Delusions of grandeur

Quick quiz – which Australian capital city has a population approaching 900,000?  That, apparently, is the size of a typical Australian capital city according to Councillor Susie Douglas of Gold Coast City.  "It is forecast that Gold Coast City's population will reach nearly 900,000 people by 2040, which is on par with the population of a capital city," she said.  This remarkable piece of hyperbole was part of an announcement that Gold Coast Council's economic development agency, Business Gold Coast, has an employment creation target of 8000 jobs annually.  The city council's $90 million stimulus package approved this year is the first of its kind by a local government authority in Australia.  Within this package, the council endorsed a $2.6 million investment attraction scheme, which provides financial assistance to encourage new and targeted investment to expand or move to the city.  The scheme was launched in October with a Business Roadshow which took in Sydney and Melbourne, a key outcome of this year's Gold Coast Bulletin Rescue Patrol.

Cowra’s new sewer plant

Leading Australian engineering group, Monadelphous recently won the $8.8 million contract for construction of Cowra’s new Sewage Treatment Plant (STP), the Cowra Guardian reports.

Monadelphous is highly regarded in the industry and has completed numerous sewage treatment plant upgrade projects for both state and local government authorities such as NSW Public works, Port Macquarie-Hastings Shire Council, Morton Bay Regional Council and Bundaberg Regional Council. The work at Cowra will commence in January and will take approximately 52 weeks to complete.

Council recognises the significant financial contribution of the NSW Government towards this project as part of their Country Towns Water Supply and Sewerage Program.

Victimisation in Warrnambool?

Three Warrnambool City councillors, including the mayor and a senior officer, were breath-tested within minutes of leaving their post-meeting informal dinner, The Standard reports.  Mystery surrounds why so many high-ranking city leaders were pulled over in close proximity to city hall in separate cars within a short space of time when police resources were stretched to the limit.  It adds intrigue to a heated debate around the council table this week about a call to ban alcohol from the traditional post-meeting dinners and meal breaks.  Some sources have wondered if there was a tip-off to police to instigate the breath tests after the November 16 meeting.  Cr Peter Hulin's motion on Monday night to end the tradition of alcoholic beverages being available at meal breaks or after meetings was met with resounding opposition from five other councillors and accusations of grandstanding.  Some said his motion appeared to be a payback for them lodging a complaint about him to the Local Government Authority about a breach of council confidentiality which led to a special panel investigation.

Helping erode civil liberties

Governments of every level and stripe don’t like nay-sayers.  However as the Fairfax group of newspapers reported last weekend, the Victorian government (described recently as the “best state government in Australia” – mostly because the others are so bad, a related article comments) is now releasing information on legitimate and peaceful protesters to the private security firms who manage access to possibly contentious projects.  Melbourne Water has also been involved in monitoring civil protests.  Councils probably don’t do as much only because they lack the funds and resources such as State police to do the work.

Tasmania Water looking for software

The Tasmanian water joint services utility Onstream has advertised for expressions of interest from vendors for a a land management and billing system.  The corporation began operations on 1 July 2009 and provides a range of professional services to the three regional water and sewerage corporations in Tasmania.

Make up your mind!

More than 500 South Australian officers and councillors have taken part in a program to make them better decision-makers.  The program, by the Local Government Managers Association and Wallmans Lawyers, was delivered by some of the state's leading legal authorities.  Wallmans partner Michael Kelledy said: "There is a very real lack of information available to people in local government when it comes to good administrative practices and decision-making.  This has meant local government decision-making has not always been as comprehensive or robust as the law requires, making it more susceptible to being challenged, whether by the Ombudsman, in the courts or otherwise."

The training comes just a year after a damning assessment of local government by then acting ombudsman Ken MacPherson, who told the Government's Economic and Finance Committee: "Some (councils) are utterly appalling."  While he made the comments amid allegations corruption was rampant in local government, Mr MacPherson said some elected members had not understood their responsibilities and accountability and administrative propriety suffered.

"What the Ombudsman's office had identified were shortcomings across a number of councils, which indicated nobody was making an effort to undertake the required training and ensure the bar was raised on good administrative decision-making," Mr Kelledy said.

