Sunday 27 December 2015

IN REVIEW: The Inveresk Public Land Grab?


FROM LAUNCESTON PETITIONS: Launceston's Mayor Albert van Zetten, paraphrased, can it seems, "only remember one expression one expression of interest in this land' and it seems they wanted it for nothing. It seems that 'offer' was rejected. ..............  The CITIZEN'S PETITION [LINK] continues to build and awareness continues to grow..............  It's NOT that ratepayers object to the university moving from its current site  to Inveresk, its just the case that people object to subsidising the move in both the short term and into long term ..............  Its been revealed that airport need to make ex gratia payments for services received, so why not universities? ..............  Why should ratepayers bear the cost of income forgone? ..............  Where is/was the community consultation? ..............  


WHAT OFFERS???
Northern campus MoU partners inspect Inveresk site – Partners to a significant Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) assume a great deal that it turns out is not such a great deal for either the city nor ratepayers..........  Click here

The press has been reporting on the University's proposal:

  • Early plans for university's move revealed By ROSITA GALLASCH and ISABEL BIRD July 23, 2015, 11:08 p.m. ............... Click here
  • ABC News: Launceston northern suburbs residents fear business will suffer if UTAS relocates campus ...............  Click here to go to source
  • Meeting turns up heat on campus reshuffle By ISABEL BIRD Oct. 1, 2015,  ............... Click here to go to the report 
  • The concept plans have arisen from collaborations between the MoU partners, and reference the strategic goals and plans of all the parties.[?]  .............. .......CLICK HERE]
CLICK HERE TO GO TO THE EXAMINER'S REPORT ON THE MEETIN
There is an unfolding story here with signatures on a petition being collected for a CITY OF LAUNCESTON PUBLIC MEETING under the provisions of the Local Govt., Act 1993 .............. The petition collection is going well but as always with such things it would be good to see many many more signatories as when people hear about 'the petition' they seem very ready to sign. Now is the time to show up and especially so as its being counted upon that we [the people] "will not show up when push comes to shove".

HAVE YOUR SAY VIA THE COMMENTS SECTION BELOW

Thursday 24 December 2015

TOWN HALL CONFIDENTIALITY



REVIEW: Stories abound around the issue of confidentiality in 'civic affairs'. Where ever confidentiality crops up as an issue not too far away there will be contention, debate and often this is unhelpful. It is very easy for a 'culture of secrecy' to take root given what is often at stake in civic affairs.

LCC: NEWS is seeking input from Launceston citizens – residents & ratepayer – with experiences (positive & negative) that may throw some light on the often joked about, 'bitched' about', culture of 'automatic secrecy' that is said by many to prevail relative to civic affairs in the city. 

Of course there needs to be a level of confidentiality to appropriately protect peoples privacy as its something we all seek protect for reasons of security at the very least. But, 'appropriate' and 'inappropriate' have become 'deemed conditions'. They are often used simultaneously with 'legal and ill legal'

There is some under the breath backgrounding going on here and it comes with uncomfortable innuendo ... sometimes laced with an implied legal threat  ... quasi and real. 

Typically, in local governance, the capacity to pursue and overcome, or pay for, deemed inappropriateness means that any resistance to it just melts away. Mostly, it might not matter but the culture of 'automatic secrecy' can build with unknown and untold consequences. 

LCC: NEWS is simply seeking flush out the anecdotal stories to do with appropriate and inappropriate ‘secrecy’ in this arena. 

That done the extent of the evidence gathering that needs to be done can be assessed. Arguably, to the extent that it exists, there is a need to address the culture of 'automatic secrecy' if its as deeply embedded as early indications suggest.

