Saturday, January 28, 2006

Melbourne City Council hard at Work

One item of business only listed for next Tuesday's meeting. What's not included in the public documents?

Melbourne City Council has been hard at work with only one item of business listed for next Tuesdays Meeting.

Meanwhile the Council's travel register and update on Councillor expenses has not been published.

Past Travel Register information is still missing (In spite there being a resolution of the Council requiring this information to be published - they will go to any effort to avoid or delay accountability)

Our request for information related to Council's undisclosed expenses still have not been answered, items are not listed on the agenda and the elected Council remains silent complacent in the ongoing abuse .

Missing are the expenses related to the Council funded Lord Mayor and Deputy Lord Mayors' Limousines, internal catering expenses and the costs of in-bound missions. (If you can - take time to read some of the Greens' unfulfilled promises to the electorate. Greens Councillor, Brindley Fraser, maybe hasn't read them or if he has he is too busy generating Co2 emissions travelling overseas attending executive meetings of an third party international Confest organisations then he is in following up on the Greens' policy commitments - more on the Greens lies and deceit later)

Credit given where credit is due.

Cr Clarke has tried to raise a number of issues and obtain information for the public benefit but for reasons unknown, for what seams to be reasonable requests, he keeps getting voted down. (What do they have to hide I wonder?)

I thought the Council was obliged under the corporate standards, professional management and good governance guidelines to provide Councillors with relevant information on the management and administration of the City Council as and when requested.


Can you imagine the uproar if a member of a board and share holder representative of a major public company was denied access to corporate accounts and information on management. I am sure the ASIC would have a few things to say.

We will published our list of outstanding items when we have finished compiling them. It is a long list and we don't want to miss any items. (In future we will keep and publish our own register recoding the status of each item)

City Council Document management system

The City Council's document management system, costing 10's' of millions of dollars, has little to desire as the Council administration continue to make it as difficult as possible to access information, policy documents and reports.

The City Council, after numerous requests, have published the Council's register(s) of delegation but for some reason they have spilt the information into at least three parts stored in different location on their internet site. Inefficient at best - out right corrupt at worst. (Try finding all three - results for the lucky few who can find them will be published next week)

What's more there is no central register of decisions that have been made under delegation. There is no way for the public to know what decisions are being made, who made them and under what authority. There is no structured reporting system feeding this information back to the Council and available to the public. It is all done behind closed doors hidden away under commercial confidentiality agreements or decisions made under delegation that are not available to the public.


This raises a number of issues of concern as it would appear that no one really knows what's going on inside the Council. It is certainly not transparent, it's certainly not efficient. Our Councillors don't seam to care as they have not raised this issue or supported the right of other councillors to obtain information or act on previous complaints and recommendations. Maybe the administration has bought their silence with offers of overseas trips and other benefits - when information is made available it is behind closed doors or at illegal unauthorised meetings. The quality of governance continues to decline.


game on

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