More corruption in Wollongong

A year after the ICAC investigation at Wollongong Council and the rotten apples are still being found out.  This time it is, so Council claims, because of their new anti-corruption processes, reports the Illawarra Mercury.  Acting general manager Peter Kofod confirmed that a staff member had been dismissed after an internal complaint and investigation. But he was unable to provide specific details, saying the investigation was ongoing.  "What I can say is that this is an example of council's new policies and processes in action," he said. "We have made it very clear that this council will not tolerate any form of corrupt or dishonest behaviour."  Administrator Col Gellatly was also unable to provide further details.

Only last month, the council adopted a new fraud and corruption prevention policy which encourages staff to report fraudulent, dishonest or corrupt behaviour so it can be investigated.  "Council's professional conduct co-ordinator (ombudsman) has now been in place for more than a year, council has appointed protected disclosure officers and protected disclosure referral officers and introduced a corporate governance committee with external representatives," Mr Kofod said.  "It is impossible to create a corruption-proof organisation but through comprehensive new policies, processes and systems, we are showing it is possible to identify and take action against anyone associated with council who chooses to act unethically."

In October last year, ICAC handed down 27 corruption prevention recommendations after Commissioner Jerrold Cripps found an unprecedented level of corruption existed within the council, spanning five tiers of local government.  He found that former general manager Rod Oxley had created an environment that bred corruption.

SE Queensland water restructure ramping up

If job vacancy advertisements are anything to go by, activity is accelerating in the retail bodies being created to sell water to the residents of SE Queensland.  Three retail water companies have been formed, and an advertisement on online job site Seek on Saturday was looking for 6 business analysts for work in billing, finance, HR and land management.  This isn’t the first of such advertisements.  Let’s hope there are enough such experts to go around the three of them.

WA consolidation hastens slowly

In August, the Premier Colin Barnett announced his target of fewer than 100 councils within five years but so far, only nine councils have elected to amalgamate.  The Government is introducing a regional model for sharing services but Labor's opposition MP, Paul Papalia, says that is just another name for forced amalgamations.  "What the Minister is trying to hide is that the process that he created in February which has thrown the Local Government sector into complete disarray and derailed a collaborative, co-operative approach to reform has completely failed," he said.

Mr Papalia says the plans have derailed the reform process that was under way before the Barnett Government came to power.  "I think the minister really has to accept that his process has failed, that he has created a lot of damage in the local government sector," he said.  "He should return to a collaborative, co-operative process that was under way prior to him arriving."

Open government

All the hype about the NBN shouldn’t blind us to the fact that this Australian government doesn’t have an open government strategy and indeed has recently been shown up as running behind a number of countries including our country cousins across the Tasman.  This failing is one of the themes of this Blog, and I was reminded of this by a story in The Guardian about the US and the UK opening up government data:

On both sides of the Atlantic, governments are making more data available in more useful formats for developers. In Britain, the government aims to open access to postcode data by spring of next year.   This will most likely be the dataset that links postcodes to geographic location rather than the Postcode Address File (PAF) that links postcodes to addresses.  This is part of the Smarter Government project that Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced recently to get most government services and data online. The postcode data is just one of many datasets we can hope to see from the government, and with Sir Tim Berners-Lee involved, the formats will use open standards with input from the World Wide Web Consortium. The prime minister said that 1,100 datasets have already been released, and he said: “And there are many hundreds more that can be opened up - not only from central government but also from local councils, the NHS, police and education authorities”.  The government has also promised better access to data from local authorities.

Meanwhile here in Australia we still have councils like Lithgow harassing their business owners to give them information that’s already been provided to the ATO or the ABS, imposing unnecessary burdens.  Perhaps we need an National Government Information Initiative to match the NBN.  I’ve even got an acronym ready-made – NITWIT.

Planning gripes top the list

In  further show of why planning is such a cornucopia for patronage, graft, special favours and a quick buck, planning and development gripes are the basis of most complaints received by NSW councils, new figures show.  The NSW government in November released details of complaints received by the state's local governments, showing that a small number of areas received more than half of the grievances.

Shoalhaven City Council received the state's most complaints (75) during the 2008/09 financial year, although the figure is down from 127 the previous year.  Gosford, Tweed, Ku-ring-gai, Sydney, Wollongong, Mid-Western, Wyong, Bega and Shellharbour councils made up the remainder of the top-10 most complained about local government areas.

