General Manager protection
- Details
- Published: Tuesday, 17 February 2026 16:36
The brutal treatment handed out to the former GM of Parramatta, aided and abetted by grubby local media, has brought things to a head. It’s time to provide better protection for General Managers.
It may have taken decades, but senior staff have better protection after removing the concept of senior staff from the Local Government Act and employing those people under the Local Government State Award or local Enterprise Agreements, where they apply. And having access to the Industrial Relations Commission for Unfair Dismissal.
When the senior staff legislation was introduced into the Legislative Assembly, everything was very celebratory and in a casual lunch in Parliament House we discovered what has to be the best kept secret in local government. The Minister for Local Government Ron Hoenig announced he had always thought General Managers should be better protected.
We emailed the Office of Local Government to have this issue discussed by the next meeting of the Employment Matters Reference Group, an employment group established by the Office at the time of the mergers to deal with employment considerations which found that there were good reasons for it to continue.
Amongst other things, we said:
Our Committee of Management unanimously resolved at their last meeting on 20 November:
Following the termination of the General Manager at Parramatta City, Gail Connolly, as a result of political battles amongst councillors, depa resolves to take all steps, starting with an approach to OLG and the Minister for Local Government, to achieve consensus that it’s time to be extending protections now available to former senior staff, to general managers.
I know that we have discussed this in the past and LGNSW has had little appetite for curtailing the rights of their members to remove general managers for a variety of reasons (or none at all, meaning that there was a reason but it couldn't be published) but you never know your luck.
We've always taken the view that if there isn't consensus on extending the senior staff provisions to General Managers, then making the "no reason" termination provision something significantly more than 38 weeks, would assist in putting a stop to these practices. Or at the very least make councillors think more financially responsibly about the cost, and the risk of public/political humiliation.
65 weeks sounds like a reasonable compromise.
Unfortunately, despite our best intentions, I was in the IRC at the time of the meeting, and the Committee hasn’t met since. Maybe it was our suggestion that the current 38 weeks exit payment “for any reason”, should five weeks become 65 weeks that has struck them dumb. That amount of money should make councillors spend a bit more time contemplating the departure of the GM.