NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND

With deep concern for the realm, [Mentor] rose and warned,

‘Hear me, men of Ithaca.  Hear what I have to say.

Never let any sceptered king be kind and gentle now,

not with all his heart, or set his mind on justice—

no, let him be cruel and always practice outrage’.

Homer: Odyssey, Book 2, lines 255-259, trans. Robert Fagles

Return of the King

As every schoolchild knows—or used to know, before political correctness rampaged through the curriculum, rooting out as much of traditional Western culture as it could manage before anyone had time to prevent it—the word ‘mentor’, meaning a sage and trusted adviser, comes from the name of a character in Homer’s Odyssey.

Mentor is the wise old man entrusted with the care and tutelage of Odysseus’ son Telemachus when the hero sailed away from Ithaca to take part in the war against Troy.

On Monday night, along with about 40 other residents, I attended the Council meeting (or most of it) and the Special Electors Meeting that followed. These were the first such meetings for many months that were not chaired by Minister Tony Simpson’s calamitous protégé, James Best.

So it was with great relief and rejoicing that we witnessed Matthew Reid take his seat as Shire President, flanked on his right by Crs. Smythe and Wallace.   (It was with rather different sentiments that we observed Acting CEO Graeme Simpson ensconced to the left of Cr Reid.  He’s well past his use-by date.  It’s time he was put out to grass.)

Who should be a mentor?  Not somebody from the Department!

What struck me as odd was the provision of several places behind and to the right of President Reid marked as being for ‘mentors’.  It turned out that these were for a couple of councillors from other local governments and a senior officer of the Department of Local Government, Ms Jenni Law.

Why Minister Simpson should have selected Ms Law, or any other senior member of his department’s staff, to act as mentor to Shire President Reid is beyond my comprehension. 

The Department, like the minister, was responsible for the appointment of Mr. Best as commissioner and therefore for the damage he inflicted on our shire while he was here.  They were warned over and again that Mr. Best was not an ideal appointment. 

They chose to do nothing about it, just as they chose for many years to ignore the cruelty, bullying and worse perpetrated upon residents of the Shire during the period of the Hooper-Boyle-Hooper ascendancy.

It goes without saying that neither the minister nor his senior bureaucrats will ever accept the slightest responsibility for Mr. Best’s catastrophic reign over York. 

Apologising for mistakes, however disastrous, is not in a politician’s DNA, and state government employees are trained never to apologise for or acknowledge any kind of error except under extreme duress involving the application of electric cattle prods to their intimate parts.

Frankly, I don’t believe for a moment that Cr Reid and his colleagues need mentors.  They have shown themselves to be perfectly capable of managing the Shire’s affairs.  If they lack anything, it may be experience, which time and practice will provide.

But I think the Department needs mentors, and so, I believe, does Minister Simpson—in spades.  I think they need training in ethics and probity, though not from their self-styled probity expert, Brad Jolly, who seems incapable of understanding the concept of ‘conflict of interest’ as it applies to himself and for that reason must be excluded from any such process.

Let’s hope Minister Simpson’s mentor is a bit more circumspect in what he says than was Homer’s Mentor.  The minister and his departmental advisers are cruel and outrageous enough already.

Have our councillors been brainwashed?

Glad as I was to witness the return of our councillors, I’m concerned that the training they received while under suspension may have inculcated a warped and fundamentally anti-democratic philosophy of local government that in my opinion, and not only mine, is not supported either by the Local Government Act 1995 or by regulations made under that Act.

Warped though it is, that philosophy underwrites virtually every decision of the minister and every action of his department.  It goes a long way to explain why they declined to intervene in the Shire’s affairs when intervention was sorely needed, but couldn’t wait to intervene when a reforming shire president, overwhelmingly supported by the electors, tried to find out what was really going on in the Shire and put a stop to the administration’s shenanigans.   

It may also explain why they are so determined to ensure that what they regard as York’s ‘historical issues’ will never be investigated but instead must be swept far away on a tsunami of deceit.

The main plank of their philosophy is that real power in a local government only appears to be vested in the elected councillors and through them the electors.  That’s just for show, to make the rest of us feel good.  (This was also very much the opinion of former CEO Hooper, who frequently impressed it upon his staff.)

According to departmental realpolitik, power actually lies with the CEO and through him senior officials in the Shire administration.  The legislation says something quite different, but the department doesn’t care, because the CEO and senior administrative staff are much easier to control than elected members of the Council, and control, as opposed to representation, is in their view what local government is all about.

It's the councillors who appoint the CEO, but once he is in the job, he is regarded as having complete sway over all matters connected with administration.  Councillors are expected to deal only with ‘strategic’ matters, i.e. policy.  Councillors are not supposed to inquire into or make judgements about administrative matters, and members of the public are not permitted to ask questions about such matters in public question time.

