Australia’s local councils are being encouraged to show off the diversity of their services on national Local Government Twitter Day using the hashtag #yourratesatwork, a hashtag which may have an oddly familiar ring to many.

It is eerily similar to the 2005 trade union campaign Your Rights at Work, a campaign which proved the nail in the coffin against Prime Minister John Howard’s WorkChoices.

The hashtag #yourrightsatwork is still floating around on Twitter but now it is more commonly used in relation to underpaid workers and proposals to slash penalty rates.

The Australian Local Government Association (ALGA) is running the Twitterfest on August 3, following successful 2014 Twitter trials in Queensland, NSW, Victoria and South Australia.

ALGA will be hoping to beat the 2014 national Local Government Twitter Day statistics, which recorded about 2,100 tweets and 950 retweets and had more than 500 separate Twitter users participating nationwide.

The aim is to showcase the huge range of services that Australian local government provides and to boost public awareness of the important work that councils do by grouping feeds under a common hashtag.

ALGA said: “Getting involved makes no additional resource demands on councils but rather encourages you to add the common hashtag to tweets and for your posts on the day to show the diversity of local services undertaken or supported by councils from the first task of the day to the last task of the day.

“You may choose to post three times on the day or once an hour – it’s up to you.”

All tweets using the hashtag will be aggregated at: http://www.lga.sa.gov.au/mycouncil