SOME BACKGROUNDING

LOCAL GOVT. ACT 1993 ... SECTION 84. Financial statements: ... (1) The general manager is to prepare and forward to the Auditor-General a copy of the council's financial statements for each financial year in accordance with the Audit Act 2008. ......... (2) Any financial statement for a financial year is to– (a) ......... (b) specify any interests as notified to the general manager of any councillor in respect of any body or organisation with which the council has major financial dealings; and ......... (c) contain a comparison between the council's actual and estimated revenue and expenditure for that financial year; and ......... (d) contain a statement of any revenue and expenditure of a council committee, a special committee or a controlling authority; and ......... (da) contain a statement of the operating, capital and competitive neutrality costs in respect of each significant business activity undertaken by the council during that financial year together with a statement of the revenue associated with that activity; and ......... (db) contain financial management indicators, and asset management indicators, specified in an order under subsection (2A); and ......... (e) contain any other information the Minister determines. ......... (2A) The Minister, by order, may specify – ......... (a) financial management indicators; and ......... (b) asset management indicators – ......... to be included in the financial statements of councils. (2B) The Minister is to consult with councils as to the matters to be included in an order under subsection (2A). ......... (3) The general manager is to certify that, in accordance with this Act and any other relevant Act, the financial statements fairly represent – ......... (a) the financial position of the council; and ......... (b) the results of the council's operations; and ......... (c) the cash flow of the council. ......... (4) The general manager is to ensure that the certified financial statements are tabled at a meeting of the council as soon as practicable. ......... (5) In this section – ......... competitive neutrality costs means the costs required to be taken into account under the competitive neutrality principles.

LOCAL GOVERNMENT ACT 1993 - SECT 28C 28C. Confidentiality undertaking ......... (1) If the general manager considers that the information or document is confidential, the general manager may require the councillor to whom the information or document is to be made available to give an undertaking to keep it confidential. ......... (2) If a councillor refuses or fails to give the undertaking, the general manager may refuse to make the information or document available to the councillor..........

Ethical issues and points to consider .........  As part of their role, councillors are required to balance relationships with a diverse range of stakeholders, while also ensuring that they are behaving ethically and in line with the Local Government Act and regulations, their council's code of conduct and any relevant policies. In considering these risk areas, participants should note that the role of a councillor is to represent and serve the public. The public interest should always come first – ahead of that of the individual.

HOW TO CONTRIBUTE ... If any of this sparks a memory or something simply use the comment section below. Please DO NOT use people's names or provide identification information. If sufficient information/stories come to light an assessment will be made in regard to where to next .... Quite possibly the mythology may not turn out to be as dire as some anecdotal story telling suggests the again ……

Tuesday 22 December 2015

LETTER TO THE EDITOR: Accountability

Shadow Attorney General has won his case against Attorney General George Brandis refusal to release his ministerial diary , as the case was a personal one the Attorney General could be faced with legal costs that could run into the 10,000 ,s dollars that he could be personal liable for. 

Should the Attorney General appeal the judgement and loses the appeal, this judgement has serious ramifications and elected representatives will be held more accountable. 

State and local government bodies will be held more accountable under (The Freedom of Information Act .) 

Brian P. Khan Newstead

COMMENT: We need to be mindful of the ways all this bumps all the way down the line. Mark Dreyfus is defending a much misunderstood principle.  This is something that could also apply to council managers, mayors and aldermen. As they say "watch this space."

Monday 21 December 2015

LETTER TO THE EDITOR: Traffic Issues


WHILST travelling back to the city from Prospect Market Place on December 8, the volume of traffic flowing to Westbury Road at 8.40am must give Meander Valley Council concern over the proposed changes to traffic management, Westbury Road and Wellington Street by the Launceston City Council.
This amount of traffic has to return at the end of the day coupled with Metro bus services travelling to and from.

Parents of students attending St Patrick's College realise the traffic problems going and coming from the college and inherent danger.

Whilst the parents who wish their children to have a private secondary education have a choice, send them to other private schools, i.e Mowbray or Newstead to avoid the traffic delays that will occur if these alterations take place (remember Normanstone Road and its failure).

Students doing years 11 and 12 have the choice of the other private schools or Newstead or Launceston colleges.

The all out election at the last council election has left a lack of experience, which long-serving alderman could have advised on.

