Almost too much news - and Barry puts
the boot into the public sector

 

Members at Wagga Wagga vindicated as Minister rejects calls for a planning administrator

This is what is called an "I told you so" moment. The 2010 campaign by builders and developers in Wagga Wagga, unwilling to comply with normal planning rules, has now been shown to be a beat-up and a farce.

Yesterday, Minister for Planning Brad Hazzard announced that despite the calls by the self-seekers, the boofheads, the flouters of planning laws and the scurrilous yellow press Dirty Advertiser and it's partial, sub-professional and conflicted "journalists", he would not appoint a planning administrator to Wagga Wagga City Council.

This was clearly a beat-up all along. We said as much in depaNews when we said we were confident that the complaints, like that of Peter Hurst, would be dismissed when investigated. Now they have been. And while the Sydney Morning Herald printed that quote in full, the Dirty Advertiser, as part of its partial and complicitous role in backing these miscreants, chose to remove any reference to Mr Hurst. Shame on them, obviously one Press Council finding against them wasn't enough.

It’s good to see belligerent people get their comeuppance. The Dirty Advertiser described local hotmix provider Bill Casley as an "outspoken leader" on 10 September last year and it was Casley who spear-headed the complaints by dissidents against planning decisions by WWCC.

 

Casley and his grievances on the way to Tony Kelly's office

 

Ordinarily we wouldn't care about a small developer who ignored advice from a Council that his plan to build a hotmix plant in a rural area was contrary to the zoning, who ignored offers of assistance from the Council to find an alternative site in an industrial zoning, who built it anyway and then refused to file a development application to even try and legitimise the illegal development. What a stupid thing to do. The whole purpose of planning is to make sure that particular types of development are only built in areas where those types of development are allowable.

But on this occasion this story needs to be told. Described by the Wagga Wagga Dirty Advertiser on 14 September 2010 as "the outspoken leader of one of Wagga’s biggest asphalt companies", Casley got nailed by the Land and Environment Court when he appealed the action the Council had taken against his illegal works. On 6 April the Court dismissed his appeal.

This was reported in the Sydney Morning Herald in the Local Government section on 19 April but, of course, true to their partial reporting on this issue in Wagga Wagga, the Dirty Advertiser didn’t report it at all.

The Herald described Casley as "a protagonist in the campaign waged by developers" and ABC Riverina claimed his dispute "sparked months of complaints about the council’s planning department, and resulted in the Planning Minister threatening to take away the Council's planning powers", and now his complaints have been found to be baseless (just like Peter Hurst’s) by the Land and Environment Court and, along with everyone else's, have also been rejected by the Minister for Planning.

Why the former Minister for Planning Tony Kelly and his office provided oxygen to such an unworthy group remains to be explained. Don’t hold your breath on that one.

We are thrilled at the upholding of the integrity of the work done by our members at Wagga Wagga and congratulate the new Minister for Planning.

(As an aside, a diplomatic e-mail from our office, couched in the sweetest of terms, highlighted the failure of the Dirty Advertiser to report the Casley decision and resulted in them publishing an edited version of Harvey Grennan’s Herald story.

And for anyone alarmed about an "Opinion" piece in that yellow rag over Easter by "journalist" Patrick Wood that reported he had a short conversation with me where I called him a d-head and hung up, this is clearly untrue. (Don’t worry, I was not that polite.)

 

Members put ban on services to Deputy Mayor at Blayney

 

Deputy Mayor Kevin Radburn - getting nothing from depa members

 

It's hard to imagine that there are still councillors out there who don't understand that it is unacceptable to criticise the performance of employees at council meetings. Maybe it's because it was at Blayney, and it gets pretty damn cold at Blayney, that the Deputy Mayor Councillor Kevin Radburn thought it was okay to do precisely this.

And not only that, despite being called into line twice by Mayor Bruce Kingham, he kept doing it. This was unacceptable behaviour by the Deputy Mayor and clearly a breach of significant sections of the Code of Conduct but Director of Environment Services Paul O'Brien by that stage had had enough and left the meeting.

Clearly a General Manager has a responsibility to remind the Mayor if he is not properly managing the meeting and protecting staff from this sort of thing but it is the Mayor who is responsible for managing council meetings and he failed to do so. No senior officer, or any other council employee for that matter, should be put in a situation where they have to ask the Mayor for this to be done. And any councillor who thinks its okay to ignore repeated requests by the Mayor to pull themself together and behave, should be thrown out of the meeting by the Mayor anyway.

We wrote to the General Manager calling for an apology from the Mayor for his failure to manage the meeting and from the Deputy Mayor for his breaches of the Code of Conduct and when things weren't going fast enough, our members met and unanimously resolved to place a ban, not only personally and directly on any service at all to Councillor Radburn but also services to any meeting in which council Radburn might be in attendance and deliberating.

This worked. The GM has now referred the incident to an external panel that considers potential breaches of the Code of Conduct and, after this positive approach by the General Manager, members have parked the general ban on council services for the time being. The ban on Councillor Radburn continues.

Members know that depa has had a long history of protecting employees against this sort of unacceptable behaviour and precedents established in the Industrial Relations Commission by Deputy President Grayson in the Wagga Wagga dispute unequivocally remind councils of their obligations to protect the reputations of staff as well as their health and safety.

 

FBT changes in 2010 Federal Budget will affect council cars

 

The announcement in the Federal Budget that the sliding scale of FBT payments based on the kilometres travelled by the car is to be scrapped and replaced with a standard 20% tax is currently being digested by the industry.

It never made any sense to have a tax which reduced if you travel more kilometres. This additional travel increased other costs and its encouragement to emit more carbon.

