Halfway point for councillors

Christmas and the summer holidays have passed and it’s now time for the kids to return to school and the oldies return to work. 

So to our Bass Coast councillors will return to work this month. 

They’ve reached the halfway mark of their current term. 

Some of them will likely reflect on what they consider to have achieved in the past two years, and what they might achieve in the second half.

One thing that none of them is able to claim so far is any improvement toward open and transparent processes at Bass Coast Shire Council.

For example, we have the administrations ongoing disgraceful misuse of the Unreasonable Customer Conduct (UCC) to silence reasonable and legitimate alternate community viewpoints. 

The UCC is a policy that is entirely subjective in content, and which is invoked at the whim of the executive. 

Our councillors willingly accept that their CEO can make false assertions in effort to impose the UCC against individual community members. 

In my case for example it is falsely claimed that I sent more than 400 emails to council in a 12-month period. The CEO refuses to substantiate the claim.

Another example is the draconian changes our councillors have introduced to council meeting rules. Having initially allowed public questions to simply be ignored, they subsequently codified the ability to prevent reasonable and legitimate public questions from ever seeing the light of day at council meetings. 

The mayor alone holds sole discretion to determine if a question will be put to the public meeting.

The current sitting mayor, Cr Michael Whelan (Island Ward), has abundantly made clear his disdain for public questioning of council. 

In March 2022, he took the unprecedented action of stopping public questions being put to the Council meeting. 

And he later told ABC radio of his view that the need for public questions at council meetings is a fantasy.

So with just half their term remaining, in 2023 will our councillors start kicking some goals to unwind the appalling culture which they have allowed to be introduced at BCSC? Or will mediocrity be their goal? 

Kevin Griffin, Address supplied