From the Desk of the CEO: September 2026

Published on 24 September 2026

This month, there is a lot to be thankful for.

First up, September marks the one-year anniversary of my being employment with the Hope Vale Aboriginal Shire Council. It has been a distinct pleasure to have the honour of working here in Hope Vale and working with terrific staff and Council.

This past year has been a reasonably turbulent one with a lot of changes, both in the structure of Council and putting the governance in place that Council requested be done.

We have increased our employment; we have backed that up with solid recruitment policy and actions and implemented processes that respect the right of staff to make complaints and feel protected in their workplace.

We have also introduced and enforced a drug and alcohol policy that makes our workplace a safe place for all employees. It is not a punitive policy. It is designed to help people understand that this workplace does not tolerate any impairment of ability and we aim to help people stop taking drugs when it interferes with their workplace performance. Without going into detail, we try to give people three goes at getting it right. This policy applies across the board to employees and any other contractors who work for us.

I would also like to thank everyone in the community for interacting with Council on Facebook, Instagram and our website. This council believes in communicating with everyone to ensure that everyone gets the same message. As an example, on Instagram, we saw our views increase to 5,001. We have views from right around the world, believe it or not, with 1,216 views from the USA and even 50 views from Singapore. Our Facebook was marginally down this month, but our website had 8,569 views (up 4%). Now I know not everyone agrees with what we may say or do, but that is the joy of democracy; everyone is entitled to their respectful opinion. We learn from your suggestions, and we try to improve as a council.

The one thing I am truly thankful for, though, is that the nature of our social media has changed. We are receiving a much more positive response, and the negative comments that simply pull everyone down have distinctly reduced. Let’s celebrate Hope Vale, the wins and the losses, and let’s dust ourselves off and make ourselves proud of our community.

May I add my personal thanks to everyone who has been involved in removing horses from our streets. I know this has caused some arguments around ownership at times, but in general, people are supporting what we are doing. As I have said, this will take place over a period of time, but already there is a noticeable change in the amount of horse droppings in the town area, and this helps to make our town clean and healthy. With everyone getting on board with cleaning up the litter and their yards, the town is looking really great. The Mayor and I met with Matt Smith MP, our local Federal Representative, and his words were, “Hope Vale is really kicking goals.”

Don’t forget, if you want to put your family’s record into our cemetery records so that we can help to create memories and provide your offspring with the information that says who your family is and where you came from, please talk to Vonetta Ware in our office. She will be only too pleased to have your contribution.

We are really thankful though that over the past twelve months we have created a net number of positions amounting to 20 extra people employed by Council. This is great; but even better, our turnover of staff has gone from an average of 26 per year to six. This could mean a couple of things: that people like working for us, and we can provide meaningful employment, or that people are better trained to do their job and can actually get some job satisfaction. Whatever the reason is though, it is an enviable position to be in as the cost of recruitment is one of the biggest costs that a Council can experience, and it is this Council’s goal to provide meaningful expenditure on projects that benefit Hope Vale and to reduce the expenditure to deliver those programmes at the same high level of output.

Anyway, thank you to everybody for contributing. To all my staff who manage our projects, keep the place tidy, look after our roads, run our childcare and aged care, radio and NDIS; our MPC and all our administration both here and in Cairns, my very personal thanks for all the hard work you do.

…and a special thanks to our Councillors who have to make some difficult decisions from time to time – you represent your community well.

Lew Rojahn
CEO