March depaNews

Apparently OLG believes that as the regulator, they don’t need any help, encouragement or assistance from anyone else when they actually want to get their fingers out and regulate the bad behaviour of Councillors.

We reported last month we’d filed an application to be joined as a party in proceedings known as Office of Local Government and former councillor Funnell. We did this because of the experience of our members having been treated by this person as a councillor in a variety of unacceptable ways – threats, abuse, defaming on facebook, you name it.. We have responsibilities protecting the health and safety of our members, and if this person were to return to public office at Wagga Wagga, then it would be back on again, as it was while he was a councillor, to go the staff.

We were provided with a very tight timeframe after our application to file submissions and material and relied upon material we had already filed in proceedings related to the former councillor, but primarily focused on the OLG’s insistence upon being an investigator and regulator hiding behind the curtains. A significant proportion of those documents contained evidence about the former councillor and his attitude to staff and what he believed he could and couldn’t do to them, and how he should or shouldn’t treat them.

While OLG has the power to bring these actions to NCAT, they don’t have the responsibility to protect employees that we do, and in any event, their procedures and processes are so confidential, no one ever really knows what they’re doing and, as the recent investigation into setting up a new framework for complaints against councillor behaviour showed, the average time for OLG to conduct an investigation, that does conclude with some kind of penalty, is over 400 days!

400 days! Hardly something that stands as good evidence of a highly competent and professional business.

Significantly, in their submissions opposing us becoming a party, they focused on an assertion that we wanted to re-agitate issues in our earlier applications, one of which remains waiting for a decision. This is not the case, we thought it clear in our original submissions but made that clear in our response. It’s both interesting and disappointing how readily they fall into their cover-up of the matters we were agitating in the other proceedings.

Too many Sir Humphreys involved here.

The Local Government State Award was made by consent of the parties in October 1991 to operate from 1992. It was a significant development in local government, removing separate awards, hundreds of classifications and establishing salary systems to allow employees to progress based on the acquisition and use of skills.

It has been varied by consent ever since - demonstrating that there is generally a common approach in the industry between the employers and the unions about the purpose of the Award, what is important in it and what may need to be changed. It’s an opportunity to fix things that might be unclear, or could be clearer as well as keeping up-to-date changed standards.

The unions rely on their executives and membership for feedback, LGNSW relies upon the expertise (sic) of a consultative group of general managers and HR people to provide input on the employer’s side. LGNSW never discloses the composition of the consultative group, and depa has never really wanted to know. If it’s reflective of the industry, it will comprise the good, the bad and the ugly, but we really don’t know how many of them are good. If any.

Having an historic consensus doesn’t mean it’s an easy process. It isn’t. The three unions and LGNSW as the employer party all have logs of claims for things they would like discussed during the negotiations. Sometimes, there are areas that can’t be agreed but the parties agree to have whichever member of the Commission is managing the process conduct an arbitration. But unlike other arbitrations where they hear submissions and evidence from the union or unions and the employers, we have agreed beforehand that we will accept whatever is recommended by the Commission, forfeiting the usual right to appeal.

This happened to allow the introduction of the requirement that councils pay the costs of accreditation for certifiers by the Building Professionals Board as it was at the time, and its successors, and when clause 9(i) was introduced in the 2020 Award.

We’ve had calls from members wondering what’s happening but it’s a process where agreements are made in principle as we work our way through the various logs, but all subject at the end to what is agreed on a pay increase. The higher the pay increase, the fewer the beneficial changes in the Award.

It is a work in progress, we meet every couple of weeks, we report to the IRC and have Commissioner Muir, on this occasion, try to bring the parties together on those areas where there are difficulties, all with the expectation that we will have a new Award made to operate from the first pay period after 1 July 2023.

This is Elizabeth Farrelly. Over the years she has written opinion pieces in the Sydney Morning Herald bagging the introduction of private certification, shonky developments, destruction of heritage by tollways and infrastructure, design concepts, over-development and sensitive development, poor building standards, the importance of caring for the environment, climate change, and even on one occasion four years ago, a report on UnionsNSW’s success over the NSW Government on electoral regulation - something we were involved in as well.

This Saturday she is standing as an Independent in the Legislative Council.

There is significant common ground between her attitudes and the sorts of things that are important to us and our members, and would be good for us and our issues in that Chamber.

She spoke at our Annual Conference in 2019 when she was in the process of writing Killing Sydney: The Fight for a City’s Soul and was beyond fascinating. A fabulous, colourful communicator and someone who would be an asset in the Legislative Council on issues we are interested in. She could singlehandedly write a new Planning Act that focussed on people and communities and not developers!

We don’t normally recommend a political party or candidate. We have published articles with images of Dumb and Dumber, and Tweedledum and Tweedledee, but on this occasion, if you’re struggling to work out where you should put the numbers on Saturday, you could do a lot worse than casting a vote in her direction.

It’s group H, and if you’ve already got major parties you’d prefer to vote for, you can vote below the line and then pass your preference on!