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Mike Wilson’s ad in the Huon News
Huon Valley Guessing Games
Time passes, and the calls keep coming: “What’s happening with the board of inquiry (BoI) into Huon Valley Council?” Frankly, I don’t know. And I don’t know why council observers are so impatient. This was a ministerial-ordered inquiry, for goodness’ sake, so why would we hear anything of substance so soon?
The BoI report only went to Local Government Minister Peter Gutwein on February 19, and the board’s members were still snooping around council when it met the following Wednesday, so there may have been some touching up of the report after that visit.
Anyway, if the report is not to the minister’s liking, we, the public, might never see anything but a heavily redacted version.
However, we did find out on March 15 — thanks to Mayor Peter Coad (doing his duty as an elected representative of the people and striving for as much transparency as the constraints of the restrictive Local Government Act 1993 allow) talking to Jessica Howard of the Mercury — that the report had been sighted by HVC management and himself.
In the same Mercury report, Coad said he had “advised” GM Simone Watson to call a closed meeting of council to discuss the report. Knowing the “immovable object and irresistible force” situation that seems to exist between Coad and Watson, I initially wondered whether such a meeting would come to pass. However, now there has been an advertisement that council will meet in closed session on Tuesday (March 22).
What will go on at that meeting, and what the atmosphere at it will be, is something we might never discover. So, what happens from here remains, for the moment, pure speculation.
Presumably the minister (presumably in consultation with Phillip Hoysted, his director of local government) will first consider management, mayoral and councillor comments in response to the report, and then deliberate on his next step.
Gutwein might even decide to hold fire on a decision until the Glenorchy Council report comes in; or he may confer with his premier as to whether what’s been happening down in the Huon has any relevance to the government’s thoughts about the possibility of council mergers in 2018; or he might decide to sack the whole lot of them, manager and councillors, and put in an administrator or equivalent. Wouldn’t the latter be lovely: just what the valley really needs.
What would be nice would be for Gutwein’s department to keep the curious public as informed as it can without, of course, giving away, prematurely, the contents of the report, its recommendations and what he’s thinking of doing about it.
One thing we do know down here in the Huon is that Cr Mike Wilson — the shrillest voice in the circus drama that has been acted out since Peter Coad had the temerity to enter, and win, the contest for mayor back in 2014 — has been in almost permanent election mode. And he’s stepped up campaigning a lot in recent weeks. Sadly, his rhetoric is repetitive, not in the least entertaining, and rarely involves anything that, to my mind, can be construed as a constructive thought.
Does Wilson know something we don’t know? Another councillor, Ken Studley, ex-regular soldier, now real-estate salesman — sartorially elegant in safari suit at council’s February meeting — also seems to be putting the spit-and-polish on. His adverts seeking heart-to-heart communication with the constituency are running fairly regularly. You’d almost believe Wilson’s team has been put on election alert.
Through all this, council management appears to have gone to sleep on the job. And its expensive “communications and media unit” (more than $300,000 a year), in terms of output (or, rather, lack of it), seems to be getting its money for jam: two media releases this month (‘Important information for Private Water Suppliers’ and ‘Branding the Huon Valley’), one last month (‘Overseas doctors visiting the Huon Valley’), and two in January (‘Huonville Netball upgrade’ and ‘Cuppa Conversation’), for a total output of roughly 1800 words — far fewer than I’ve cobbled together over the past weekend to produce this boring, though I feel useful, effort in the interests of leaving for posterity one person’s views of what was going on with the Huon Valley Council in January-March 2016.
Recent letters columns of the Huon Valley News, and, at times of The Classifieds, the valley’s two weekly publications, have been most busy. One might almost believe that the community’s traditional apathy towards local government is lifting. Verbal bullets are flying hither and yon, the balance, from rough observation, favouring Mayor Coad.
Some of the flak seems to have been getting in Wilson’s craw. In last week’s HVN (March 16) and Classifieds (March 17), obviously niggled by letters-to-the-editor commentary, Wilson ran adverts in which he presented the “facts” as he sees them — about the council’s $4 million (now probably nearer to $6 million) loss through investments in “collateral debt obligations” (CDOs); the Port Huon Sports Centre; council credit cards; and the Petty Sessions Jetty. In each advert, he says: “I have now sought legal advice regarding the defamatory comments that have been made about me.”
Interestingly, Wilson appears to have thrown caution to the wind by revealing how much HVC has recouped in its legal action against the Commonwealth Bank. Council, claiming to have been given a bum steer, has long blamed ComBank for the original $4 million loss.
He says in his advert: “Of the $4 million invested [shouldn’t that be “lost”?], 36% has been recovered at this stage.” My understanding, as a result of attending council meetings, is that the amount so far recovered is subject to a confidentiality clause in council’s agreement with whoever it is that has returned some of the money lost back during GFC (global financial crisis) days (2007-08).
Has Wilson put himself in code-of-conduct territory for revealing information that council is bound, by confidentiality agreement, to keep secret?
