Geoffrey Swan’s Tasmanian Times offering is an impressive and well-researched attempt to paint a picture of council the way it is.
And I have since been shocked to hear Mayor Sally Doyle reaffirm, at the 25 October 2023 council meeting, that the Huon Valley Council’s lips-sealed dictatorship would continue.
Seems nothing is to be revealed of the circumstances under which GM Jason Browne suddenly vacated his post; and, that no more questions about his intriguing departure will be tolerated.
From my observations, since 2008, I have deduced HVC has been hiding behind what I view as specious legal grounds.
This, I believe, is a disgrace and an assault on the public’s democratic rights. When it is a question of what comes first, public interest should always prevail over private interest in seriously controversial matters.
As I mused on what I regard as council’s consistent failure to act in the public interest, I got to thinking about the number of council chiefs since long-time GM Geoff Cockerill (about 1993-2009) was not invited in 2009 to reapply for his job. That was at a time council was struggling to deal with a huge financial crisis of its own making.
That particular financial scandal was the seeming loss on world money markets of around $6 million of HVC’s spare cash. Council – on whose financial advice it never clearly revealed – invested millions in what were called CDOs (collateral debt obligations).
In those days, longtime councillor and controversial figure Mike Wilson, constrained presumably by council confidentiality, might have been able to reveal a lot more than he did about the circumstances of the CDO investments. Many of us miss that recently departed self-proclaimed passionate supporter of the valley.
Council’s controllers, it seemed, had thought the CDOs would attract huge earnings (to this observer, a belief far too good to be true). We were later told some of that lost money was recovered. Council watchers ended up not knowing what to believe.
As a newcomer to the Huon Valley, I was shocked at council’s way of doing things.
It seemed that when it got things wrong, it would simply obfuscate about what had really happened, trusting that the public memory would eventually lapse into amnesia.
There have been about half-a-dozen council bosses since Cockerill departed. None was very long in the job. These CEOs include a state government-appointed commissioner, who took over for two years after the LG minister sacked council, having decided it was out of control.
In this ratepayer’s eyes, council’s performance — although it generally competently delivers local government basics such as garbage collection, road grading and receipting of council charges etc, this council has never been impressive on matters relating to what should be democratic processes, or on forthright communication with the public.
My uncertain feeling about its modus operandi has never eased, and interested citizens have been frequently perplexed in the sense being that council was not offering evidence of correct behaviour.
For example, whenever a new GM was to be appointed, there was always a sense that the post had already been filled, sometimes even before the recruitment process commenced. Perhaps council was always following the ‘royal commission rule’ — never call one unless the answer is already known.
In the case of the appointment of the latest GM a couple of years back, council was forced to acknowledge advice from an authoritative body that it had behaved inappropriately in appointing General Manager Browne — and then still it went on to confirm the appointment. It felt as if there was a puppeteer at work.
That sense lingers today.
Geoffrey Swan asks many questions without getting rational answers. I sense we’re unlikely to get any as long as council does not undergo another cleanup … another spring cleaning.
Mayor Sally Doyle seems in no mood to offer reasonable explanations. Perhaps her departure from council would help towards a clearing of the air.
Bob Hawkins, a journalist since the mid-1950s, has been covering the affairs of Huon Valley Council since 2009.