Launceston City Council has a fight on its hands in the Northern suburbs over moving the university from open space to a congested space at Inveresk.

Blind Freddy would be aware not to open another war on the western front of the city and adjoining municipality.

West Launceston residents missed out on the missing link in Granville Street out of the Bi-Centenary levy and now the only solution is a bridge from Peel Street to Westbury Road.


— BRIAN KHAN, Newstead.


Saturday 19 December 2015

A QUESTIONABLE REPORT CARD FOR LAUNCESTON CITY COUNCIL


There is a growing number of citizens, ratepayers and residents in Launceston who are despairing at the ‘goings on’ at their city’s Town Hall. This is cumulative and especially so in regard to:
  • Meeting processes and fiscal reporting; 
  • Aldermanic participation and community engagement;
  • The maintenance of culture of secrecy/confidentiality; 
  • Community engagement and consultation; and
  • Adherence to Organisational Values.


As a point of interest, Launceston council’s AGM proceedings, despite there being much to report on, has essentially been ignored by the press. Why might that be so? 

Despite  engaging with social media, arguably nominally, council hasn't posted a media release on its website since March 2014.

Financial reporting, as available to the public, is opaque and confusing to the extent that ratepayers, the council's key stakeholders, are functionally excluded from the assessment of financial records.

Launceston is Tasmania’s largest council with the largest operating budget in the state. It is also legendary that Launceston's council levies the highest rates in the State. How did the council arrive at this point where its constituency is treated with disregard and not taken into account?

In consideration of all this, the council’s apparent lack of accountability to its citizens is no small thing. 

It is now abundantly clear that the city’s council is arguably out of touch with its citizenry. Moreover, this is demonstrated when the city's AGM is so poorly, indeed inadequately promoted, that its attendance is minuscule. Apparently, the constituency is 'blamed' and neither the aldermen collectively, nor management, see the community's disengagement as being any kind of a problem.

In fact, anecdotally, council is apparently seen as some kind of opportunity to advance pet projects and to hold off on initiatives outside various aldermen's direct interest. Anecdotally again, issues get to be glossed over if they are imagined as being contrary to management's interests and program.

All things considered, it is unsurprising that the recent AGM meeting, and increasingly so for meetings before it, was so poorly attended despite what was, or might have been, at stake. Interestingly, questions have even been raised in regard to the state of the 2015 meeting given some attending believe that a quorum might not have been in attendance throughout the meeting. 

If it was the case, and given that a quorum is so small, half the aldermen plus one, why didn't the mayor notice and draw attention to the state of affairs?

In fact, printed copies of council’s financial report were not available to many residents because too few had been printed and ratepayer's were turned away from Town Hall for several days prior to the AGM.  How might citizens ask informed questions about the city’s expenditures if the financial reporting was not made easily available to them? 

Given the lack of press attention to the AGM,  both before and after the meeting, it begs the question ..... was the lack of press attention actually welcomed? 

Similarly, in the light of the council committing the city to gift of public land to the University of Tasmania, despite public disquiet, it is notable that the aldermen were so disinterested in their accountability and constituent’s concerns as to bypass them, totally disengage the concerns and vote unanimously for gifting the land. 

By any measure it would appear as if the aldermen lacked the social licence that would enable them to function as aldermen.

It was the university that called the so-called "Town Hall Meeting" and not as one would expect Launceston City Council given that access to PUBLIC LAND that was at issue. 

Nonetheless, the meeting was anything but a ringing endorsement for the council's and the university's public position being advocated at the meeting. That is a  position arrived at without either public disclosure or meaningful public consultation.

In regard to LCC's financial reporting, and despite its “statutory adequacy”, the  financial reports lack detail and they hardly provide the level of reporting that a truly accountable corporate entity should be providing to its constituency and stakeholders. 

On what evidence can LCC's financial performance and service outcome be measured? Also, how can achievements be truly assessed? It is possible that the Auditor General's audit may touch upon issues of public interest.