The Wilson advert’s bit about “legal advice” seem a bit rich considering he and some of his Heart of the Huon team have been wildly bagging Peter Coad ever since he threw his hat in the ring for the mayor’s job and spoiled Wilson’s ambition of cornering the job for himself. The adverts have me thinking of a quote attributed to US president Harry S. Truman (the man who ordered the atomic bombs to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945): “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.” Surely Wilson is not finding himself all of a sweat?
Mayor Coad was elected on a platform of economic reform, transparency, openness, integrity etc. Predictably, the embittered majority Heart bloc has been mocking and verbally abusing him ever since. At one council meeting, Wilson even suggested the mayor was acting like a dictator.
Considering the years of secrecy that the Heart and its string of predecessors have been able to impose on council affairs since Robert Armstrong became mayor early this century, it’s not surprising that they are sensitive about the progressive ideas of a mayor who wants a council that the public can see into, that it can trust, and that has an economic policy for sustainable growth in the valley.
Coming to the surface in recent weeks have been many issues that have troubled this writer since attending his first Huon Valley Council meeting in 2008.
Example: The elected representatives have voted to delegate an excessive amount of authority to its chief executive for as long as I can remember — certainly back to the days of the secretive, iron-fisted rule of Geoff Cockerill. This situation is particularly worrying today with council run by a CEO who seems to have relatively brief local government management experience. One problem is that it can encourage councillors (who sit as the equivalent of a board of management) to be lazy in their vigilance of how such a vast level of delegated authority is handled.
Then there is the image that many in the valley have of the council. HVC is widely perceived as a council that is riddled with nepotism (hardly avoidable in such a tight-knit community); that sometimes appears to turn a blind eye to floutings of the law by possibly privileged interests; that ignores community wishes and directs resources to projects that do not have community blessing; that counters unwelcome councillor resolutions via bureaucratic manoeuvring; that allows councillors to take part in the resolution of issues despite the possibility of conflict-of-interest; that appears to spend far too much public money on legal advice; that fails to seriously consider popularly supported petitions and imposes unwanted facilities on the community (or, on the other hand, destroys community-supported facilities); that resists an appeal from the community not to spend a quarter-million dollars on an ugly public toilet that overwhelms an otherwise tasteful tiny park, yet can’t find $80,000 to put in a lift to a popularly used room in the same township’s town hall; that once rode roughshod over public resistance by turning up at daybreak, with police escort, and, willy-nilly, bulldozed a historic substantial mid-20th century building that just had to have asbestos in it, and then carted the debris away in open trucks, dust flying everywhere; that leased a council-owned caravan park at an apparent peppercorn rental to a private business (one of whom had been a councilor for some years when the lease was later renewed), demanded not one cent of the potential profits, yet continued to pay the $1600 annual Crown leasehold fee from the public coffers; that pours good money after bad into a sports centre that it saw fit, nearly 20 years ago, to acquire at an undisclosed price from an owner who was behind in his rates; that (in another of its not infrequent cargo-cult moments) supported a timber project that claimed it would create 300 jobs yet never offered work for more than a few score; that approved several buildings on a natural promontory of “outstanding scenic significance” that was officially recommended not to have more than two main buildings on it; that makes a private business of a public building after next to no serious consultation with the community; that has a 10-year no-strategy strategic plan; that has a virtually no-consultation consultation policy; that, at the latest unofficial estimate, appears to have lost close to $6 million through risky investments about a decade ago, yet still refuses to officially apologise to the community whose money it lost, or to reveal the circumstances of the loss . . .
The list goes on, leaving this writer believing that the Huon Valley has a directionless, visionless, secretive council that is not worthy of community support. With more research, I am sure more evidence would turn up that would reinforce my belief that one of the greatest drawbacks to the well-being of the social and economic health of the Huon community this century has been council’s lack of leadership and all-round competence.
It is disappointing to observe a council that your instinct tells you is failing to serve properly the interests of the people of the municipality as a whole, and simultaneously contributes to the undermining of our (sadly, rapidly dissolving) national concept of democracy.
NOTHING that happened at last month’s council meeting (February 24) generated any confidence that Gutwein’s decision to inquire into council’s affairs had done anything to make it consider mending its ways.
Two decisions confirmed its disconnect with the community and its determination to maintain council opacity: one was to prevent an inquiry into credit card records back to July 1, 2012; the other was to make legal an illegal and unapproved jetty without ever uttering a word about finding out, and punishing (or at least reprimanding), whoever it was that built that substantial jetty without a permit nearly two years ago.
In the finest tradition of all its previous incarnations, the dominant Heart of the Huon band of councillors yet again contrived to take council two steps backwards. Worse, the Heart seems determined to continue to draw a veil over matters that it feels the public simply should not know about — or, more to the point, should keep their noses out of.
