Editor: Veteran journalist Bob Hawkins examines Huon Valley Council’s strategy for ‘a sustainable future’. His analysis begs the question: Is this a portent of state and federal government policy as the nation enters straitened circumstances and likely huge political change?
Huon Valley Guessing Games Though there is no such thing as truth, that’s no excuse for any of us not to strive to get near to it — and that includes Huon Valley Council. Time and again, it seems to prefer to dodge it.
Last Wednesday (May 1), in a media release enigmatically titled Preparing for a sustainable future, council was dodging and weaving again. If not marketing pork pies, it was not telling it like it is. Its spin doctors had laid on as good a veneer as they could to distract from the real news: the evening before, at a “special” council meeting, Mayor Robert Armstrong and his controlling bloc had voted on a motion to slash and burn to achieve budget cuts of about $380,000. (Greens councillors Liz Smith and Rosalie Woodruff voted against the motion.)
The cuts are concentrated in three of council’s most socially and environmentally valuable paddocks — natural-resource management, community services and youth services. The mayor’s men did not consider cuts in paddocks that require the services of the kind of toys big kids love to play with — street sweepers, bulldozers, concrete mixers, diggers . . .
The release begins with a couple of gratuitous softeners: Huon Valley Council will not go into debt to fund recurrent expenditure [admirable, some might say] . . . The needs of the community have changed [aren’t they constantly?] . . . Council has decided to respond to those changes to ensure [don’t laugh] sustainable delivery [of what?] now and into the future [when else?].
Then it talks of a review required in response to a number of financial threats currently facing council. This is where the fog thickens. In another display of crying wolf — with which observers of council have become familiar — the release points to where council sees potential loss of revenue.
The so-called forest peace deal — the prospect of which the mayor has railed against for so long — could mean, the release says, a potential loss of rate revenue from Forestry Tasmania if production forests become reserves . . . in the order of $200,000. Well, yes, that could eventually happen, but not in the financial year to come, 2013-14, for which, ostensibly, the mayor has felt it necessary to spearhead slash-and-burn tactics.
Surely, if some councils are eventually to be hit hard through loss of rates income from forestry, wouldn’t that allow them to join, with some optimism, the beggars’ queue for a share of the $350-million pie Canberra has baked to ease the pain of the transition of “production forests” to reserves? To admit that now, of course, would not help council in its arguments justify the cuts it has made.
Something else the release does not say: if rate revenue from forestry areas is to fall, it will not happen until at the earliest FY2014-15. Under legislation approved by State Parliament last week, as I see it, no forest production areas will pass to reserves until October 2014 at the earliest, so rates will continue to be paid at least through FY2013-14. That piece of sleight-of-hand in the release might better be described as dishonesty by omission.
Then the release laments that prevailing low interest rates are hurting council coffers. It says investment interest is expected to be down by around $140,000 because of the economic downturn. I don’t remember council lamenting publicly a few years ago when it came to light that it had lost $4 million.
Accurate in the release is that — like everyone — council is facing greater costs for essential services (power, water, sewerage etc).
The release expresses uncertainty about whether council will continue to receive a priority dividend from Southern Water of $871,000 that was legislated for a period of five years. To a layperson, this is gobbledegook with red herring characteristics. Perhaps council would like to explain more fully what this legislated priority dividend involves. For example, is the current FY2012-13 the “legislated period” end date?
Armstrong is quoted as saying: It has been estimated that if these threats materialise and council chose to merely [an odd word] maintain its current level of services, council would be forced to increase the general rate in the order of nine percent. That would only be so if, apart from the investment-interest drop, the other envisioned threats materialised in FY2013-14. He goes on to say that, in these circumstances, council had little choice but to make some hard decisions.
Then comes the real news: Council has endorsed service reduction in Community Services, Natural Resource Management and Youth Services, which is expected to save about $380,000.
Sensible savings are always necessary, but one gets a sneaking suspicion that the controlling councillors have taken a political decision to get rid of community and youth services that they’re not much interested in, at the same time undermining the scope of NRM, a portfolio held by Smith; neutering council’s arts role by absorbing it into tourism activities, thus relieving Woodruff of a task she has tackled with vigour these past two years; and abandoning altogether council’s pretence of commitment to heritage. At the Tuesday meeting last week, I think I heard the mayor suggest that heritage could “look after itself”. Not sure what that might mean.
