site is currently down. There are multiple references on the web pre-mid-2011 to "Shire of Yarra Ranges" as this was the marketing name of Yarra Ranges Shire Council prior to that time (see the now obsolete logo on the main page). It is simply not correct to say that "where there is an alternative, it is 'Yarra Ranges Shire'", as references from both the Victorian Electoral Commission and the Victorian Government should more than sufficiently establish. Regardless, although Shire of Yarra Ranges was the "trading name" of the council for several years, and therefore will have multiple references on the web for some time to come, it is neither currently in use (see new logo and current website) and (more critically) was never the "official" name of the council. As established in earlier comments, neither the Victorian Electoral Commission nor the Victorian department for Local Government in its various guises (see above) have for nearly 20 years used the phrase in reference to this council or (for that matter) any other Victorian council area (which is clearly the main source of contention, since other articles will need to be updated as well as they also follow an incorrect format). I am also surprised to see the contention that the council allegedly isn't notable. Aside from the fact that the info box seems peculiarly interested in the council itself through mentioning the mayor, website, logo, etc.; per WP:N, all that is required for notability is "significant coverage" in "reliable" sources. Yarra Ranges Shire Council has more than enough ongoing coverage in multiple sources both recent [1] and more generally [2] to justify notability in its own right, as would inevitably be the case with every other LGA in Victoria. Finally, the term "shire" explicitly refers to the government "authority". If the article is about the geographic area why are we using such government terminology at all, why not simply "Yarra Ranges" which would be more or less geographically accurate and significantly more concise (per WP:Name)? This whole discussion seems a contrivance in order to avoid a broader discussion about why articles on multiple Victorian LGAs are mis-named. AngoraFish 木 14:22, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

Of course the council is non-notable - notice the lack of a link on the mayor's name? WP:POLITICIAN is pretty clear that, except in exceptional circumstances, only first-sublevel (i.e. state) politicians are notable. I could point to plenty of examples of local councillors' articles having been deleted as non-notable, especially since the tighter biographies of living persons regulations coming in a few years ago. There are some instances where notable controversies at local government level have been written about - the Port Macquarie-Hastings one is a good example, and I personally believe all cases where a council is dismissed should have a dismissal article, as it's an event of state significance. But I digress.

"Shire of Yarra Ranges" is not and has never been a "trading name" as you describe - I can find plenty of evidence that the council has always used Yarra Ranges Shire Council as its own official name. A shire, or a town, or a city, or a region in jurisdictions which have them, is a building block of a state and an area of land, whereas a council is the governing / managing authority - that is, an elected body and the staff who serve both that body and the shire's residents more generally - which has authority from a state piece of legislation but is not part of the state apparatus. If you look for example at planning decisions or activities of government beyond simply local government (eg water catchment, forestry etc), they refer extensively to LGAs purely in terms of their boundaries. It is actually those documents (and as I live in WA I don't have them in front of me) that I got the complete list of LGAs from to begin with which are used to make key decisions affecting the residents of those shires at a higher level than local government, and have nothing whatsoever to do with the councils. Other publications such as the RACV country road directory, some social services bodies working at federal level etc use the exact names as defined; hence why we have Shire of Yarra Ranges and Shire of Cardinia, but Bass Coast Shire.

As for the final suggestion, "Yarra Ranges" is just a name with no legal bearing on anything. For example, to give another example, "Melbourne" is a place quite widely defined within the 2030 Planning boundaries which are also used by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The City of Melbourne is a specific subset of that land which has gazetted boundaries and has an incorporated Council which manages its affairs under the Local Government Act. Saying the latter is the former would never work, and it's no different in the Shire of Yarra Ranges's area.