It has been said elsewhere that Launcestonians might well feel like they are being treated like proverbial mushrooms set aside in a darkened room. Maybe they shouldn’t feel slighted. Outraged yes! Surprised, absolutely not!

CITIZEN SURVEY: Free Public Land For Utas In Launceston





CONTEXT In the course of distributing the CITIZEN'S PETITION calling for a public meeting in regard to Launceston City Council determining that it would gift public land to the University of Tasmania to enable the university to move its operation from its current Newnham campus to the Inveresk precinct a survey has been undertaken. The data collection has been done by a group of petition distributers.





CLICK ABOVE TO ENLARGE


REFERENCES

OPINION: Town Hall Follies At Inveresk

Its official, the Silly Season 2015/16 is upon us and Launceston’s general manager, Robert Dobrzynski, is out and about spruiking a grand vision for Launceston, York Park, Inveresk and sports science. 

Council has had its last meeting for the year and all the aldermen are out of the way attending to family business. Hence, the GM can now get to work building his fiefdom with even less aldermanic interference than is usually the case. 

So what about this new component of the ‘Launceston Empire’? And, it has to be asked, why Launceston? And then, where did this all come from? 

Taking the second question first, there seems to be neither rhyme nor reason why such a facility, a "high standards centre of excellence", should be in Launceston or even Tasmania.  It could be but why? Why here and why now?

Of course saying such things is tantamount to Taswegian blasphemy yet the questions do need to be asked and over and over and over again. 

What a lovely bit of tautology "a high standards centre of excellence" is. Nonetheless, like motherhood, its very hard to argue against it yet it’s loaded with insinuations and potential consequences of every kind – intended and unintended

Interestingly, Meryl Streep summed up motherhood so very well when she said it had "a very humanising effect [and] everything gets reduced to essentials." Here, here, and indeed where are the essentials here?

The speculative and possibly self-serving rhetoric in this Examiner story [LINK] is laid on so thick that Fulton Sheen’s quote springs to mind, it says that, “baloney is flattery laid on so thick it cannot be true, and blarney is flattery so thin we love it” . What are we looking at here "baloney" or "blarney"?

A little while back Senator David Leyonhjelm coined the phrase “brain fart”, a characterisation that fits the circumstance here so very, very well. 

As per usual this ‘enterprise’ depends upon the resources of others, wishfully here ‘the university’s’ and if all else fails ‘the ratepayers’the former by persuasion and the latter by conscription

The story here is sprinkled with the ‘royal we’ as is often the case when a general manager speaks out when left to their own devices. It sometimes seems that this is very often the case at Town Hall.

Actually, why isn’t the Mayor doing the spruiking here? Or, why isn’t it the chairman of the York Park Authority? Or indeed, why isn’t it a chorus of aldermen? Is the “we” in this context anything more than hollow rhetoric? Indeed, have the aldermen signed off on the initiative if the aspiration has substance or is a shared idea? 

Indeed, where is the media release, the position paper, the facts sheet? According to council's website there hasn't been a media release out of Town Hall since March 2014.

Likewise the question that really needs to be asked is, outside the GM's office,  has this aspiration any substance at all? Is there in fact a foundation to build upon? Or is all this speculation intended to divert ratepayer's attention away from some uncomfortable proposition or other.

It’s the council, the mayor and aldermen, who are accountable. So what do they, as aldermen, know about all this? Strangely they do not seem to get a mention. Actually what does the York Park ‘governing authority’ know? If there are answers here, who is being held to account, when and how? 

Launceston’s ratepayers, more than likely, would welcome anyone lifting the York Park fiscal burden from their shoulders. The idea is a sentimental winner! However, every time win-winning has looked like a prospect in the past the outcome has been a totally different scenario. 

It seems to work like this. Because Bass is a marginal electorate it has been possible to garner parish-pump political largess. – quite often in the past. What’s wrong with that? Nothing IF the money goes towards something that saves expenditure in an ongoing way or that is otherwise income generative.

