West Tamar Council Embraces AI for Strategic Planning Amidst Community Debate
The picturesque West Tamar region in Tasmania, renowned for its burgeoning vineyards, celebrated gastronomy, pristine national parks, and vibrant agricultural sector, is also experiencing a significant population boom, positioning it as one of the state’s most rapidly expanding areas. In a move that reflects a forward-thinking approach to governance, the local council recently unveiled a draft of its 10-year strategic plan. This ambitious document, however, has sparked considerable discussion, not only for its content but for the innovative, and some might say controversial, method used in its creation: artificial intelligence.
The council’s chief executive, Kristen Desmond, championed the use of AI, explaining that it allowed for a document with “more depth” at a fraction of the cost. She likened the process to engaging a consultant but with a significantly reduced timeline. “If we asked a consultant to review 50 strategic documents and come up with themes out of those, before they even started talking to people, that would be 12 months of work,” Desmond stated. Instead, AI was tasked with synthesising a multitude of strategic documents. This was followed by seven targeted community workshops, from which the AI then extracted overarching themes. “The reports from both of those processes were synthesised and that gave us the basis of the plan,” she elaborated.
To address potential resident anxieties about the reliance on technology, Desmond assured the public that human oversight was integral throughout the entire process. “Humans were involved all the way along,” she emphasised, clarifying that it was “people who turned it into the document.” She described AI as a “second brain,” capable of performing the “grunt work” but not the final refinement. The council’s involvement was constant, from supplying initial strategies to attending community workshops and scrutinising the AI-generated reports. This ensured that the council remained informed and in control at every stage. The final iteration of the plan, Desmond noted, was “very different to the base document produced by AI.”
Community Concerns and the Quest for Local Relevance
Despite the council’s assurances, the draft plan has drawn criticism from some local residents who feel it lacks the specific nuance and localised flavour essential for effective regional planning. Former Greens candidate and West Tamar resident, Jack Davenport, expressed his reservations, suggesting that the place names could be easily substituted with those from any other part of Australia, rendering the document equally applicable elsewhere. He believes the plan “oversimplifies the relationship between the different parts of West Tamar.”
Susan Wutke, a business owner in Beaconsfield, echoed these sentiments, lamenting what she perceived as a deficiency in actionable strategies within the document. “There’s no action in any of the words,” she stated. Wutke argued that relying on AI for such a crucial community engagement process sacrifices the creativity, inspiration, and innovative ideas that human consultants typically bring. “We pay these people to come up and consult with community, bring creativity, inspiration, ideas and it’s all completely lost with AI,” she contended.
The draft document itself outlines that the plan is “informed by a review of Council and regional strategies, engagement with elected members, staff, youth, business and community stakeholders, and the strongest recurring themes across that work.” It further states that the plan is “built around three civic themes. These reflect how people experience West Tamar as one connected place, rather than as separate services or departments.”
Desmond encouraged residents to actively participate in the ongoing consultation process to voice their concerns and suggestions. “We’ve put a lot of work into this to make it truly West Tamar unique,” she asserted. “If they think we’ve missed something, it’s open for community consultation… This part is about people fixing it.” The public consultation period for the West Tamar Draft Community Strategic Plan is set to close on June 28.
The Growing Role of AI in Resource-Constrained Councils
The West Tamar Council’s foray into AI-assisted planning highlights a broader trend, particularly among smaller local governments grappling with limited resources. Christina Holmdahl, Mayor of West Tamar Council, expressed optimism about the future integration of AI. “We’re very enthusiastic about the way we’re going to be able to use AI in the future,” she said. “We’re going to be able to use our people more efficiently and get more out of them, which is good for the ratepayers because we’re doing more work than we normally would.”
Mick Tucker, president of the Local Government Association Tasmania, concurred that AI could be instrumental in alleviating resource constraints. “We know in local government [that] planning is one of the big issues [where] we all struggle with lack of resources,” Tucker noted. He believes that with rigorous scrutiny of AI outputs, councils can “actually really free up resources for the more important issues at hand.” Tucker suggested that while AI can handle initial data synthesis and input, the crucial follow-up and strategic decision-making should still be led by human expertise. “We don’t need to have a highly paid manager there doing that initial input… If it needs to have follow-up, that’s where you want to put the best of your resources.”
Simon Tyrrell, a technology advisor based in Tasmania, pointed out that AI offers unprecedented technological capabilities to smaller organisations, akin to what large corporations have access to. “For really the first time — since the internet and then the smartphone — they’ve actually got access to the same technology capabilities that the biggest companies in the world are using,” Tyrrell explained. He highlighted the human limitation in synthesising vast amounts of information and the time required, a barrier that AI can help overcome. “It is possible with these [AI] tools to load them up with secure, sensitive, historical information and run all sorts of processes across the top of them.”
However, Tyrrell also issued a cautionary note, stressing the importance of educating users on the responsible and effective use of AI. “We’re not seeing investment in those skills that are going to be required for these tools to be used safely and well,” he warned. He elaborated on how AI models are designed to fulfil user prompts, even if it means generating fabricated information. “If I go and ask an AI tool, ‘give me something that matches these exact facts and supports my argument’, the models work in a way that they will try to answer your question.” He advised that specifying constraints, such as requiring only cited sources from real cases, and verifying the AI’s output is crucial. “If I then change that to say, ‘you must only use cited sources of real cases’ then I simply said to the AI, ‘is that a real case?’ If it’s made it up, it will actually say so.”
