User talk:Hinchinbrook

Naming of article
Hi, firstly I respect that this is a complex issue. However, the Local Government Act so far as it addresses the naming of Local Government Areas states that they are called "the Shire of...", ("the Town of..." currently not used but allowed for), "the City of..." and "the Region of..." (the latter added by the amendment in 2007). Each and every individual Shire in Queensland was, at the time and in later references, gazetted in accordance with this naming device, with the sole exceptions of Logan, Redland and Gold Coast (I am not sure why these were done differently, as although they are all newer ones, so were the Shires of Warwick, Cooloola etc). Hinchinbrook was left unaltered by the 2007 legislation and the rash of 1990s amalgamations.

A council is an elected body of members to represent an area, not an area - this article is not about the elected body of members, but about the area (although addresses one in the context of the other), and I don't believe we should be using artificial constructions such as "the Hinchinbrook Shire Council local government area". The other thing is that Wikipedia goes well beyond Queensland and, except where contradicted by gazettal (this was the case with the three I named plus the Regional Councils in QLD), we've tried to follow LG Act provisions as the best way forward Australia-wide - this is because of our reliable sources guideline and you can't get much more reliable than the law, in my view. It looks unprofessional if we have a raft of different names in place referring to the same things for no better reason than simple preference. I wish however that state LG Departments around Australia would be more clear and give us more guidance as to naming - it's a real pain. NSW's in particular is a mess. QLD sometimes does and sometimes doesn't follow its own Act in terms of naming in gazettals, as is the case in Tasmania. WA's and Victoria's are probably the best (in WA, the reverse practice of referring to the *council* as the *shire* is very much in common usage anyway). Orderinchaos 00:11, 19 August 2009 (UTC)