“I am a passionate person and if on occasion I don’t get it quite right, I am always willing to acknowledge it”. Always?
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- Published: Monday, 12 February 2024 09:15
We’ve had two examples of Sutherland Mayor Councillor Carmelo Pesce abusing our members. The first, in 2017, expletives and anger about a member dealing with non-compliance under both the Food Act and building regulations of the Mayor’s cafés where the GM at the time, Scott Phillips, secured an apology and a handshake from the Mayor within 24-hours. And encouraged the manager who had made the complaint to always bring this kind of unacceptable behaviour to the attention of the GM for a remedy.
The second, in June 2020 where another member was chasing the Mayor to comply and received a similar serve, expletives and anger again about his cafés, but when the complaint was escalated through the organisation the GM Manjeet Grewal didn’t secure an apology or a handshake and we needed to file an industrial dispute to try to get the Mayor behaving.
We gave up on the GM and wrote to all the councillors asking them to agree to commit to better standards of behaviour and cutting out abuse, and only the ALP councillors did so.
The positive out of that awful experience is that there is now a Memorandum of Understanding between Sutherland Shire and Georges River Council (both councils have had issues with councillor behaviour) for compliance issues concerning properties or businesses owned by councillors, to be dealt with by compliance staff from the other Council. Hard to threaten them.
Councillor Pesce, is now favoured for Liberal Preselection to replace the disgraced member for Cook the Hon(!) Scott Morrison. The question is what do the electors in Cook think are important values and qualities in their local Federal member?
Given our experience with the Councillor’s behaviour to our members, it was only a matter of time before investigative journalists, scrutinising the pretender to the crown and finding plenty to investigate, contacted us.
See the ABC News article here