At council’s January 27 meeting, two Heart members broke ranks, resulting in council appearing poised to take a giant step towards greater transparency, and, dare it be said, responsible local government.
Cr Ian Mackintosh’s January motion — calling for a review (for presentation to the April council meeting) of council credit records going back four years — passed 5-4 (http://oldtt.pixelkey.biz/index.php?/article/is-huon-council-gm-playing-for-time/), thanks to the votes of Heart members Lydia Eastley and Bruce Heron
By the February 24 meeting, Eastley and Heron were firmly back in the Heart fold. After a wrangling debate on February 24, and a “compromise” motion put up by Wilson, Mackintosh’s resolution was either dead, or watered down to such an extent that — if there is still a popularly elected council in the valley in 2016-17 (no one knows yet what the BoI report has recommended or what the minister will do) — there is unlikely ever to be an examination of who spent what on credit cards prior to November 2014 (when the present council began its term).
Interesting about the February debate were speeches by Eastley and Heron justifying why they wouldn’t stand by their decisions to support Mackintosh’s January resolution. What could be heard of Eastley’s rambling delivery left the gallery wondering just what it was that she was saying, or what it was that had changed her mind. Heron, never a good communicator and usually given to platitudes, read a prepared speech that he delivered so hesitatingly one might be forgiven for thinking he might not have written it. (Council’s audio system, installed some months ago, is so bad it might as well not be there.)
Much more interesting was why Wilson felt it was OK for him to put up his “compromise” motion. My belief, and that of other observers, is that it might not have passed a conflict-of-interest test. By proposing a review period beginning November 1, 2014 (rather than for the four years called for in Mackintosh’s January motion), Wilson was excluding from examination the entire period in which he was deputy mayor and the period of several weeks preceding November 1, 2014, when he was acting mayor (standing in for then-mayor Robert Armstrong, who, after about 13 years, had finally stood aside after taking a seat on the Legislative Council much earlier in the year).
Whether Wilson had a council credit card in his days as deputy mayor is beside the point (he says he has never held a council credit card since he became a councillor 15 years ago); the point is that he surely should have made reference to this information about himself while speaking to his motion. He didn’t.
Questions are still being asked about council’s credit card uses.
The outcome of Wilson’s “compromise” motion is that HVC management must now report only on a period — November 1, 2014, to February 29 this year — in which southern Tasmanian council credit card issues in general have been in the media spotlight. It now appears that HVC will probably never report on the period July 1, 2012, to October 31, 2014.
Coad summed this up in a media release of February 26, in which he says: “. . . It is highly unlikely this earlier period will be approved for review given that a majority of councillors — the six-member Heart of the Huon team — have now demonstrated an unwillingness for credit card records to be revealed . . .”
No one, to my knowledge, has suggested publicly that there has been anything untoward. However, it is interesting that council is only willing to investigate a period dating back to just before Mayor Coad began requesting such details. Forgive me for smelling a rat somewhere.
THEN came debate on the illegal, unapproved jetty near Petty Sessions restaurant at Franklin. No one I have met is objecting to the idea of one jetty at that spot. (Petty Sessions already has approval to put another much larger jetty immediately downstream from the existing one.)
The controversy is about the way it came to be. Contempt for the law by person/s unknown and council’s failure to enforce regulations are what have provoked community criticism and talk of collusion and lack of community consultation.
It’s difficult to go into the nitty-gritty of the Petty Sessions jetty saga without tempting litigation, so I won’t, suffice to say that council made the jetty retrospectively legal on February 24; and that Mike Wilson can no longer moor his “eco-cruiser” permanently there because commercial vessels are no longer allowed to use it for more than three days in any month. (See TT links: http://oldtt.pixelkey.biz/index.php?/article/franklin-a-right-pickle-on-the-petty-sessions-foreshore/ http://oldtt.pixelkey.biz/index.php?/article/franklins-unapproved-jetty-questions-questions/ http://oldtt.pixelkey.biz/index.php?/article/open-letter-4m-lost-an-illegal-jetty-.-.-/ http://oldtt.pixelkey.biz/index.php?/article/hvc-time-for-an-administrator/ http://oldtt.pixelkey.biz/index.php?/article/that-illegal-franklin-jetty-a-question-begged/.)
So, while we wait on Minister Gutwein to consider council management’s, the mayor’s and other councillors’ responses to the BoI report, we can only keep our fingers crossed.
Will the minister institute serious action to sort out the valley’s local government woes once and for all. Or will he simply call another election (which he hinted might be his course when he ordered the inquiry last September)? Or will he do something entirely different.
The second course, possibly leading to a council being elected that very much resembles what the valley now has, would ensure more of the same nonsense that has long plagued a council that, in many eyes, if the issues were not so serious, would be a laughing stock. Such an outcome would be to the detriment of the health and well-being of the Huon in general, and to the eternal shame of a State Government that failed to serve the best interests of its citizens. — Bob Hawkins
• Download Mike Wilson ad in Classifieds …
