Something for everyone in
the Good, the Bad and the Ugly issue:

 

Get a bonus under the new Award

Peter Hurst says he will apologise

The Daily Advertiser protects the guilty

Bernie avoids jail but it's time to go Phillip

No fee increase in 2011 and a big hint about our HR ugliness awards next issue...

 

 

So far so good as life begins under the new 2010 Award

 

Our special October issue with 10 good reasons to accept the offer for the new Award was well-received by members. We received more than 100 emails, some from delegates speaking for whole groups and all overwhelmingly positive - apart from one member for whom we will have to try harder and another who picked up that the maths was wrong.

depaNews said that the 44 months of payments was "the equivalent of 3.25% for 12 months" but it wasn't. Competent use of my calculator would have shown that 11.25% as the four increases under the Award, compounded to 11.73% over 44 months, is the equivalent of 0.26666% and that is the equivalent of 3.2% and not 3.25%. Sorry about that and thanks Brendan for picking up my low level of numeracy. Now get back to work.

But there is some good news to compensate. We foreshadowed that there still remained some time left in the Commission for conciliation of an outstanding claim made by the LGEA and supported by us to facilitate bonus payments for employees who have topped out on their salary scale.

Historically there has been a difference of opinion between the two unions covering professional staff and the USU (because the USU’s predominantly wages staff membership think that any bonuses paid to professionals means less money for them) but on this occasion everyone was able to reach some agreement and now clause 9 Performance Evaluation Reward will include this:

C.   Bonus and Additional Performance Payments

(i)     Councils may make available access to bonus payments or other opportunities for additional reward for those employees who have progressed through the salary system to the maximum point/step for their position.

(ii)     Where a salary system provides for the payment of a performance component separate from a skills component, variations to payments under the performance component shall not affect payments under the skills component.

All we need to do now, and this can be a plan for 2011, is to find some councils prepared to agree to this.

 

 

Developer agrees to apologise
in long-running Wagga Wagga unpleasantness

 

 

Our August issue speculated about why Peter Hurst, a developer at Wagga Wagga and the Vice Chairman (wow, sounds like a great job!) of the Wagga Wagga Branch of the Housing Industry Association is so unkind.

Hurst had made a range of inaccurate, baseless, derogatory and offensive allegations about our members at Wagga Wagga and a comprehensive internal investigation conducted by the Council’s Internal Auditor had dismissed the lot.

As part of an industrial dispute we were conducting in the Industrial Relations Commission, Deputy President Grayson had recommended that the Council seek an apology from Peter Hurst for baseless allegations and the damage done. In our August issue we said:

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

In a response to the Council, Walsh and Blair Lawyers advised that they were acting for Peter Hurst and "we are instructed that our client will apologise to council staff. The form of that apology will have to be the subject of agreement."

Clearly he was big enough to do the right thing but it is not prepared to make the apology being sought by the Council. Drafted by us, endorsed by our members, agreed to for its reasonableness by the General Manager when we met in Wagga Wagga on 21 October and subsequently agreed to be reasonable in all the circumstances by Deputy President Grayson, the apology would have put all of this unpleasantness behind us.

But something is getting in the way of this reasonable solution. Walsh and Blair acting for Peter Hurst have written subsequent letters to the Council which they want to be confidential and where they don't want the contents provided to a third party - whether that be the union representing the staff attacked by Hurst or the Industrial Relations Commission in resolving the dispute arising from the baseless and incorrect complaint.

As far as we can understand it, Mr Hurst may have changed his mind. In a clear gesture against male hegemony and in advancing his claims for equal status with the sisterhood, Mr Hurst, wants to exercise the prerogative historically claimed only for a lady, a lady’s right to change her mind. You go girl!

So, it’s not entirely clear what is happening but on the resumption of the dispute in the Commission on 25 November, the Commission recommended (view IRC recommendation) that the Council have published in the local paper, the Daily Advertiser, (see note below) a brief summary of the dispute and the dismissal of the complaints made by Peter Hurst and the apology being sought by the Council. The Commission also acknowledged its disappointment that while prepared to apologise in October, Mr Hurst looked like he had changed his mind.

After all, if Peter Hurst was prepared to apologise, he clearly knew that he had done something wrong. The apology identifies all the things that we and the Council think he did wrong.

We will be happy to publish the apology as well in the December issue.

 

 

Why is the Daily Advertiser so unkind?

 

It's hard to say. While part of the Fairfax Empire, the publication has been anything but Fairfax quality and impartial in the way it has covered the allegations and complaints against Council staff and has even deliberately taken steps to protect local developer Peter Hurst.

In response to the "show cause" letter issued by the Minister for Planning to Wagga Wagga City Council in October, depa made a statement which included this observation:

"The government runs a serious risk that when the complaints are examined, just like Peter Hurst’s, they will be dismissed. A government with such an obvious use-by date
should be more prudent."

This comment was published in full by the Sydney Morning Herald in their Local Government section on 9 November but was censored when printed by the Dirty Advertiser in an article in which they deleted the words "just like Peter Hurst". Why would they do this?

The Advertiser (or at least the main protagonist at the paper against the Council, Patrick Wood) on 25 November savaged Wagga Wagga Council because "any person who lodges a formal complaint to the Council risks having their name leaked to third parties and circulated."

