The Ugly Deaths of Democracy and Civility in Noosa Council

At about this time last week, as I read The Guardian in a hotel room in Windsor, England, Cr Ingrid sat in a chair opposite, PC perched on lap, ear plugs resplendent, participating from afar at a Thursday night Noosa Council meeting in Tewantin.

At the end of what was a torrid and most telling encounter, Cr Ingrid thanked her colleagues – not something I would have offered to such a shabby bunch.

On two occasions the six male councillors had sat on their hands, refusing to second her propositions on important matters thus gagging debate and showing a lack of respect to her, the community and democratic process.

The debate the boys’ club did not want you to experience I will come to in a moment. But Cr Ingrid sat through this mute discourtesy, and sat through the restraints applied to her but not to others, and until the end was friendly and conciliatory.

This was showing respect. Respect for her colleagues as members of a local government, the institution she has consistently shown respect for. Respect unreciprocated. Grace under pressure.

Let me take a closer look at those councillors. First there’s the mayor, the one who sets the tone and conducts the boys’ club chorus. In the past he has harangued Cr Ingrid, an Independent councillor, for having her views reported in a local newspaper. He has also presided over meetings of councillors in which she was admonished, as a schoolgirl might be, for voicing dissenting views.

And there have been meetings seemingly pre-arranged to allow each male councillor in turn to join the mayor in chastising her for some trumped up infraction against locally invented ‘rules’ which have no standing in law or regulation. Noosa’s little Star Chamber.

In such a constrained and intimidating environment, to enable Cr Ingrid to operate effectively in her Independent role, at our own expense she has needed to seek recourse to a barrister’s advice. This has cost some thousands of dollars but has toned down the spurious faux ‘rules’ that this often toxic council has sought to impose.

The barrister’s advice was especially required last year when two councillors, at about the same time, made seven formal complaints against Cr Ingrid under the Councillor Code of Conduct. If upheld, these would have had the effect of penalising her and censoring her Facebook page, a major source of information about Noosa Council affairs.

One of these councillors was named as Cr Brian Stockwell. The other chose the coward’s road of anonymity but I know his stridently truculent identity. And I want him to know that I know.

In his official inquiry, the investigator chose to consider the seven complaints in one tranche and, at the end of a long process, determined that all should be dismissed as insubstantial, not substantiated or mischievous.

Cr Jackson commented at the time she believed the complaints were “a politically inspired attempt to shut down my Facebook activities and humiliate me” by the two councillors.

That they were. They were also disgraceful. And apology came there none. This boys’ club has no contrition and no dignity.

No, I would not have uttered one syllable of respect for these men who seem to have a strange understanding of their role as councillors. They were not elected to a boys’ club, after all, but as representative voices of the community.

To watch them and to listen to them at Thursday’s revealing meeting was to ponder their maturity, veracity, judgement and critical faculties. What was not missing were vanity, self-importance and ego. At boys’ club meetings there are always plenty of those to go around.

Of course, they all claim connectedness with the community but none seem to authentically demonstrate an informed connectedness.

What they do show are personal and preconceived opinions disingenuously offered as the views of the broader community. Triumphal claims are made, mythologies perpetuated and falsehoods told that simply do not accord with reality.

In all this posturing I have detected no vision for Noosa, no strategy to tackle most of the shire’s major issues, no consistent and coherent narrative of what this council seeks to achieve for the shire. There seems little insight beyond expensive thought-bubble projects and cheap self-congratulation.

There’s nothing to provide even a trace of a clear way forward for Noosa or – supposing there was – no indication there would be any significant capacity to pursue and deliver it.

And the depressing truth we citizens must live with is that next March most of these men will stand ready to be re-elected for another four years. None but Cr Pardon who, irrespective of the outcome of the serious charges against him to be tried in December, can be expected to step aside.

There is no serious contender for the mayoralty, not yet anyway, which should be of great concern to the community. Cr Wellington has had his go, it hasn’t gone well, the job seems to be beyond him and another four years of muddling through and money sprayed all over the place are taxes the shire can do without.

As for new councillors, I’ll be looking for talent that lies beyond the wannabees sprouting from the astroturf of the Noosa Residents and Ratepayers Association: pet politicians encouraged by outside influencers.

These outsiders are the Shadowmen, who wish to ensure they retain their business model which depends upon control of the council to keep the money flowing where the Shadowmen want it to flow.

I remain hopeful that there may be a couple of promising candidates unconnected to the Shadowmen who understand that genuine community connectedness is everything and that everything flows from connectedness. And I refer to good governance, real openness and transparency, and clear policies and strategies that align with the community’s needs and expectations.

So what were those motions from Cr Ingrid that caused the boys’ club to squirm uncomfortably on its hands and refuse debate? (Lapsed for want of a seconder is, I understand, the formal term.)

One was to make all informal councillor meetings on council matters open to the public, including councillor workshops, briefings and discussion forums, unless declared to be closed for legal reasons.

The purpose of this motion was to assist prevent deceit, collusion, skullduggery and conspiracy. The boys’ club did not even want to debate such restraint, let alone vote for it.

The other was a related motion proposing that the CEO keep a record of discussions at these informal councillor meetings. The boys’ club also did not want this. You may ask yourself what it is that the boys’ club fears.

Anyway, so it was that, towards the end of Thursday night’s near four hour meeting, Cr Ingrid thanked her ungracious colleagues and asked them from halfway around the world to “have a glass of wine” for her at their post-meeting dinner.

She doesn’t drink alcohol, but – after those hours of demonstrable obduracy and dopiness by the boys’ club – you could forgive her for changing the habit of a lifetime.

Cr Ingrid chose to end this meeting by showing her colleagues respect they had not shown her and that in my view they did not deserve.

They have spent nearly four years working to deride and rebuff the only councillor who refused to join their quasi-political party ‘team’, who refused to obey their ‘rules’, who asked the hard questions, who didn’t duck the hard work and who stuck up for the community wherever she could.

A good friend of mine, former NSW education minister Rodney Cavalier, has written: “For a person of principle, politics is not about favourable opportunity, capturing salient for advantage, surrendering when circumstance turns adverse. No. Politics is about serving a cause. Thinking in those terms, a practitioner will be guided by purpose.”

Cr Ingrid is a woman of principle who has been guided by a community which deserves better from its local government. I cannot flaw the Noosa community in all this. By and large it has stood solidly behind her.

But the boys’ club, and the Shadowmen who loom behind it (one of them present at this meeting in corporeal form), well, they have much to answer for.