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Wednesday 13 December 2023
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Music helps make a Splash on Mondays Seaside serenade: Journeyman musician Kevin Vis brings music and calm to Rosebud foreshore every Monday. Picture: Gary Sissons
TOOTGAROOK musician and raconteur Kevin Vis has lived a colourful life, travelling the world seeking adventure and meaning, and creating music wherever he goes. New Zealand-born Vis has worked in the fitness industry and been a landscaper and boat skipper, and even played fictional Australian character Keith Elliot in the Swedish soap opera Friends and Enemies. There were many distractions and deviations before he found his way to the Mornington Peninsula in 2001, including playing in bands in Europe and rubbing shoulders with the glitterati of the international music world, but he says his Rosebud gig for the homeless is the most rewarding and humbling. Vis plays with his partner Dee Brown as the duo The Calmer Miles at venues around the peninsula, but every Monday he takes his guitar to Rosebud foreshore where he strums away in the background while the Splash team provides support and food for rough sleepers and those in need.
He says some people listen, some hum along, and others just carry on with “their business”, of surviving. “But the wonderful thing for me is that it’s a great vibe down there and it’s a great feeling to be able to add to that vibe and see some smiles and people humming or just lying under a tree tapping their toes to the music,” he said. “There is such a need in the community at the moment, and I’m only there for an hour or so but it’s great to being part of something that is good and positive.” Vis says there is “a lot of energy” to the scene at Rosebud foreshore when the Splash team visit on Mondays, and he feels he can be a “pied piper” to draw people in to enjoy the music. “Music does that, it brings people in, and I’d even like to bring some drums and maybe get people involved in the music,” he said. During his Monday sessions, Vis plays an aptly named Vagabond guitar, which he helped design with Seaford guitar aficionado James Cargill, son of guitar maker Merv Cargill. Liz Bell
poor community satisfaction survey results (Shire again misses survey satisfaction, The News 21/6/23). Dillon said a Transparency and Integrity Hub would offer “streamlined access” to “selected” and “curated” information which “may” include financial records, asset management (the shire’s capital works program), procurement data “and more”. “This online hub will allow visitors to explore and visualise data, providing an overview of the shire’s decision-making and activities. This will require the procurement of a suitable web-based platform to publish these datasets for open consumption.
“It will also require the collection, cleansing and curation of each dataset to ensure it is accurate and ready for release.” After Gill’s notice of motion was defeated last month, he said listening to the arguments against providing more information reminded him of the saying: There’s nothing to fear but fear itself. Race, who opposed Gill’s motion but now wants a Transparency and Integrity Hub, said “It comes back to the unintended consequences of a little bit of information because they say, to use that expression, a little bit of information is dangerous.”
‘Transparent council’ Take 2 Keith Platt keith@mpnews.com.au MORNINGTON Peninsula Shire councillors were this week to again set to grapple with the concept of transparency and the release of information to the public. Part of the shire’s official “mission” is “keeping you up to date with what is happening across the shire in an open and direct way”, but last month councillors voted five to four against publishing summaries of their secret discussions, or briefings, with officers. Cr David Gill, who proposed the defeated motion, said while briefings
were noted on agendas the details remained secret and it could be up to six months before they came back to council for a decision (Transparency backed, but ‘secret’ talks stay, The News 28/11/23). At this week’s public meeting Cr Sarah Race asked her colleagues to spend $200,000 to $300,000 on establishing an online Transparency and Integrity Hub to provide “unprecedented access to the city’s finances and provide greater scrutiny over how council spends ratepayers’ money”. Establishment of the hub would “allow the shire to be leaders in transparent and open government”.
The “broad and deep” information on the “digital portal” about finances, council decisions and activities would be “intuitive, interactive, auditable and downloadable by selection”. “Stories will be developed to provide context to the data and to assist the community to discover more about how council works and to engage with council data based on areas of interest,” Race said in background notes to her notice of motion on the agenda at Tuesday’s public council meeting. Customer and transformation manager Patrick Dillon, in a report on the agenda, said the hub proposal was being made “to address” the council’s