About Me - Cody Davies - Town of Gawler Elected Member

My name is Cody Davies, a 34-year-old local resident in my second term on the Gawler Council. If you are interested in learning a bit more about me, here is some information about my history in the community and with the Council.

My Background

I first moved to Gawler in the early 2000s as a teenager. When I was sixteen, my whole family, including myself, moved to Singapore where my dad’s work had relocated him, but after a few years, I moved back to Gawler while they stayed overseas. After returning to Australia, I started to become involved in local community groups, including the Gawler Youth Advisory Committee, which I joined in 2011. This was my first experience getting involved in local government, and I learned a lot while I was there.

The idea of making a difference in the local community interested me so much that in 2014, I ran as a candidate in the Gawler Council elections, as I wanted to take the next step in contributing to the Council and providing a voice for others of my generation. Unfortunately, I was unsuccessful, only receiving 61 first-preference votes before quickly being knocked out of the running with a total of 67 votes after preferences (nowhere near the required quota of 391).

Over the next four years, I continued to be actively involved in the local community, becoming involved in various community groups such as the Gawler Broadcasting Association, the Gawler History Team, and the Gawler Suicide Prevention Group. By the time I ran again in 2018 I was better-known and successfully became an Elected Member with 319 first-preference votes – a 5x increase on my first attempt!

Getting Started on Council

Much of my first year on Council was spent getting up to speed on all the new information that new Elected Members need to absorb. I had some previous experience with the format of local government through the Youth Committee, but an interesting thing about Council is that you are making decisions on a wide range of topics on any given day – a meeting can quickly move from a discussion of library services to stormwater management to tree planting. The staff help by providing summaries of what’s going on, but there can still be a lot to initially take in.

Fortunately, I was able to find some ways to make positive contributions to Council discussions from the start. The very first tweak I made to a Council motion was also at my very first Council meeting when we were deciding which sub-committees to keep. There was a recommendation from the staff that the Youth Advisory Committee have their meetings moved from monthly to quarterly, under the reasoning that not many official motions came through the committee at the time. I successfully moved that we continue having monthly meetings, as the YAC was an experience that I had gotten a lot out of as a young person. This experience also led me to make the empowerment of our youth committee a goal of my Council term – I wanted to help the new YAC members to make use of their platform and move motions of their own.

In my view, this has been a massive success. During the 2018-2022 Council term, our Youth Committee got involved in budget discussions in a major way for the first time, working together to create a $50,000 budget bid for a youth traineeship in Gawler. While it was not initially going to make it into the budget, I championed that motion during budget discussions and it successfully made it through, which has led to some great results.

First Term Achievements

A lot of Council work is in the small details – the most common occurrence is that a resident contacts me about an issue and then I help them to find the information they need or the right person to talk to. At Council meetings, a lot of the work comes down to thoroughly reading the agenda and making some small tweaks that help the smooth running of the Council along.

That said, I have also been active in moving a range of my own motions. Here are a few examples of what I’ve been up to during my first term:

One of the big problems that Councils face is a low level of community engagement – a lot of people feel disconnected from the decisions that Council makes, and then when drafts go out for community consultation, we only get a small number of responses, often from the same few dedicated residents who can make time to attend meetings. To help address this, I moved that all our meetings be permanently archived on YouTube, which will help a wider range of people to keep up with the Council.
Local games shop Table Top Warfare was having trouble with the Finniss Street multi-story carpark (the one located next to the Big W and Woolworths), as early car park closing hours on the weekend meant that customers were getting their cars locked in, leading to a fee in order to get them back out. In the end, I worked with Gawler staff and other Elected Members to have the car park's opening hours moved to a schedule that worked better for everyone without leading to any increased costs.
2022 was the first year of my "participatory budgeting" initiative for the annual budget, where local Gawler residents can directly vote on where $40,000 of our budget goes – the aim is to increase the level of community participation in the Council budget process, and to improve our community infrastructure (i.e., public benches and water fountains) in areas where it is needed most. This first year was a big success, with three hundred local residents becoming democratically involved in helping to decide our budget.

Hobbies & Interests

Outside of Council, I am still involved in other local community groups, such as the Gawler Broadcasting Association and the Gawler Suicide Prevention group. Previously I held a position as chair at both organisations, but currently, I am taking a more backseat role as a regular member of the boards. Lately, I’ve also started to get back into some social tennis, down at the Gawler & District tennis association.

I’ve also been gradually completing my study at the University of Adelaide, doing a Bachelor of Arts majoring in History. I have been studying at a slower pace to create a reasonable work-life balance, but the end is not far off. I have been considering whether to take this study further and get a Master’s in Teaching but will see what my situation is like when the time comes.

When I have some free time, I enjoy playing video games – since I was 17, I have been helping out at ZeldaUniverse.net, a fan website dedicated to the Legend of Zelda series. More recently I have been able to use these skills to raise some money for charity through video game live streams, which has been a lot of fun.