Already some councils are threatening employees that they will try to recoup the increases in FBT from them as part of leaseback fees but these councils are missing the point that providing employees with private use of cars clearly benefits the Council as well as the employees concerned and that this is not an appropriate course of action. Imagine a council trying to recruit you lot without offering a car.

Clause 15 of the State Award restricts councils to increases of less than 10% anyway.

The new statutory rate will be phased in from 10 May 2011 over four years.

The single rate of 20% will:

• Increase the tax concession provided for cars driven less than 15,000 km a year;

• maintain the current tax concession provided for vehicles driven between 15,000 and 25,000 km a year; and

• decrease the tax concession provided for vehicles driven more than 25,000 km a year.

It will be cars travelling more than 25,000 km per annum that will be the problem.

We have organised a meeting with the LGSA to discuss the impact of these changes on councils and their fleets so that we can better manage this issue across the industry. That meeting will be held on 6 June and we will report in June's depaNews.

 

Is this the right room for an argument?
Here we go again at Taree

"An argument isn't just contradiction"

We are in dispute again with Greater Taree City Council.

As a result of a restructure some time ago, the Council has de-skilled and removed authority from a member who was formerly a Manager and is now a team leader. He accepted the position of team leader on assurances by the Council would be virtually indistinguishable and that this would be revealed when the position description was developed. The Council has refused, despite monthly requests, to prepare the position description.

We were able to identify 18 separate responsibilities lost in the change (and that's counting the loss of all delegations only as one factor) in addition to the council's failure to honour their undertaking to prepare a position description but the council would still not agree to make the aggrieved employee redundant.

So, we filed a dispute and, for good measure, added to it two other issues that we were struggling to settle. One was an issue about an employee's right to a free commuter car arising from a letter of appointment which said she had that as an entitlement and the other was a failure of the Council to comply with the rules of their salary system when the salary system allowed two step increases but management simply decided that they didn't want to do that anymore.

The dispute was heard by Commissioner Stanton in the Industrial Relations Commission on 4 May and the Council denied everything. It was like living in Monty Python's famous Argument Sketch:

depa:         I came here for a good argument.

Council:     No you didn't; no, you came here for an argument.

depa:         An argument isn't just contradiction.

Council:     It can be.

depa:         No it can't. An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition.

Council:     No it isn't.

depa:         Yes it is! It's not just contradiction.

Council:     Look, if I argue with you, I must take up a contrary position.

depa:         Yes, but that's not just saying “No it isn't”!

Council:     Yes it is!

depa:         No it isn't!

Council:     Yes it is!

depa:         Argument is an intellectual process. Contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of any statement the other person makes.

(Short pause)

Council:     No it isn't.

The argument/contradiction is set down for conciliation in the Commission in Taree on 30 June. We hope for something more constructive from the Council that day.

 

Pizza Man still doesn't bother answering

Hurstville General Manager Victor Lampe still won't explain a free lunch for the freeloaders. He is probably too busy paying good people out of their employment contracts.

 

Councils line up to trial Industry Guidelines
(but Upper Hunter isn’t one of them)

 

There are now eight or nine councils on the point of signing up for the trial of the Industry Guidelines – and four from the Hunter. This progress was noted when depa’s two disputes were listed for further conciliation in the Commission on 28 April.

Upper Hunter remains wedded to their obsession with urine and its tendency to fail to pick up impairment when an employee is impaired - preferring the prurient window it opens into employees’ private lives and the detection of things that have nothing to do with impairment at work.

The Commission made it clear to the Council that they need to reach agreement with the three unions about the continuation of this policy and this method of testing and not just rely on some purported local agreement. The Council seems reluctant to meet with the unions now. Brow-beating your staff in a little council where people are not experts and don’t know their rights is one thing, but trying to brow-beat the unions is another.

We make the fearless prediction that urine testing will be gone by the end of the year or, at the very latest, after the industry trial is concluded early next year.

 

A sign of what life could be like in the
new New South Wales

 

We reported last month that prior to the election the Opposition gave undertakings that they would make no changes to the Industrial Relations Commission in their first term which would have a negative impact on those employees working under awards or enterprise agreements of the NSW Commission. We hoped that was right and, for a new government, were prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt.

But amendments sought to the Industrial Relations Act this week challenged this assurance.

The Industrial Relations Amendment (Public Sector Conditions of Employment) Bill 2011 attempts to remove the independent role of the Industrial Relations Commission that has underpinned the successful operation of the Commission for the last 100 years. The Bill will remove the independence of the Commission to the extent that the Government's own wages policy and philosophical commitments on issues like leave will be incorporated into the Industrial Relations Act and leave the Commission only with the power to adjudicate within those guidelines.

This would be a crushing blow to the historic independence of the Commission. The Bill does not specifically exclude local government at this stage although Minister for Finance Greg Pearce in his second reading speech on Tuesday said "clearly, this requirement will not apply to, for example, matters relating to local government employers and employees."

While an undertaking like this in the second reading speech is nice, some more clarity about the Bill would be preferred.

And while there may not be an immediate threat, we are clearly going to be affected when a Government gives undertakings to make no changes and then does something as dramatic as that to public sector employees.

Unions NSW Secretary Mark Lennon said that "the Government would have a blank cheque to determine workplace rights and conditions for its own employees" and that "the proposal represented the most radical change to workplace laws in more than a century and would see the commission banned from enforcing existing awards".

"This is an unprecedented assault on the rights of public sector workers to have their day in court to turn to determine their wages and conditions."

We agree and urge all members to sign UnionsNSW’s petition as a sign of your support.

 

Ian Robertson
Secretary