On Thursday 19 April, Councillor Ingrid Jackson put a transparency motion before Noosa Council. As she explained on her own facebook page:
“My motion was simple: that General Committee meeting minutes be made public. That’s the meeting where the most significant or contentious matters are debated and amendments are won or lost. But in Noosa, the public never sees these minutes.
“By studying the legislation, I have learned that Council has been in breach of the Local Government law for four years, because it does not make minutes of its committee meetings available to the public.
“The only legal exception is where a Council makes a formal resolution to exempt a Committee. But Noosa Council has never done that.”
None of her six male colleagues chose to second the motion, and Ingrid was effectively silenced. She couldn’t speak to it, it couldn’t be discussed or voted on, and it couldn’t be deferred. When Ingrid subsequently released a statement on this, the Noosa Community Notice Board lit up.
Why it matters
Noosa Council appears to have operated in breach of the law. Some of the Noosa ‘stalwarts’ are calling this a technicality and expect it to be fixed with an exemption motion – to allow the public to be kept in the dark.
I believe this would be a mistake, run contrary to best practice and hopefully it will not come to pass – although those councillors taking a stand against disclosing minutes do seem to have the numbers.
Open Noosa believes the default position should always be ‘open’ and ‘public’. Queensland’s commissioner for information has co-published a series of papers on the topic. Page four of Transparency and Public Sector performance states:
‘Moving towards a ‘push model’ of transparency requires a major change in political and bureaucratic culture, away from traditional practices of caution and confidentiality and towards a more confident and open approach to communication with the public.
‘The necessary cultural change would be facilitated by both politicians and public servants becoming convinced of the positive value of government transparency, not only to the wider public but also to governments themselves in the discharge of their duties.
‘This change of values and culture provides the greatest challenge to public information policy.’
Why does it matter?
Keep corruption at bay
Transparency and openness are required to keep the people in power on the straight and narrow. Transparency cultivates better behaviour and makes it harder for more dominant people to set the agenda or bully others to adopt it.
The global organisation, Transparency International, has this to say on ‘What is Transparency?’:
‘Transparency is about shedding light on rules, plans, processes and actions. It is knowing why, how, what, and how much.
‘Transparency ensures that public officials, civil servants, managers, board members and business people act visibly and understandably, and report on their activities.
‘And it means that the general public can hold them to account. It is the surest way of guarding against corruption, and helps increase trust in the people and institutions on which our futures depend.’
Beyond Belcarra – leaders in transparency
The Local Government Association of Queensland last week called on the State Government to introduce even stricter reforms for local government, going even further than the Crime and Corruption Commission’s ‘Operation Belcarra’ report.
LGAQ CEO Greg Hallam said local governments are determined to be leaders in transparency and accountability to guarantee public confidence and trust.
Better value for money, better outcomes
Transparency makes for better project results and better value for money as decision-makers know they are under constant public scrutiny. This is relevant in our shire. Open Noosa featured posts on the topic of Council ‘outsourcing’ it’s conservation grant giving to the closely associated Noosa Biosphere Reserve Foundation and the lack of accountability and KPIs.
“Making cost-benefit analyses public (with clearly documented assumptions) …greatly improves the transparency of decision making. Such transparency strengthens the incentives for decision-makers to focus on the overall net benefits of projects.
“It also allows particular estimates (for example, of construction costs or patronage) to be debated and testing done on how the use of different estimates would affect the projects’ net benefits.
“Transparency can help to improve the quality of analyses because proponents and practitioners know that any flaws are likely to be exposed.”
Transparency and the Performance of Outsourced Government Services
Better for diversity and wider participation in our democracy
Transparency and the understanding of process are crucial if we want more young people or people from diverse backgrounds to participate in governance. Transparency is an integral part of better accessibility. You cannot understand what you cannot see or find. Which brings me to usability and search issues with council minutes and agendas.
Have you ever tried to find out when a particular issue of interest was or will be discussed in council?
Searchability is key for transparency
Agendas and minutes are one thing, but searchability is key. Imagine the internet without google (or any other search engine – Lycos anyone 🙂 ). Have you ever tried to find out when something of interest was or will be discussed in council? Or how something was decided? For example, I happen to be interested in when the next Noosa Biosphere Funding Deed will be discussed, so I searched the agendas for ‘biosphere’.
No documents were found…
So I thought I would search the minutes archives for ‘biosphere’.
Not as much as I would have expected. Two documents from 2014 are matching the keywords. We know there were many more agenda points, reports, decisions etc since, but according to the archive search, they are unretrievable.
My guess is that keywords have been entered manually and I wonder if the archivist has been asleep since or if there is something more sinister at work. Or maybe the public would just get ‘confused’ by too much information.
Let’s test some less contested topics. Let’s say I am a bush carer…..
Nope, nothing for me.
or interested in waste issues?
Nope, nothing to see.
Next I searched ‘ceo’:
Two documents returned in all those years. One from 2014, one from 2015. So it’s either a fluke or somebody in Council must have had the desire to make papers findable.
Out of curiosity, I opened one of the documents.
Ipswich and full circle irony
Interestingly my search for ‘ceo’ brought up Brett De Chastel’s appointment to Noosa Council back in 2014-2015. His resume shows that from 1998-2001 Brett was Deputy CEO at Ipswich Council. Brett was responsible for good governance, IT and record keeping amongst other things.
I’m not suggesting Brett was in any way responsible for the litany of corruption and misconduct allegations that have more recently plagued Ipswich City Council and consecutive mayors. However, at a minimum, one would hope Brett would be aware of the importance of transparency and accountability.
I hope our male councillors will get better at taking their female fellow councillor more seriously and listen to what she has got to say. I believe as a shire and community we will benefit greatly.
P.S. Noosa Council website’s general site search (top left) works much better – BUT the results are confusing and not sortable, which means it is still very hard to make sense of it all. As a dyed-in-the-wool UX designer, I recommend looking at offering ONE simple search and allowing the user to filter the results.
Much has been made of precedent in the discussion of the reaction in Council to Cr Jackson’s motion, suggesting it was outside the conventions for noone to second the motion. That is probably the case, but I think it’s also worth noting that such a motion from a councillor is also a rarity.
I think most would agree with you that maxiumum transparency is not only desirable, but leads to better governance, and you give an exclellent summation of the reasons why.
There’s another aspect of governance that is as, or perhaps more important than transparency, and this is responsiveness. In my experience our councillors and our council staff excell in this area, which is perhaps why a recent survey found a greater than normal satisfaction with Council in the community in Noosa.
If there’s a legal issue here of course it should be dealth with, but I am wondering if it could have been done in a more discreet way than this motion from a councillor. Is there a bit of grandstanding occuring here?
Thanks for your comment Judy. Having witnessed various attempted minute manipulations by the former mayor and what I have to assume were strategic disappearances of council news posts, plus having experienced bullying and a ‘what, this woman dares to speak?’ incidences, I have to say this approach seems to fit into the mould of a remnant toxic culture. I for one can not wait for this to change for the better. This did not come out of the blue either, and I am glad Ingrid raised the issue. It would have been a discreet and actionable path if the councillors hadn’t decided to silence the motion. We also know that there are undercurrents of ‘team think’ and ‘Lets all be reasonable and do what I say’ attitudes.
I am glad you had good experiences with Council’s responsiveness, which to my mind isn’t so much about governance but rather about operations. I too found some council staff of great assistance, but equally, I had a few snap and send incidences falling straight into the too hard basket. One was about the start of a lantana outbreak in the Wallum. But I agree, responsiveness could well be a factor in high satisfaction rating.