ONLY a few minutes into last Wednesday’s special council meeting, I found myself imagining, surrealistically, a flock of ostriches flying by the seat of their pants yet with heads still stuck firmly in the sand. It was apparent that Mayor Armstrong and his all-male political allies — ears blocked to appeals to reason from the two Greens — were determined to hack away at services to which they concede little value.
The flock, it appeared, had long convinced themselves that there is no climate change, no global warming, no sea-level rise, no pollution . . . Therefore, conveniently, the moment was opportune to sharply prune council’s role in natural-resource management — with the exception of “weed management” and Landcare support. Cuts in this area could also threaten council’s relationship with NRM South.
On the cultural front, they had decided savings would be made by lumping arts into tourism and dropping heritage responsibilities altogether. On the matter of heritage, I’ve never heard Armstrong or Wilson utter a word of encouragement to those valley blow-ins (plus a handful of locals) who see merit in establishing museums and history groups to help preserve the stories and memorabilia of a region that is still struggling to emerge from its cultural amnesia.
The slashing and burning didn’t stop at NRM and culture: all “youth services” apart from health and unspecified “programs” are to end, and much the same is to happen to “community services”.
Not that we hadn’t been warned. Earlier in the year, Armstrong, when he fronted a Legislative Council hearing into the forestry-agreement bill, had signalled a council attack on NRM and children’s services.
Last week on Tuesday, while council was meeting in Huonville, over the range in Hobart, Labor, with the help of four delusional Greens (but not Kim Booth) in the lower house, pushed through the upper house’s amended version of that bill. (It was legislation that, had it not been mangled by the upper house, might just have provided the basis for a rational solution to the problem of the state’s stuffed forestry industry.)
Back in Huonville, the special meeting was already in session when two lone members of the public arrived on the stroke of 5pm. (The other three seated in the public gallery were council staff, possibly because they were worried about job cuts.)
Nowhere was there a single scrap of paper to tell us, even in basic terms, what was on the agenda, what the councillors’ names are, what was being discussed . . . It all felt as if what council was about to do wasn’t really any business of the public that, ostensibly, it is supposed serve.
Normally, except for “attachments” (usually to be found on the HVC website), attending members of the public are provided with papers that enable them to follow proceedings. In the past couple of years, a screen display has indicated which agenda item is being dealt with and a copy of the recommendation under discussion. On Tuesday evening last week? Nothing.
When we walked in (sharp on five o’clock), it appeared Deputy Mayor Mike Wilson had put up an “alternative motion”. It sounded as if he had made an addition to the agenda-recommended motion via which the mayor and his men would plug the envisioned holes in finances. (Passage of that motion would allow council at another meeting to fix a general rate for FY2013-14.)
I knew a bit about the agenda recommendation because I had spent that afternoon reading, on the HVC website, the 100-plus pages of council’s latest “review of services”. Mysteriously, by Wednesday morning, the link to the review had transmogrified itself into just a window on the website that listed “News”, “Events” and “Consultations”. The services review document was nowhere to be found. Later in the week, I was informed by always-helpful council staff of the location of the e-document that wasn’t where it should have been.
Fortunately, I had made enough notes to have at least an inkling of what the special meeting was about.
What followed — including an unedifying exchange between Wilson and Woodruff over how many “workshops” she had attended/or failed to attend — saw council exposed for what it is: a closed-minded, bugger-the-environment, never-mind-the-arts, goodbye-heritage, we-don’t-consult, secrecy-obsessed jumble of an organisation that can’t see beyond the next project it’s going to make a mess of.
Nowhere in the reading could I find specifics of what council intends to dispose of. Here is my guessed list (council, I’m sure, will set the record straight where I’ve guessed wrong):
— Staff are to be sacked, maybe as many as five.
— Natural-resource-management activities — unless NRM South continues to cough up cash and staff despite council’s withdrawal of financial support — are going to be substantially curtailed and council will lose a wealth of knowledge in this area. It could even mean the end of the NRM Advisory Committee, a treasure trove of environmentally experienced talent.
