I am pleased to support the motion to adopt Wyndham’s Smart City Strategy which is now ready to be released to the public. It gives me great pleasure to be the portfolio holder leading this journey.

Wyndham will set a new standard for cities. Our future will be marked by innovation, opportunity, inclusion, creativity and sustainability. We will harness technology and data in our bid to take a place amongst leading global smart cities. We will deliver this strategy by executing the Smart City Implementation plan. This plan sits under the Smart City Strategy and represents our intent and commitment to the community. 

I am proud of this plan and look forward to supporting the initiatives within, these initiatives have been prioritised based on what is most important to our community – they’ve told us. We’ve listened. 

Our plan focuses on transport, community safety, education, environment and sustainability, being more data-driven, partnership-oriented, being innovative and lastly not forgetting who we are here to serve. Our community – and what I mean by this, is that initiatives within the plan are citizen-centric. They are centred around our community. 

Madam Mayor I would like to call out – that for many of the initiatives we will be engaging with our residents to further define their needs to ensure we deliver a service or product that is value add and meets residents' expectations.  We will use sophisticated customer and user experience models and methods to do this. 

I want to thank the Smart City office team lead by Dr Adam Mowlam, the Smart City portfolio committee members, my fellow councillors and the senior executive team for their works and supports, and those hundreds of residents from the community who participated during the consultation stage. This strategy won’t come today without all these efforts. I am looking forward to working with staff and our partners on delivering this strategy and value to our community.