Australia's National Local Government Newspaper Online

President’s comment

In each edition we feature the views of a Local Government Association President. The following is from Councillor Warren Maloney, President of the Victorian Local Governance Association.

When a Council is sacked ...

On 11 August the Victorian Minister for Local Government, Candy Broad, suspended Glen Eira City Council in Melbourne’s south east. The decision to suspend Glen Eira Council was the consequence of an investigation that the Council had itself called for; this fact distinguishes the events at Glen Eira and separates them from unwarranted speculation about governance within other Local Governments.

In the aftermath of the Kennett Government’s wholesale unilateral Council sackings in the mid 1990s, the Victorian Local Government peak bodies conducted a Local Government Constitutional Convention in 2000. The communiqué from that event called for the following protections:

• that Local Governments could not be suspended collectively
• that Councils could only be dismissed for failure to govern or for serious corporate illegality
• elections must be called within three months
• that any decision of the Minister to suspend must be ultimately the province of the Parliament, not a unilateral decision of the Minister.

In this case, the Minister has cited governance as the issue, called an election in a little over three months and is in fact subject to Parliament, (under the Act, either House can reverse the Minister’s decision).

However, we are dismayed that the investigator’s recommendations and the Minister’s actions fail to provide the Council and community with anything more than a ‘circuit-breaker’, as is so often the case when a Council is dismissed.

The Glen Eira community may in November re-elect the same Councillors who were just suspended. What will have changed if that occurs?

The VLGA calls for a quality and comprehensive program to provide information and training for prospective candidates in all Council elections, particularly those where there has been a dismissal of democratically elected Councillors. We also call for the provision of accredited, measurable and relevant Councillor training for all democratically elected Councillors in Australia.

The VLGA’s concern is that upheavals such as the recent events at Glen Eira should not be allowed to weaken and divide the local community and diminish the public regard for Local Governments. They should provide an opportunity to strengthen the local community, the Council and the Local Government sector as a whole.

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