— Heritage will no longer be a council responsibility. Which means no official effort is likely to be made to identify for listing items of built or natural interest — “the things that you keep”, as a Tasmanian premier once said in the 1970s (I can’t remember which one, but it was probably Eric Reece).
— Arts will be absorbed by council’s tourism section and the talented volunteer Arts and Heritage Advisory Committee, a Woodruff-chaired project, might cease to exist. (The committee has worked long and hard these past couple of years to put together a “strategy and action plan”, which was launched with an encouraging prepared speech only a few weeks ago by no lesser a dignitary than the mayor.) Wilson seemed especially keen on Tuesday last week to tear asunder the neat “arts and heritage” pairing.
(Every time I think of tourism developer and cruise operator Deputy Mayor Wilson, I cannot help but see that bottle of launch bubbly smashing over the bow of his eco-cruiser, Lady Jane II, the shards spraying down into the waters of the Huon alongside the Franklin jetty. That event, captured by photographer Mike Peters, is a worthy addition to his collection of marvellous Huon Valley photographic memorabilia. In early 2009, Peters was also on hand, soon after dawn, to capture council-contracted bulldozers splintering to oblivion the landmark Franklin Football Club rooms that once adorned the oval. Council committed that offence against the senses in full knowledge that a petition to save the building was growing fast.)
— The five township committees are to be disbanded (not a bad decision really) and, possibly, the five annual township forums will no longer be held (a very bad decision). As I see it, this is a tacit admission by council that the committee system has always been a sham in terms of “community consultation”, a process that, for years, has amounted to no more than lip service and a high-sounding, rarely followed policy document.
— Most other “community-development projects” will go.
— As a consequence of the two above, community development-associated administrative costs will be sharply reduced.
— The skate park project for Cygnet — along with other youth services — may end up in the too-hard basket, if not eliminated entirely. (At the Tuesday meeting, Cr Rohan Gudden, holder of the “youth services” portfolio, said not a word in defence of his portfolio. In his nearly four years on council, Gudden has come across as very much the silent type.)
It never ceases to amaze me that Armstrong and his deputy Wilson are so concerned about such piddling amounts as $140,000 here, $200,000 there, yet they show great reluctance to utter a word about the $4 million the council (of which they were members) gambled away half a dozen years ago as a result of its failure to do due diligence and naively accepting the advice of a non-independent financial adviser. (Even with falling interest rates, that lost $4 million could have earned as much as another million dollars had it been invested sensibly all that time ago — a sum that would have comfortably covered council’s assumed FY2013-14 cash shortfall.)
More to the point, while it may be true that investment interest revenue is down, council is not, as things stand, in any danger of losing $200,000 in forestry rates in FY2013-14. Yet this is what council is claiming to justify its cutbacks. NRM, youth and community services represent, in total, only about 5% of council’s budget, yet they have been made to bear the entire $380,000 cutback.
Nowhere in the review of services could I spot any suggestion of cutbacks in expenditure in the controlling bloc’s favourite, closely guarded area: infrastructure services, which take around a third of the total annual budget.
Then there is the $200,000-plus a year for the gutter sweeper that swishes along the streets of the five main population centres. The effect, as one ratepayer observed at last December’s Cygnet township forum, is for its sweepings to be simply “picked up and rearranged into circles”. It might not save much money, but a sizeable chunk of that $200,000 could be better spent employing a few street-cleaners. But no chance: that costly and largely ineffective monster is truly a jealously protected toy.
As usual, there was almost no one in the public gallery on Tuesday last week to watch another depressing performance by the elected representatives who call the council tune. These men, while prepared to rip the heart out of some of the more meritorious aspects of council services, are tightly united in defence of profligate council spending on high-energy, concrete-focused activities — such as poorly designed, over-engineered, probably over-priced public toilets, car parks, playground projects . . .
After following municipal politics Huon-style for more than five years, I still cannot begin to understand what Mayor Armstrong and his men think is a “sustainable future”. — Bob Hawkins
The writer is a friend of Liz Smith and Rosalie Woodruff. He is not a member of any political party.
