Good afternoon, my name is Scott Jukes. I'm from the Department of Natural Resources and Environment in the State of Victoria, which is in Australia, and firstly I'd just like to thank personally Linda and NSF for allowing me to participate in this very unique workshop. Roger asked me to spend just a couple of minutes explaining how standards are maintained in the State of Victoria. In Australia there is no federal authority for setting standards for geographic names for a whole series of reasons, but specifically what this means is, each individual jurisdiction or each individual state has a separate set of rules, legislative rules, which govern the standardization of naming and the policies and principles.
In Victoria, the way that we grab all of those UN protocols or resolutions and standards and take them right down to the local level is via some guidelines. Now guidelines don't have the same legislative teeth, if you like, that procedures in legislation or rules have. However we find them quite effective, and what happens is, at the start of this year we've devolved all of the powers to name various objects to local governing and administrative bodies, so basically the local governments are responsible for naming most of the features within their area. Now that means education, because there are standards and principles and UN resolutions that are very sensible that we expect people to follow. So what we do is, we go round to each of these local governing authorities, give them an 80 page handout which is the guidelines that they should use when they're trying to work out whether or not a name should be used. We give them some training on how to access the website to find out more information about the system, or to find out whether or not what they want to name is duplicating anything. What this means directly is that we're giving access to the local people to make changes in the State's database. Now that's quite a responsibility shift, and the way we maintain it is by checking that they have followed the guidelines. There are three main checks that we do: the first is the check of significance - we have to make sure that the local authority isn't naming anything of wider than local significance. For an example: I hope you know what the Twelve Apostles are; they're these rock formations that are on the World Heritage list. They're quite important not only to the local shire but also probably Australia itself, and we wouldn't want the local shire renaming those Twelve Apostles without consulting the rest of Victoria, or Australia in fact.
So having passed that test of significance, it then goes on to - have the rules, the policies, the principles been followed? Is it derogatory? The same things basically that Roger was talking about. After satisfying that, we check that there has been adequate consultation with the community. Now the words "adequate" and "appropriate" seem to be quite difficult words for local authorities to come to terms with. A lot of local authorities are used to having rules, or statutory rules, not guidelines, where they say you must do this, you must do that. Now we've got 80 pages and we say, ah yes, there are 80 pages, but probably only two of the pages affect your particular instance at this time; so what we're trying to teach them is discretion, how to understand the importance of a particular naming instance with how much consultation is required. If it only affects four people, you probably should only ask four people about it; if it affects a 100,000 people, you should ask 100,000, if not more.
After checking that this mechanism has worked and consultation has been appropriate, we basically just register it which means we publish it in the government gazette to make it legal and it's done. We don't look, really, at the spelling of the name, we don't look very hard if it's in the right spot, because we're actually in the process of not even collecting the positional information any more, and I won't to talk about that now, because I haven't got time, but basically that's how we maintain our standards. Thank you.