City of South Perth

The City of South Perth is a local government area in the inner southern suburbs of the Western Australian capital city of Perth about 4km south of Perth's central business district. The City covers an area of 19.9km2, maintains 203km of roads and a little over 4.3 km² of parks and gardens, and has a population of about 38,500 (2006).The area broadly forms a peninsula, being bounded on three sides by the waters of the Swan and Canning rivers.HistoryThe South Perth Road District was formed on 9 June 1892 and the district became a municipality on 21 February 1902. It then reverted to a road district on 1 March 1922, but regained municipality status on 1 March 1956. It was granted city status on 1 July 1959.In 2014, the WA State Government mounted a proposal for local government reform; the City of South Perth was proposed to be amalgamated with the Town of Victoria Park, together with a sizable portion of the City of Canning. A poll took place during January–February 2015, with the question: "Should the City of South Perth and the Town of Victoria Park be abolished and amalgamated to form a new local government?". The informally (non-binding) suggested name for the new entity was 'City of South Park'.In order for the poll to prevent the amalgamation from proceeding, at least 50% of electors from either local government were required to vote, and of those, more than half needed to vote against the proposal. At the conclusion of the poll at 6.00pm on 7 February 2015, the outcome was that for South Perth, 50.83% of the City's 26,789 electors voted, with 77.75% voting against the proposal. Although only 38.02% of the Town of Victoria Park's 20,136 electors voted, of those, a clear majority (61.58%) voted against the proposal. However, with more than 50% poll returns, the City of South Perth response was sufficient to cancel the amalgamation of these local governments, and they remained as separate entities.