Tweed Council mayor Katie Milne said it was “probably not appropriate” for her shire to enter such a pact with the neighbouring Gold Coast Council.

“We’ve got differences, they’re a very pro-development council, we’re a very pro-environment council,” Cr Milne said.

“We totally co-operate but they’re 500,000 people, we’re 95,000 people, we’re big enough to be self sufficient with pools, libraries, things like that.

“It’s more about harmonising cross border issues with police, with domestic violence – things like that.”

Cr Milne has been in Albury for the past three days to attend the Local Government NSW Conference with three fellow Tweed councillors.

She said national licensing systems were vital to fix border anomalies.

Mayors Kevin Mack (Albury) and Anna Speedie (Wodonga) spoke last month at the Australian Regional Development Conference in Tweed Heads.

Cr Speedie told last week’s council meeting of the response to the speech which outlined the Two Cities, One Community deal.

“Tweed were really interested in the agreement that we had, considering that their neighbour is about five times the size of them,” she said.

“We talked about some of the synergies, they don’t have to necessarily do the big stuff, look for the things where you actually have a commonality.

“We had a lot of discussion around that, they were very interested to understand what our agreement had in it, what it meant and what we were doing, the actions out of it.”

Cr Speedie said she had spoken to Cr Milne and Tweed Shire’s chief executive about collaborating on cross border issues.

She said there were “some learnings” to be taken from Tweed and Queanbeyan in seeking to resolve anomalies that affect places straddling jurisdictions.