However, IF it’s ‘nice-to-have’ infrastructure that requires upkeep and maintenance, most often, the ‘political largess’ can become an awful burden. 

Launceston has quite a bit of the kind of infrastructure that is ‘non-core’ and parish-pump funded. AND it turns out that it costs each and every ratepayer $300 to $400 a year more than might otherwise be the case. 

The disconnects entrenched in the Tasmanian Local Govt. Act 1993 play not a small part in the kind of outcome being discussed here and arguably it has done in Launceston over decades. 

Flat-footed deemed denials just do not wipe away the evidence no matter how often repeated. As we know, Lenin is attributed as saying, “lie repeated often enough passes for the truth” but we are not obliged to believe it even if Lenin thought we might. It seems that ratepayers might be required to! 

Then there is SECTION 65 of the Act that can be boiled down to general managers being able to deem themselves ‘the authority’, the unassailable authority all the time, on the strength of the Act. 

In the so-called launch of this speculative enterprise we have the speculative aspiration of York Park being touted as a "high standards centre of excellence" with "Olympic-type sports" thrown in for good measure. Moreover, all this is spiced  up with Mr Dobrzynski’s belief(?) that it all would “create additional employment and positive social and economic benefits” and more still. 

What’s actually missing is the evidence of the conversations that might have gone before. Where are the ratepayers’ representatives? Where is the business case? Where does all this fit in the city's strategic plan? Where is the social license? 

Where is the community’s inclusion in this conversation? That is the community that’ll be rated for capital requirements and/or to cover any potential loss or fill the gap for grants not won. 

"We also want to work with the Tasmanian Institute of Sport and want to work with increasing commercial and community use of these high-performance facilities to provide those additional services in the precinct," Mr Dobrzynski said. 

Aspirational no doubt but is there any evidence for a real business case here? And who are we?

It is said that if it looks like a duck, waddles and quacks like a duck, then it’s quite probably a duck. If all this looks like an aspirational brain-fart it’s most likely it's just that. 

If this administrative cum operational flatulence gets any traction at all it will be because some compliant consultant or other from far, far away has been handed our watch by ‘council’ and commissioned to tell us the time for a fat fee. 

Actually, and interestingly, what's been proffered here is a 'service' that’s both non-core and surplus to requirement even if SECTION 65 might be made to say otherwise. It’s all happened before, over and over. 

Rather than put our feet up at the beach this promisingly hot Silly Season perhaps we should be watching for the follies being played out at Town Hall until February.

Ray Norman
Trevallyn
December 2015

The Examiner Story

"Aurora sports hub to push performance"

By ANDREW MATHIESON Dec. 17, 2015, 11:18 p.m.

Friday 18 December 2015

Discussion Papers, Open Letters, Opinion Pieces, Reports, etc.



It is proposed that 'text' with this logo attached will be published on this BLOG SITE after review by a random selection of network 'members'. It is proposed that this material will be circulated via this site and 'HARD COPY CIRCULATIONS' – pamphlets etc.

Contributions to an evolving  'conversation' consistent with LCC's Strategic Plan are welcomed. The aim is for there to be a free and fair exchange of ideas and to enable that conversation to be one that belongs in the 21st C.

SOME QUOTES FOR NOW: 
  1. Rob Siltanen  "... while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
  2. Voltaire ... “One day everything will be well, that is our hope. Everything's fine today, that is our illusion” 
  3. Eric Bogosian ... “It's my duty as a human being to be pissed off”  
  4. Ray A. Davis ... “Status quos are made to be broken.” 
  5.  Richard Rohr ... “Change is not what we expect from religious people. They tend to love the past more than the present or the future.” 
  6. Jarod Kintz ... “If the status quo came carbonated in a can, I’d shake things up.” 
  7.  Ronald A. Heifetz ... “What people resist is not change per se, but loss.” 

Thursday 17 December 2015

WATCH THIS SPACE

On this site you will find materials produced collaboratively and that are consistent with the network's aims and objectives. If you believe that you have something to offer the network please email launcestonPR@tassie.net.au