The effect of this travesty of democracy is to turn Shire staff into a protected species, immune from outside criticism.  When criticised, staff are given the opportunity to scurry off on so-called ‘stress leave’, leaving their work to be done by expensive consultants.

Everybody seems to crave victim status nowadays, but it seems ridiculous that members of staff whose conduct is held up to the light in any forum by the people who pay their wages should feel obliged to stage a nervous breakdown or, as allegedly happened recently, organise a stop-work meeting to tell the world and each other how hard done by they are.  

Taking into account that some senior staff possess no qualifications to speak of relevant to the jobs they do, but for all that are very well paid, I think they are more than adequately compensated for being the targets now and then of a few harsh words on a couple of blogs.

‘Unreasonable conduct’

At the council meeting held on 6 July 2015, thankfully the last to be chaired by former commissioner Best, Acting CEO Simpson tabled a skimpy report headed ‘Unreasonable Conduct’.  By ‘unreasonable conduct’, he appears mainly to have meant some ratepayers’ unreasonable habit of asking questions in an (often vain) attempt to find out exactly what the Shire is up to and how it is spending our money.

His report refers to ‘abuse and ill informed criticism of the Commissioner and staff [which] has resulted in the Shire being considered an Unsafe Workplace.’

Statements like that go way beyond the reach of satire. 

The idea that unkind comments or ‘ill informed criticism’ on a couple of blogs—because that’s what we’re talking about here —would turn a nice comfortable suite of offices into an unsafe workplace is worse than mere nonsense.  It is also a lie. 

Applying the Acting CEO’s reasoning, if I may so dignify it, to my own situation, I suppose I should declare my study an unsafe workplace because since I started writing about the Shire I have received a couple of silly death threats, other intimations of physical harm and a handful of barely literate insults which I published and responded to on this blog. 

Another lie contained in Acting CEO Simpson’s report is the absurd statement that ‘community perceptions’—whatever that means—‘have resulted in the Shire expending a sum of of $807,824 on legal fees, reports, payouts to sacked staff’.

Apart from its gold-standard absurdity and rank dishonesty, what makes this assertion interesting is that at Monday’s council meeting, and previously in a letter to a ratepayer, Acting CEO Simpson affirmed that the word ‘sacked’ was misapplied in this case to staff receiving payouts.  He seemed to see this misapplication as a mistake of Mr. Best’s.  Yet here he is publishing the mistake in his own name, under the heading ‘Officer Comment’.

I'm not yet sure that either of those two gentlemen were mistaken.  I suppose that in Acting CEO Simpson's eyes, just as there are, as he said in Ray Hooper's case, 'degrees of resignation', there are also 'degrees of being sacked'.

No less absurd is Acting CEO Simpson’s other ‘officer comment’ that ‘The independent umpires have found there are no cases of criminal behaviour but there is still a disconnection between some members of the community and the various findings’.

Mr. Simpson, you know very well that there were no 'independent umpires'. There were no proper investigations, so there can have been no findings for members of the community to be disconnected from.  Your statement is simply not true.  If you believe it is, I challenge you to say who were the ‘independent umpires’ and publish full details of the investigations they carried out.

Otherwise, my calling you a bare-faced liar would be well-informed and justified criticism on my part.

And as I’m sure you’re well aware, there has been behaviour of a criminal nature, or at any rate behaviour bordering on criminality.  Some of the evidence has made it into print before now.  And there’s more to come.

To round it all off…poor old Ray jumps the gun

Readers may recall that the Avon Valley Gazette published in full James Best’s childish and misleading ‘Open letter to residents’.  A week later, on 17 July, the paper ran a letter from none other than The Old Wise Man of Alexander Heights, former York Shire CEO Ray Hooper, and his wife Shirley.

Here it is:

Sorry, old chap, but you have not been cleared of wrongdoing. Allegations made against you were never investigated, so how is it possible that you have been cleared? 

I'm not aware that the people of York generally have been falling over themselves to give you their 'ongoing support' since you left us.  I'd be surprised if that were so.

As to Shire staff...I'm not sure that many of them have maintained contact with you during the last 14 months, but I can think of at least two who probably have, and in the firm's time, too.  I like to see such loyalty on the part of former colleagues who owe their good fortune in the job almost entirely to a departed boss and mentor.  Thanks now to Messrs Best and Simpson, ratepayers will be paying for the consequences of Ray's mentoring for several years to come.

NOTE:  Be sure to read David Taylor's latest contribution on our friendly rival blog, http://shireofyork6302.blogspot.com.au/ ('The official unofficial website').  And enjoy the cartoons that go with it!