One final point - if you go to the ABS excel spreadsheet for LGAs (correct as of 31 March 2011), it says "Yarra Ranges (S)", i.e. "Yarra Ranges (Shire)". All Victorian LGAs are either Shires (S), Cities (C) or Rural Cities (RC), apart from Queenscliff which is a Borough (B). Barossa in South Australia is "Barossa (DC)" - that is "Barossa (District Council)". Port Stephens Council in New South Wales is "Port Stephens (A)", i.e. an area called Port Stephens, non-specific as to how it should be applied as is the case with the NSW Act (which actually specifically allows for "areas [...] to be called Councils". All of these stem from the relevant State Government classifications. If the designation said (SC), you'd have a point. But only NSW and SA have provision for a "council" referring to an "area" (a usage which is horribly imprecise, just as the usage by WA authorities of "Shire/Town/City" to refer to the *elected council* is likewise imprecise.) Orderinchaos 16:24, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

This whole argume is a prime example of what's wrong with Wikipedia, an amost exclusive reliance on the google test as some kind of definitive answer when other, clearly more relevant sources are available. The ABS uses its own classifications for its own purposes. Clearly the definitive source here is the auspicing body of the council, the Victorian government. As the council has been created entirely with the authority of the Victorian state government it is Victorian state government sources that are definitive. Regardless, even by your own source the 'area' should be "Yarra Ranges Shire", not "Shire of Yarra Ranges" for which the only source appears to be old Yarra Ranges Council policy documents per your own references. Some of your arguments are just plain ludicrous - there is no relationship between notability of a local councillor and notability of an entire council, there is simply no comparison. Councillors have four year tems and there are hundreds of them while the LGA is an ongoing $100 million organisation with widespread coverage in state and local media. Wikipedia is full of hundreds of thousands of businesses with half a dozen media articles to their name and a couple of dozen employees. Local Governments in Victoria have entire newspapers covering them in significant detail. Regardless, as the only thing this article discusses is the council, its wards, mayor, logo, website, etc. the whole area/organisation distinction and Wikipedia's arbitrarily made-up name remains completely disconnected from reality. AngoraFish 木 22:59, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

The above discussion has become distracted by issues other than the title of the article. I am happy to drop "Council" from the title and just go with "Yarra Ranges Shire" per the ABS. Where the article refers to the Council itself the name "Yarra Ranges Shire Council" can be used in the body of the article. AngoraFish 木 23:27, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

Looking at the current VicRoads Country Street Directory, Ed 8, it shows the area that is the Yarra Ranges is titled as Shire of Yarra Ranges. VicRoads as a State Government Authority should know what a LGA is titled. This article should be moved back to Shire of Yarra Ranges, as the current title Yarra Ranges Shire is not correct. --121.220.113.228 (talk) 05:30, 12 August 2013 (UTC)

Municipalities exist by the grace of the Victorian State government. It was the state government that created the shire in 1994. The relevant page of the government's web site, here, tells us that the gazetted name is Yarra Ranges Shire. HiLo48 (talk) 06:19, 12 August 2013 (UTC)

That is the gazetted name for the municipality (ie, the corporation or council) not the LGA, which is usually called the "municipal type of municipal area". It is common practice in local government, in Victoria, that the LGA is titled "municipal type of municipal area", and the organisation that manages and services the LGA is the "municipal area municipal type Council", though there a few exceptions; eg, A resident of Yarra Ranges lives in the Shire of Yarra Ranges, which is managed and serviced by the Yarra Ranges Shire Council — the few exceptions are Alpine Shire, Bass Coast Shire, Golden Plains Shire, Latrobe City and Surf Coast Shire. Council staff occasionally have to explain this misunderstanding to local residents. --121.214.23.128 (talk) 23:31, 12 August 2013 (UTC)

That reads like pure bureaucratic gobbledegook. Are you saying that a municipality is not the same thing as a local government area? That's confusing. No wonder almost nobody saw the point of the recent proposed referendum. And probably never will. HiLo48 (talk) 08:23, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

That's pretty much what we already do anyway. See e.g. Fraser Coast Region. I'd note that the ABS does not express an opinion as to whether the Shire should come before or after - the bracketed (S) appears after on all entities, but in many cases it's clearly and unambiguously not, for example [3] in Western Australia which appears as "Kalamunda (S)". But for the sake of avoiding further argument, and noting that one can find sources which support both (Maroondah Weekly uses "Yarra Ranges Shire" for example, while many documents curiously use the two forms entirely interchangeably in the same documents), I think we'll agree to disagree on the wider issue and move the article to YRS. Orderinchaos 23:46, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

Mayor

Mayor seems to be outdated. Checked on 2/7/2023 and there is an error: the listed mayor is not Richard Higgins, it is Jim Child. Yarra Ranges Shire Lmills36 (talk) 14:21, 1 July 2023 (UTC)