THE HISTORY CHANNEL

Mayor Sue Doherty of South Perth City Council

How local government stomps on dissidents in its ranks—the strange case of South Perth City Council, the Department of Local Government and former councillor Lindsay Jamieson

In September 2007, Mr Lindsay Jamieson, then a City of South Perth councillor, took exception to remarks made concerning him in the minutes of that month’s council meeting.

Those remarks reflected a 2006 finding by the WA Department of Local Government that Mr. Jamieson had committed a prima facie breach of the financial interest provisions of the Local Government Act 1995.  The Department had issued Mr. Jamieson with a caution, which it later withdrew because no evidence of actual wrongdoing could be found.

Nearly four years later, in June 2011, Mr. John Hyde, MLA for Perth and Opposition spokesman for local government, made the following speech in the WA Parliament supporting Mr. Jamieson’s claim that he had been poorly dealt with by both the city council and the department. 

I reprint here the entire speech as recorded in Hansard 16 June 2011 p4368c, paragraphing the text to make it easier to read and in places adding emphasis:

MR J.N. HYDE (Perth) [12.55 pm]: Justice delayed is justice denied. A former councillor for the City of South Perth, Mr Lindsay Jamieson, has been wrongly branded by the city, the council and the Department of Local Government as guilty until proven innocent with no reasonable means of establishing his innocence, despite the Public Sector Commission directing the department to correct its wrongful slurs.

After Mr Jamieson took up the fight against the DLG, the department was forced to withdraw a caution it had issued against him. The Public Sector Commission made findings against the department that included breaches of its code of ethics and a failure to follow its complaints handling procedure.

The City of South Perth and its council have not followed the same path and continue to treat Mr Jamieson as guilty. At the council meeting in March, just two of five paragraphs of a letter from the DLG were read to the council. The city and the council omitted to read the other three paragraphs, which included a request for the city to prepare a report to the council.

When Mr Jamieson challenged the council at its next council meeting during public question time, he was told that all five paragraphs were read out to council members during the private meal break before the council meeting.

This lack of openness and transparency is deeply disturbing. The council has also refused on three occasions to hear a deputation from Mr Jamieson.

The Department of Local Government may have technically corrected its wrong against the former councillor, but the Minister for Local Government needs to ensure that his department’s ongoing council monitoring and quality assurance role achieves a proper outcome by both the city administration and the full council publicly admitting their mistakes and giving Mr Jamieson complete justice.

I call on the Minister for Local Government to meet with Mr Jamieson to understand what should be done to ensure that this injustice is fully undone. Local government elections will be held across WA on 15 October. The minister needs to ensure that the thousands of Western Australians who have and will give voluntary service to their local councils as elected members will always be treated fairly and justly.

So the Public Sector Commission gave the DLG a severe wigging, after which the department apologised to Mr. Jamieson and settled with him, presumably for what is usually coyly described as ‘an undisclosed sum’. 

Was that good enough for Mr. Jamieson?  No, it wasn’t.  Silly fellow, he wanted redress from the South Perth City Council as well.

His battle for an apology from the City, and for reimbursement of his legal expenses, went on for several years.  For some of those years, our old friend former York commissioner James Best was mayor of South Perth.  It would be interesting to know if that was in any way relevant to Mr. Jamieson’s misfortunes.  

At one point Mr. Jamieson applied under FOI to the City for access to information about himself.   His application was refused, on the grounds that it ‘would divert a substantial and unreasonable proportion of the City’s resources away from core business’. 

The FOI Commissioner took a different view and set the Council’s decision aside.  You can read his judgement at www.foi.wa.gov.au/PDF_DECS/D0222013.pdf 

Meanwhile, despite the DLG’s climbdown, and Mr. Hyde’s comments in Parliament, the City of South Perth remained obdurate in its hostility to Mr. Jamieson.  On 29 March 2012, the City’s mayor, Sue Doherty, issued a media statement insisting that the City did not owe Mr. Jamieson an apology and would not be reimbursing his legal expenses, just as it had previously refused to do in 2007.

You can read Mayor Doherty’s media statement at http://www.southperth.wa.gov.au/News-and-Events/News/2012/March/Former-Councillor-Matter-Closed

So far as Mayor Doherty was concerned, the decision of the DLG to rescind the caution it had issued to Mr. Jamieson bore no relevance to any action the City had taken or its continuing belief in Mr. Jamieson’s guilt.  Those are not the words she uses, but that is what she means.   I think there is more to this than meets the eye.

There is something quite disturbing about the tone of Mayor Doherty’s words.  They have about them a hint of the personal—indeed, of the vindictive.

It is the tone usually adopted by people in power having scores to settle with so-called ‘trouble makers’, i.e. mavericks, dissidents and other ‘public nuisances’ who see the world differently from the way the powerful see it and insist on ‘speaking truth to power’.  In Mr. Jamieson’s case, what he most desired to do, I believe, was to clear his name which he regarded as having been publicly and unfairly maligned.

The tone I speak of is similar to the one adopted by Mayor Doherty’s predecessor in office, James Best, when, having avenged himself on the people of York by arranging for the Shire to buy the Old Convent School from his friends for an excessive price, he told us almost in so many words that he was the Council and could do what he damned well liked.

I confess I’m not a full bottle on the details of Mr. Jamieson’s battle with the City as it unfolded over the years.  My suspicion that he was in the right is based on three things: Mr. Hyde’s speech in Parliament, the involvement of the Public Sector Commission, and the fact the DLG—not, as we know, inclined to see things from any perspective other than their own, or to say sorry—felt the need to withdraw their accusation, apologise to Mr. Jamieson and perhaps pay him some money as well.

It’s now more than three years since Mayor Doherty released her media statement.  Did the South Perth City Council end up apologising to Mr. Jamieson?  I don’t know.  I hope so, but I very much doubt it.