Some people might think that working for luxury sports car maker Porsche was a dream come true, but for Simon Harris it lacked the purpose he was seeking.
“At the end of a ten-year chapter at Porsche, it was time for a massive change,” says Harris. “I got out on the tools, building sheds and fences in a labouring job, but then a technical officer role came up at Mitchell Shire Council.”
By his own admission, Harris fell into his career in local government by accident – which now spans more than two decades – but it has delivered the purpose he was looking for.
“I didn’t know what I was missing until I started in local government,” he says. “Now I can see how what I do is of direct benefit for other people, and when I started contributing to my local community, I found what I was looking for.”
Beginning with a technical officer role at Mitchell Shire, Harris entered the local government sector soon after the adoption of Victoria’s Road Management Act in the mid 2000s, and found himself implementing an asset management information and inspection system to comply with the Act.
“That was my real inroad into infrastructure asset management, and we implemented an asset management and inspection system with the depot which was quite successful,” he says.
Simon then started with long-term financial planning for the Council’s assets, which required capturing all assets as they didn’t have an asset register at that stage.
He says, “It was the time when changes in accounting standards required local government to register all of their assets for the first time, so I was part of the movement to convert those asset spreadsheets into something the accountants could trust and we could also use for long-term planning.”
Harris then moved to South Gippsland where he helped implement that Council’s asset management system, before he joined Bass Coast Council where he’s held a variety of roles over the past 15 years.
In his current role as the Co-ordinator of Asset Management, Simon has led their asset management strategies through a complicated period, navigating the legacy of council amalgamations, and the impact of climate change on more than 40 kilometres of coast directly managed by the council.
“I’ve been very privileged to explore all aspects of the asset lifecycle, from fleet, buildings to roads, drainage, asset accounting and property management,” he says. “Not long after I started at Bass Coast, I leveraged my experience and consolidated all the data we had into a central point of truth to help create the confidence we needed to make our predictions, understand what we needed to focus on, and what money we needed.
“I’ve also been fortunate to have been in leadership roles where I’ve been able to build teams, because when you’re dealing with the amounts of data we have, you need a team to manage and process it, track what is going on, and keep the registers up to date.”
Bass Coast Shire Council was formed through the merger of five former shires, each with a population of between 5000 and 10,000 people, and these small communities span an area of more than 850 square kilometres.
The permanent population of around 44,000 can swell to 80,000 or more during the holiday seasons.
The big challenges at Bass Coast, which has over 110,000 assets with a total replacement value approaching $2 billion, are the growing population and the impact of climate change on the coast.
“Sea level rise and coastal erosion are major immediate concerns, and have been for a decade or more,” says Harris. “A couple of weeks ago there was a land slip in one of our coastal communities, and some land fell into the ocean. It’s really challenging because there are very complex coastal management arrangements across our municipality.
“There are dozens of different factors that impact coastal management depending on whether something is inside or outside of the town boundary. You also have Parks Victoria or Philip Island Nature Parks involved in some cases, and direct community committees as well.”
Assets managed by these committees are often close to roads managed by the Council, and to private properties, and in many cases the Council is seen as the asset owner and the last line of defence.
Sometimes hard decisions need to be made because maintaining an asset can’t be justified when climate change intervenes. “At one foreshore, the primary dunes are eroding quite rapidly,” says Harris. “There was an old railway line perched on top of the dunes and we put a rail trail there, but we had to close part of it recently, much to the community’s angst.
“You can understand where they are coming from, but they don’t understand that we can’t just build a seawall and prevent that erosion because we’ve done the long-term planning and the coastal erosion and sea level rise is just going to keep marching on.”
One of the significant initiatives in Victoria has been the South East Councils Climate Change Alliance (SECCCA), a collaborative research and advocacy body that coordinates the response to climate change across south-east Melbourne.
Bass Coast has been working with SECCCA and one major project has been a vulnerability assessment of Council’s assets.
“We have brought in the climate scientists and the GIS and data experts to connect our asset base to their work to understand the impacts of climate change,” say Harris.
“It has been a convergence of our mature asset management approach, the maturity of forward-thinking climate realists converging with the science to give us a better understanding of likely future impacts.”
Harris was able to showcase and benchmark this work at a 2025 conference in Chicago, which he attended as part of a scholarship from the Municipal Engineering Foundation of Victoria (MEFV).
“I talked a lot with North American peers about climate resilient asset management, and the work we have done with SECCCA,” he says. “I understood that what we have done is in many ways sector leading, so it was an amazing experience to talk about that to an international audience.
“But I also heard about the journeys that others in the US and Canada are on. The hazards we are facing are all very similar, so it was awesome to learn from them as well.”
You can hear more from Simon at the 2026 IPWEA International Asset Management Summit: https://www.amsummit.com.au
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