OLG continues the paragraph 20 cover-up

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Published: Thursday, 16 November 2023 13:32

We all make mistakes, we teach our kids that it’s better to own up, apologise and fix the problem than to deny it. We try to live that ourselves but we’ve been banging our heads against the wall with the Office of Local Government since 5 February 2021 when their former CEO Tim Hurst got this paragraph wrong in findings against a former councillor on Wagga Wagga Council:

Hurst was wrong, and we’ve been pursuing that mistake ever since. We’ve identified misconduct from March 2013 that OLG ignored, they refused access to documents, and we’ve run two unsuccessful cases in NCAT looking for a remedy. But as a karmic reward (or extraordinary coincidence) when OLG prosecuted the former councillor in NCAT this year they included two examples of misconduct from 14 and 18 September 2020 and were able to have the miscreant banned from public office for five years.

Those two examples of misconduct predated Hurst’s paragraph 20.

We wondered whether OLG was throwing us a lifeline, or scoring an own goal, or it was a karmic reward but their own prosecution demonstrated Hurst got it wrong. It could also have been a mistake, but vigorously defended anyway.

We wrote to the current Executive Director, Local Government, DPIE Brett Whitworth on 19 June and here is our latest follow-up sent on 10 October 2023. No more follow-ups, we’re not even asking for the sacking of those who were complicit in the “mistake”, covering it up at the time, nor those who were complicit subsequently.

The Supreme Court beckons.