Or as Mr Burns from the Simpsons said, ”This is brain surgery, it’s not rocket science!”
If you were working within an environment like the council with its 856 employees, you may find many have very definite opinions and ideologies that dictate how your money should be spent. This work environment might well test anyone’s ability to cope and induce them to nervous collapse requiring Mr Burns’ brain surgery but it should NOT be this way.
I have been door to door throughout Pimpala Ward during my campaign to become Councillor and one thing I have tried to do is find out what people want. It very soon becomes apparent that 99% of residents and rate payers are concerned about the high rates they pay, condition of roads, gutters and footpaths, dumping rubbish, maintenance of reserves, cutting back dangerous trees, helping clubs and basically getting onto stuff quickly. If you think I have missed anything then it probably falls within the 1% I have alluded to.
So that’s what I mean; it’s not rocket science, or at least it shouldn’t be.
Nevertheless judging by the intricacies of council meetings the process seems anything but straightforward.
I believe, and quite frankly the majority of Pimpala believes, that councils should get back to the basics of Rates, Rubbish, Roads, Recreation and Rapid response. If there is any other way to sum it up you could say it’s about doing what the majority of families want.
Of course! We can help minorities, but if we are supposed to be a democracy then we must attend to what the majority want first, not the minority. The rule of the minority is foolhardy.
To my mind a council should be more like a Jim’s franchise doing the basic tasks for householders. They should not be trying to re-engineer the social fabric.
To get back to basics we need to trim off the waste but any talk of this is just talk until we find out exactly where the ‘BODIES ARE BURIED’ and where the money has gone. This means we need to commission a full FORENSIC AUDIT. It’s not cheap and could take 6 months to complete but only once we have this information can elected members ask the CEO to give recommendations on where savings can be made.
Until we have that audit it’s more than reasonable to bring in a staff freeze. No one gets fired but we don’t rehire more staff to fill those vacated positions when staff leave. If essential positions are lost we can reshuffle staff but whatever way we navigate this don’t increase staff numbers.
For every 10 or 11 staff that resign we free up $1 million dollars to fix all the basic things that have been neglected like broken and dangerous trees, broken drains, roads, footpaths and, you name it.
If I were to say to you the council’s website has information that shows there are 856 staff that cost over $78 million a year and also shows a great list of legal costs incurred every quarter by the 4 companies of lawyers it employs many people would be lucky to be able to find it. Not many, I think. And if I told you that by entering the secret password ‘transparency’ into the search bar at the top of the website you could discover the ‘Transparency and Integrity Portal’ which is a mine of extra documents you might be impressed … but then you might also be forgiven for thinking that if you first need to know that secret pass word ‘transparency’ then how transparent is this!
You can find at least some of the documents in the ‘Transparency and Integrity Portal’ in other ways but usually you need to use the exact terms and spelling of the headings. For example if you want to find how much the council pays each year to its lawyers you would have to enter ‘legal services expenditure’ but if you were to enter ‘legal costs’ it comes up with 1136 results. Of course I can’t be sure that searching the correct term ‘legal services expenditure’ will find all the costs.
The spread sheet that contains the list of wages paid to staff is also there but it has no totals so you need to have some knowledge of how to manipulate this data to insert a calculation field to add up the totals.
And none of the items I have mentioned are listed in the annual budget!
Yes, I’m sure they are there but included within other categories that are not always very informative such as ‘Governance’ which has a $5.07 million budget or there might be some legal fees within the $5.64 million budgeted for ‘Strategy and Sustainability’. But who really knows what ‘Strategy and Sustainability’ is anyway, not to mention ‘Governance’.
Maybe I should stop there before I give up and declare; this is rocket science.
Without doubt a Forensic Audit will tease out a lot more transparency than we have now and save us a bucket load of cash that could be spent on real stuff we want or we could pay down the $135 million debt.