We make Parramatta rethink charging employees with leaseback cars for parking them in council car parks. Again.
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- Published: Tuesday, 23 February 2021 13:15
Pictured above are Parramatta City CEO Brett Newman, social historian Karl Marx and Parramatta’s Chief People and Culture Officer, Bernadette Kavanagh - three unlikely people to be together at Highgate Cemetery, and to be relevant to the story.
Brett Newman is the latest CEO at Parramatta (the eighth in the last 20 years) and comes to Parramatta with a history in property and property development, most recently with Property NSW and Stockland. Karl Marx was a social historian and critic of the capitalist state and a significant historic figure. Bernadette Cavanagh came to Parramatta 12 months ago with a recent background in HR. Neither Brett nor Bernadette know anything about obligations under the Local Government State Award, and seeing the first award in 1992 was made more than 100 years after Marx’s death, the three of them have that in common.
But, in 1852 Marx wrote an essay titled The Eighteenth Brumiere of Louis Napoleon, in which he uttered his famous quote that historical entities and circumstances can happen twice - “the first as tragedy, then as farce”. While he was writing about Napoleon 1 and then his subsequent successor Louis Napoleon or Napoleon III, he was also anticipating our dealings with Parramatta.
In 2010 we had a dispute with the former Parramatta Council when it raised its intention to charge employees to park their leaseback cars in the Council carpark, meaning that employees would be charged for bringing the Council’s car to work. When local negotiations failed, we filed a dispute which came on before then Deputy President Grayson, who, grilled the Council’s lawyer about the unusual suggestion that employees should have to pay to park the Council’s car and, after relatively short proceedings, adjourned with the suggestion that the Council reconsider their position.
Which they did quickly, and decided it wasn’t such a good idea after all. Tragedy.
In December 2020, CEO Brett Newman emailed all staff telling them that he had decided to change policies and procedures which would require employees to pay to park in Council carparks and where, not having learned or even been aware of the lessons of history, didn’t exclude those with leaseback cars. Farce.
We know that sometimes it’s hard for people who come from outside local government to understand that there might be industrial instruments that oblige them to do certain things, or even that those instruments might require them if they want to make changes to car arrangements for leaseback cars, to do it in a consultative way through the consultative committee. Neither Brett nor Bernadette would have had any experience with these kinds of obligations, so they were lucky we are very forgiving.
We wrote to Brett and Bernadette the day Brett announced his intention, introducing ourselves and providing some of the history in case they thought they were doing something original. And they ignored us, sending a cursory response that didn’t exempt leaseback cars at 4:53pm on Wednesday 23 December when most of us had packed up and gone on leave. Then, on our return from leave, steadfastly refusing to deal with our repeated requests to clarify what happens to people with leaseback cars and ignoring increasingly urgent emails because we needed to protect our members against being charged for parking from 1 March.
This is probably not because they’re bad people (we don’t know them well enough to make that judgement yet) but because they really didn’t understand what the problem was, nor how farcical their behaviour was becoming.
So we filed a dispute again (mercifully Deputy President Grayson had retired because he would have loved it) but sure enough with assistance from LGNSW and the Council’s own more junior industrial staff who do know what they’re doing, we finally received the clarification we were looking for. We didn’t need a ludicrous two-page letter failing to deal with the issue that we rejected and sent back, all we needed was those four or five very, very short sentences.
And on that basis we discontinued the proceedings without the need to even attend once - although I’m sure Commissioner Murphy would have enjoyed Marx’s analysis.
We’ll have more to do with Parramatta, you can feel it.