This was a concern that the baseless complaint made by Peter Hurst was provided to depa by the people complained about for advice and assistance and then found its way into the Industrial Relations Commission by way of dispute. A strange obsession with confidentiality in the circumstances, because Mr Hurst was quite happy to circulate the content of his complaint to virtually everyone he knew. And the Advertiser was happy to jump on the bandwagon as well.

Continuing their protection of the anonymity of Mr Hurst, they conclude:

"A Wagga developer earlier this year lodged a formal complaint to council against specific staff members."

"A Wagga developer"? It was Peter Hurst!

What a hide. If someone made a complaint against a journalist for something like for example, that all he did was protect developer mates and had a low level of commitment to journalistic integrity, it is reasonable to expect that if the paper (or the Fairfax Empire) would investigate the complaint and the hapless journalist involved would have the right to seek advice on the complaint from a third party - and particularly from their union. Patrick just didn't get that - he didn't think that a reasonable parallel at all.

 

 

BPB News

 

1      Another good meeting with the BPB

depa Vice President Jamie Loader, member of the Committee of Manager Darren Greenow and I met with representatives of the BPB on 9 November. We must be great company because there were more members of the Board there than ever before. The word must be getting around.

They agreed that something needed to be done about how Councils are accommodated in any process that involves the investigation of a Council employee accredited by the Board but were reluctant to make major legislative changes because the timetable for legislation is almost impossible. They invited our submission on those areas of the Act which we believe needed to be changed to reflect and accommodate a role for Councils.

Alternatively, they may be prepared to issue some guidelines about how the Board should recognise a role for a Council and accommodate the reality that an accredited employee is an employee of the Council and has the primary employment accountability to the Council and not to the BPB - and Council may have already investigated the issue which is the subject of the complaint to the Board.

We expect to do this by the end of the year.

 

2      Bernie gets nailed but who is Phillip Hayward?

 

Please stop sending us links to the decision of the Administrative Decisions Tribunal in Building Professionals Board v Cohen (No 2)(2010) NSWADT 266.

It gives us no pleasure (well, not much) to see someone who renounced employment in local government like Bernie did, fined, having his certificate of accreditation cancelled and banned from re-applying for two years and being disqualified from being an accredited certified director or otherwise involved in the management of any business doing this stuff for five years.

And that was nowhere near as severe as the BPB wanted because the BPB was sick of the constant number of complaints and allegations against him.

We can't speculate about Bernie's work at Liverpool, Parramatta and other places, but we would be surprised if this is how it operated while he worked in local government.

But in providing a character reference of sorts for Bernie, someone who should know better made it clear that they think local government is loose with process and that person is Phillip Hayward, Honorary Secretary of the Institution of Surveyors and a bloke with a pretty impressive looking history. His personal profile on the Institution of Surveyors' site reveals that since 2005, not only has he been a non judicial member of the General Division of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, but he "is a member of the Disciplinary and Accreditation Committees of the Building Professionals Board."

He gave evidence on Bernie's behalf in the Administrative Decisions Tribunals and there is a summary of that evidence in paragraph 19 of the Decision where it claims he made "a case for some understanding to be shown of loose practice by certifiers from Mr Cohen’s background, that of a senior inspector in local government."

We will be taking up the appropriateness of this bloke’s offensive and defamatory observations against local government employees both with Mr Hayward and the BPB.

 

 

Our membership fees will remain unchanged in 2011

 

Bloody hell, how do we keep doing this? 2011 will be the seventh year where our membership fee has remained unchanged at $398 or $7.66 per week. We are now the least expensive of the three local government unions and, from a time where we charged double the fee of the USU, we are now charging comfortably less than their, admittedly, relatively cheap rate.

Every time we announce this we make tongue-in-cheek observation that it's about time someone from the Local government Financial Professionals (sic) gave us some sort of award. Come on, we dare you.

How can we keep the fees so low?

We have comfortable cash reserves, we own our office and we don't overpay our staff! But more importantly, we can only keep fees low if we keep new members rolling in.

The Committee decided that in 2011 we would reintroduce our membership rewards program where, if you sign up two members (and their application form needs to have your name clearly written on it as the recruiter) we will send you a good bottle of red wine!

Wow, try to get such good value from any of your other membership reward programs. You can shop all year at Coles and still not have enough points to get a tea towel. And try to get a flight where you want, when you want it, with your frequent flyer points.

 

 

Next month’s issue...

 

In the December issue we sometimes provide awards to people who have gone above and beyond the call of duty in terms of good management or human resources practices and this year won't be any different.

We will have a special award for the worst human resources practices in local government and here is something to give you a bit of a hint:

And, to be part of the festive spirit, why don't you send us (to: louise@depa.net.au) some pictures of Santa and your kids and we can publish some of those? The last time we published a picture of a kid and asked you to send in yours as well, all we got was a picture of a foal. Lovely horse and all that, but let's hope we can do better than that.

 

And welcome Louise

There are only two jobs in the depa office. Mine, doing whatever it is I do, and everything else is done by the Office Manager. Jody worked for us for nearly 5 years, took maternity leave to have a baby and then liked it so much she didn't come back, we’ve had a few temporary replacements this year and now Louise Bickerton is into her fourth week - in the circumstances this year this is nothing short of an astonishing devotion to service. We have high hopes.

Please welcome her next time you ring the office...

 

Ian Robertson
Secretary