Article
Where’s the Scrutiny of Louise Elliot?
Louise Elliot seems to have moved on from her failed AirBNB campaign and is now targeting Hobart Lord Mayor Anna Reynolds arguing the LM should have declared a four-year-old donation made by a private citizen who is now heading up one of the scooter companies operating in Hobart.
It turns out that private citizen only got the scooter job this year, well after contracts were awarded. In most cities it’s very hard to separate council activities and business, and even more so in a tiny town like Hobart. (It also turns out I know this private citizen from university days, whereas I don’t know the Lord Mayor or Ms Elliot. That’s me disclosing my feelings. PS I’m not a Green.)
I don’t care about scooters or $3k the Lord Mayor received four years ago but I do actually care about community governance.
I care that the organisation Louise Elliot founded to support landlords, Tasmanian Residential Rental Property Owners (Inc), lists no contact details on its website or FB. So I went looking for them.
I found out that the 2021 AGM of the Tasmanian Residential Rental Property Owners, held at the Italian Club, returned a ‘committee’ of two (Louise Elliot +1) and that no attendees at the AGM were named but were listed as ‘approx 20 people’ and ‘approx 8 people’ by Zoom.
I care that the only two committee members of Tasmanian Residential Rental Property Owners are Louise Elliot and Dr Bradley Goldsmith, a Launceston hotelier and retired specialist in wagering systems. Is two even a committee? I don’t think so.
I also care that Tasmanian Residential Rental Property Owners offers ‘training’ in property management (via their website) that has no accreditation or identifiable author.
And I care that Tasmanian Residential Rental Property Owners has received $100,000 in public money from the Tasmanian Government, yet has no verifiable association membership or functional committee. Remember, Louise Elliot considers $10k to put poetry on buses is reckless.
I found all this out by an hour’s internet search and finding publicly accessible information. I am curious as to why The Mercury and ABC Hobart aren’t adequately scrutinising Louise Elliot?
Why does The Mercury happily report Louise Elliot/Tasmanian Residential Rental Property Owners’ plans to cram tiny homes onto a car park (20/3/22), but not notice the ‘Wanda Foundation’ does not actually exist? (It is the name of a NZ arts charity). Journalism please?
A Mercury article of 27/3 does say the Wanda Foundation is ‘tentatively named’ but Elliot has put up a website https://wandafoundation.org that routes back to her Facebook pages and the Mercury on 20/3 was happy to refer to them as a group. This is a fine point, I guess!
I note that morning host Leon Compton did question Louise Elliot about the $100,000 given to the Tasmanian Residential Rental Property Owners on @abchobart on 21/9/21. Elliot says she asked the government for the money.
I really do think there should be more focus on the ‘committee’ and the process. I note that Rosalie Woodruff tried to do this in Parliament, but I think it is a scab that should be picked at.
Anyway, I am blocked from Louise Elliot’s pages here and on Facebook but I hope this little exercise in citizen journalism is useful to people who care about the future of Hobart and invite people to do their own digging into candidates and their behaviours.
Compiled from a Twitter thread by Naomi Parry Duncan and published with her permission.