Talk:City of Latrobe

Need to agree on terminology used to refer to places of relatively different population sizes

I note that someone has said that Morwell, Moe, Churchill and Traralgon are cities, and that the less-populous places are called 'towns'.

Since the whole district/municipality is classified as a City, i.e. Latrobe City, I dispute that the term 'city' should be applied to the major towns. The Council, in its own documents such as the Council Plan 2007-2011 refers to these as 'four major centres' (page 9). If this was a municipality closer to Melbourne, they would be called suburbs, not cities.

Perhaps confusion arises when you compare Latrobe to other large rural municipalities, such as Bendigo, where there is a town called Bendigo, and it is the centre of the municipality of 'City of Greater Bendigo'. Also, Bendigo's layout is such that it does not have separate (i.e. disconnected from each other) large towns, whereas Latrobe does.

Perhaps the use of 'cities' has also arisen from the fact that, prior to amalgamation, there were separate municipalities called "City of Traralgon", "City of Morwell", etc.

Shanem-vic-au 04:15, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

A city containing cities?

Just reinforcing the point made above....

It really doesn't make sense to say that the City of Latrobe includes the cities of Moe, Morwell and Traralgon. Clearly they are no longer cities in thier own right, as they once were. They should simply be called towns. HiLo48 (talk) 06:24, 5 February 2010 (UTC)

This is an issue of nomenclature - on one hand you have an LGA called "City of", and on the other you have metropolises which are bigger than towns. There are strange cases in Queensland where recent council amalgamations made the word "City" disappear from the LGAs on a given date, such as Rockhampton, Gladstone, Toowoomba and Cairns - but noone would ever argue the metropolises magically ceased to be cities on that date. Orderinchaos 08:14, 5 February 2010 (UTC)

It was not only changed without any real discussion taking place, but the result was an absolute mess in readability terms. I've reverted, and changed "cities" to "centres" as this is a commonly accepted term for populated areas too large to be towns, without any imputation on the confusion in Australia surrounding the word "city". Orderinchaos 11:47, 15 February 2010 (UTC)

I find it somewhat mean to have a genuine attempt to fix up what was already a mess described as an "absolute mess". What was there before just made no sense. It had to be fixed. Nobody else was willing to have a go. I do think your idea of centres is a good one. Thank you. I note that the article on City of Moe clearly states that it stopped being a city when Latrobe City was created. We now have consistency.  :-) HiLo48 (talk) 12:06, 15 February 2010 (UTC)

Well, yes, the City of Moe did, but we're talking about Moe, Victoria. But I can see the argument that to call somewhere a city which is not chartered and does not have a corresponding "City of" LGA may be an OR problem, too, so a different solution which avoids the whole thing is probably preferable. Apologies re the "absolute mess" line, the great majority of the mess I fixed seems to have been introduced by earlier IP edits. Orderinchaos 12:27, 15 February 2010 (UTC)

The City of Moe and Moe, Victoria are the same place. HiLo48 (talk) 19:44, 15 February 2010 (UTC)

Nope. City of Moe was a legal local government area incorporated under the Local Government Act 1958 (as it then was). It owes its existence to a piece of legislation, and as the Kennett government showed, can be passed out of existence with the stroke of a pen. Moe, Victoria is an urban place where people live and work with an identifiable activity centre. It would take something far more drastic to pass that out of existence. The two have entirely separate identities.

As a point in fact, which somewhat disproves this "LGA is a city" argument, I'm sitting here arguing this from the City of Stirling in Western Australia, which noone would ever seriously argue is a city in the latter sense, even though it is the largest LGA in Western Australia (almost 200,000 people). It has no city centre, its community exists entirely because of Perth which I'm a 15 minute train ride from, the "city centre" is basically the council chambers and a neighbouring (very good, I must say) pizza shop and that's... kinda it. It is entirely part of the city of Perth, even though it and the other 28 or so LGAs that make it up have nothing to do with the City of Perth, a local government area under our LG Act which basically only covers the city centre and two neighbouring suburbs and whose mayor gets the fancy title of "Lord Mayor". BTW the ABS recognises "Moe-Yallourn", "Morwell" and "Traralgon" as urban centres/localities entirely separate from the former incorporated entities.

I should note these arguments come up all the time around the country; in the big metro areas we have an additional problem that the state government in some cases has decided to define each capital city as a sum of LGAs, meaning that the metro area has a border enshrined in legislation. Due to the very OR issue I foreshadowed earlier, the WikiProject decided to use these as the official boundaries. As such, we are doomed to arguments about the inclusion of the Shires of Mornington Peninsula and Cardinia within the definition in Melbourne, and the non-inclusion of City of Mandurah (or inclusion of Rockingham) in Perth's. We had a Thuringowa supporter (I would say nationalist but it wasn't trying to secede) arguing that City of Thuringowa was an entirely different place to Townsville with its own customs and traditions, even though it was basically just the outer suburbs of the latter. Peter Beattie helpfully solved our problem in March 2008 (two years after the argument first erupted here) by legislating Thuringowa out of existence, and the guy pretty much went away.

There's also persistent arguments about Newcastle, at least in part because the primary ABS definition is so obviously wrong as to be laughable, and because Newcastle's urban area extends well into a second council area, the City of Lake Macquarie. We solved it by relying on a different ABS definition (the Urban Centre one) although it only gets updated every 5 years. The final one I'm aware of is Gosford and Central Coast; anyone who's been up there would understand Gosford is a fairly compact little city, but nobody quite knows where it begins or ends, including, it seems, the ABS. The City of Gosford includes a lot of things which are not part of Gosford, but the ABS failed to define a UC/L for it. I have been in discussions with them and it's getting fixed in 2011. Orderinchaos 22:42, 15 February 2010 (UTC)

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