"It's very concerning that such a relatively small number of councils account for more than half of the 1,200 complaints received," Local Government Minister Barbara Perry said in a statement.  "We know that most councils do a good job but they need to remember at all times to work in the interests of their community."

Of the 1,200 complaints, 25 per cent were about planning and development, 15 per cent about governance and misconduct, and 11 per cent about enforcement, with conflicts of interest, customer service and mismanagement also featuring.  "Complaints can help measure community satisfaction with council decisions and can also provide a useful source of information and feedback for improving a council's services," Ms Perry said.  “It's also important to recognise that while there are a minority of councils that continue to receive large amounts of criticisms, the number of complaints against councils overall is down on last year."

During the 2007/08 financial year NSW councils received 1,450 complaints.

A call for more consolidation in Sydney

The chief executive of the Sydney Business Chamber, Patricia Forsythe, said in an opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald last week that Sydney's 470 local councillors needed to move away from arguing over the appropriate size of a backyard swimming pool on to bigger issues such as affordable housing and infrastructure renewal.  "The councillors on these new Sydney super councils should be paid a full-time wage and be resourced accordingly. They need to see themselves as boards of directors who focus on the larger strategic issues facing their region, rather than managers lost in day-to-day administration," she said.

The Local Government Association hit back.  The president of the Local Government Association, Genia McCaffery, said councils were already focusing on ways to modernise their sector and reject overly simplistic assertions that "bigger is automatically better". She acknowledged claims that some economies of scale could be achieved but said amalgamating councils would not fix their under-resourcing.  "It won't remove the burden of an unfair rate-pegged system, inadequate tax allocations, a cost-shifting bill that totalled $431 million in 2007-08 or an infrastructure renewal backlog that grows by $500 million each year," she said.

Places like Brisbane manage with one Council for much of the city, and even Auckland is consolidating its 6 councils into one.  But apparently it’s too hard for Sydney where it’s obvious that three “super” Councils – Sydney, North Shore and Parramatta, say – could manage the city between them and the other Councils could quietly fade away.

Beating up Sydney Water

Can Sydney Water get anything right?  Only a few years ago they were damned by the Auditor-General for their abandoned water billing implementation; now their CRM has come under fire in a report by NSW auditor-general Peter Achterstraat has criticised Sydney Water's implementation of a Siebel customer relationship management system which is running $34 million over budget and one-and-a-half years over schedule.  The rollout of the Maximo asset management application has also been criticised.

"Sydney Water customer management system is now expected to cost $55 million, more than double original budget of $21 million and one-and-a-half years behind schedule," the auditor report said. The original due date was August 2009, but it is not set to be delivered until February 2011.  The expanded budget was due to external costs, according to the auditors. "The significant increase in budget is due to the system integrator costs," the report said.  IBM had won the integration work, but it seemed prices were higher across the industry than the utility expected. "The budget for this stage of the project was found to be inadequate after receiving quotes from prospective service providers," the report said.

The schedule was dragged out by a year-and-a-half because of extending the design phase and a long procurement process. The integration work went out to tender in October last year.  Once implemented, the project, which also has a second phase, bringing expenditure up to $68.9 million, is expected to reduce operating costs by $1.9 million a year. It is also expected to improve customer service and reduce reliance on multiple unsupportable systems.  "Sydney Water is currently undertaking a major upgrade of its IT systems," said a spokesperson for the utility, responding to the report. "The reason why two large IT projects have exceeded their original budget estimates is because they were early estimates."

It would appear the Sydney Water is again reviewing potential replacements for its water billing application.

Take away their toys!

In Alice Springs the local council has introduced a new by-law allowing it to impound cars that have been the subject of parking fines three times in a week.  The Town Council says the by-law is a response to community concern (don’t they always?).  The new provision is one of many included in new by-laws governing public places that were signed-off by the council earlier this week.  The council's chief executive, Rex Mooney, says the by-laws will not be in place until the Local Government Minister approves them early next year.  "This ensures that Council rangers have the power to actually either impound or to cause the vehicle to be moved on," he said.

This makes for some interesting enhancements to the hand-held devices that most Councils supply their parking inspectors.  Presumably the devices (which are usually a one-way communication device, uploading details of the day’s parking infringements) are now a two-way device, with updates being provided, presumably on a 7-day rolling data series, of what cars have had parking fines in the past 7 days.  And if a car moves three times in the same day and is giving a parking infringement each time?