IRC acts to protect members at Wagga Wagga - and sets best practice model for all councils

At last, some proper recognition of a Council's duty of care when employees reputations are attacked

depa has had a long history of successfully acting to support members treated poorly by councillors behaving badly and/or local developers - Parramatta twice, Mudgee/Mid Western, Eurobodalla, Snowy River and Nambucca. Local government is a very easy target and no more so for professionals working in strategic planning and development control. After all, every application that draws objections will invariably end up with someone unhappy with someone else, often someone doing nothing more that discharging their obligations under a planning instrument or the BCA.

Everyone is familiar with local dissidents, loonies and others launching unwarranted attacks on staff in public or at council meetings or even the local press without employees having the opportunity to defend themselves - and the Council which employs them often reluctant to acknowledge that they have a duty of care to protect employees in the firing line.

But no longer.

Who is Peter Hurst and why is he so unkind?

 Peter Hurst says ‘knock this chip off my shoulder’

Peter Hurst is a local builder of domestic dwellings in Wagga Wagga. He is also a local heavyweight in the Housing Industry Association and has taken a particular dislike to Wagga Wagga Council which, after a long period of being under-resourced and pretty relaxed about development standards, started to take the job seriously and discharge their obligations to the community under planning instruments.

So distressed that he thought it appropriate to lodge significant complaints against Council employees involved in the management of planning and development control and then to distribute that complaint as broadly as possible within the local community, anyone in Government who would listen and, aided and abetted by the local rag the Daily Advertiser, ran a vendetta against the Council.

We thought the investigation of the complaint took a little bit longer than we would have liked and we filed a dispute with the Industrial Relations Commission to both speed up the investigation and seek the Commission's assistance to remind the Council of its responsibilities to protect staff and their reputations against defamatory and slanderous claims made by people who thought they could do so with impunity.

In a significant precedent, Deputy President Grayson issued a Statement on 11 August after the Council had dismissed all of the allegations made by Mr Hurst. Amongst other things the Commission called for the Council to:

• "obtain legal advice as to whether any employee has been defamed by any person and in particular by the complainant, Peter Hurst and the Wagga Wagga Daily Advertiser. And in relation to the Daily Advertiser in editorial and journalistic content and the publication of blogs and thereafter that the council take any legal action consistent with that advice."

Mr Hurst had the dismissal of his complaint hand-delivered but we are waiting for the apology requested in the Council’s letter.

This will be a measure of the man. We hope he will be big enough to acknowledge his mistakes, apologise appropriately and get on with the job. We will see.

Peter Hurst at Wagga Wagga’s “Look like Peter Stirling Day”

Members on strike at Taree

We have been involved in a dispute with Greater Taree City Council over recent months following a clumsy investigation carried out by the Council into a gift provided by members to their delegate Jim Boyce last year. The gift was in appreciation of his considerable efforts in a successful regrading exercise that lifted all our positions up one grade in the Council's salary system.

How extraordinary that a simple generous act by members could have such ramifications.

Members took strike action for the day on 2 July. This action was unprecedented at the Council and followed a refusal by the General Manager to agree to a course of action which could have resolved the issues very, very simply.

Two of the issues which were of concern in the dispute were the Council’s "ambushing" of employees, luring them into a meeting with HR and the relevant Director allegedly about something else and refusing to provide the employees with their right under the Award to have a union representative present.

In a statement by the Commission on 20 July the Commission criticised both of these aspects of the Council's behaviour.

The issue of "ambushing" employees is an important one. What Taree tried to do (and we know it is not an uncommon practice) is to invite employees for an "informal chat" when it was clear that the issues discussed, certainly as far as the Council was concerned, could have resulted in disciplinary action against one or more of the members being interviewed.

This is clearly unacceptable. Employees are entitled to not attend a meeting where this is a risk or to leave one if it becomes obvious that it is a risk. More importantly, councils should be more honest and open in this process.

Similarly, clause 31 Disciplinary Procedures of the Local Government (State) Award at 31A(iv) provides that an employee has the right to:

"Be entitled to request the presence of the union representative and/or the involvement of the union at any stage."

And as this is a right provided to employees under clause governing all aspects of disciplinary procedures including the investigation process, an employee has a right to be represented in any investigation.

An important message for Human Resources “professionals”.

By the way, the investigation conducted by the Council found that no one did anything wrong and that everyone (apart from council management in "ambushing" staff and not allowing representation) was completely innocent.

We stop Parramatta Council charging employees for bringing their leaseback cars to work!

As councils struggle with rate-pegging and tight budgets they are looking different options for income.

As extraordinary as it may seem, Parramatta City Council thought it made sense when they decided to close and develop the free staff car park and move all Council cars into a commercial car park (which they own!) to have employees who bring Council cars to work, and use them during the day, to pay for the privilege of parking them.

It was a policy equivalent of Tourette’s Syndrome - where they just seemed simply unable to control things that ordinarily wouldn't happen.

We filed a dispute which was dealt with in a very short time by DP Grayson in the NSW industrial Relations Commission and after having made his views known clearly and unequivocally, the Council has withdrawn the proposal.

But it does make you wonder how a stupid idea like that can work its way through HR "professionals", Directors of Corporate Services, management and executive teams and even the CEO (as the General Manager likes to be known) without someone applying some intellectual rigour or commonsense.

If you would be interested to know the names of all those people who signed off on this new policy thinking it was acceptable and a good idea, e-mail to ian@depa.net.au and if there's enough of an interest, we can publish them all next time!

BPB rethinks legislative problems and conflict of interest

We met again with representatives of the BPB on 27 July and with the Minister for Planning Tony Kelly on 12 August.

Despite their protestations that this was physically impossible, the BPB and the Minister advise that the regulations will be made in time to quarantine local government accredited employees from the regime of fines and penalties provided in the 2005 BPB Act.

And despite the BPB's anxiety about the conflict of interest inherent in a council certifying its own application, the BPB advises that there will be guidelines established for a temporary arrangement to continue this practice under certain conditions. We will wait and see.

In the last issue of depaNews we asked members to respond to our view about the conflict of interest and we received eight replies. Seven of them thought that we were insensitive to the costs associated with the issue and we should wake up to ourselves but two of them agreed with us - citing the pressure that they had personally experienced in certifying compliance with an application of their employer.

We don't resile from our position, we understand that councils are under-funded and that there would be a cost imposition with a change such as this but this is an issue that has to be confronted by councils, not by individual members. And if a prohibition on this practice means that members of ours can't be pressured to sign off on things that they may not ordinarily sign off on, or bump their employer’s jobs up the priority list to satisfy their employer, then that can only be a good thing.

We ask the Division of Local Government to do something!

We have asked the Division of Local Government to investigate the apparent inconsistencies between the anti-discrimination provisions of the Local Government Act (sections 344, 345 and 346) which require a Council’s EEO management plan to deal with four illegal areas of discrimination when the Industrial Relations Act identifies eight illegal areas of discrimination and the Anti-Discrimination Act identifies even more.

This problem was highlighted in our recent dispute with Gosford over their policy to deny leaseback cars to part-time employees who work part-time because of their responsibilities as carers.

The Department of Local Government and now, we presume similarly the Division, have been great supporters of publishing statistics on the performance of individual councils on things like how many days it takes to process an application.

To be fair and even-handed, we are happy to report on how long it will take the Division to deal with this matter. And we won't even mention that we originally raised it with them in March when they told us, according to my notes that these sections of the Act had not been reviewed since 1993 and needed to be "urgently" and then they didn't get back to us.

In other news

Ian Robertson
Secretary