Well Councillwatchers, what an interesting few weeks it's been. We now know for sure what many of us have long suspected; Wollongong City Council has been riddled with corruption for many years.
But not only Councillors and council staff seem to have been trawlled from the bottom of the pond by the ICAC enquiry. Several State Labour pollies have been drawn into the net as well. Of the four (Brown, Hay, Campbell, Tripodi) only Wollongong MP Noreen Hay seems like she may have a case to answer. Her, or her agent's, oversight in not including some $65,000 of donations including some from, yep you guessed it, developers, is hardly confidence-inspiring.
In the last few days the spotlight has turned on Shoalhaven Mayor Greg Watson's Shoalhaven Independents Group Party, NSW's sixth most successful party in soliciting donations from developers.
What can be learned from all this? Get the parties; all parties, out of local government. Let's get back to the notion that Council is about people representing the people, not parties representing some people and certainly not parties representing developers.
2 comments:
Precisely how do you "get the parties" out of local government? At the moment ALP Councillors self identify as such, so we know up front who they are. However the Liberals refuse to state their members standing for local government are Liberals. As a result, in Wollongong we had Wollongong Councillor Anne Wood elected as an alleged "indepdendent" to Council but when there was a NSW state election campaigm the same Anne Woods stood as the Liberal party endorsed candidate for the Legislative Assembly. When she was not elected to the NSW Parliament, she kept right on sitting as an "Independents" Wollongong Councillor. The system of secret party functionaries in local government is even more pernicious than party politics.
You have a point Smithy but something has to be done to clean the system. In a way it's not the big parties that are my target. The local group/parties that were created in droves when the state Gov changed local gov voting to an above-the-line system are the real problem. eg the so-called Shoalhaven Independents Group Party in the Shoalhaven led by Mayor Watson.
They appear on the ballot paper under the banner 'Shoalhaven Independents' but are anything but. It's too easy for a group to give itself a misleading name and attract a significant number of votes from uninformed/lazy voters. Which brings us to problem number two......
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