Most of the measures are pretty boring and many are plain impossible to comprehend due to the vague nature of many indicators or poor explanations and possibly shows a weakness in the governance and transparency aspects of the website when Councils can produce meaningless or incomprehensible data making any comparisons pointless.

The Governance area part of the report shows some disturbing statistics. 

Under the Administrators the most telling indicator has been the decisions made in closed or secret sessions of the Council meeting. The previous Councillor group had this figure down to under 4% of all decisions. The Administrators managed to get this up to 15% for last year’s report and a quick check on how they are fairing this current year with 6 months in is shocking. They are running at 35% of all Council decisions being made behind closed doors.

Council’s response to the published figure is the standard “Fifteen per cent of all Council resolutions were in closed session. These items were closed due to matters that prejudice the Council or any person, legal, proposed development, contractual, private commercial information and/or personnel matters.”

Seems these types of reports are on the rise with the December Council meeting showing the secret sessions came in at a staggering 47% decisions made in closed session. Most of the decisions made in the open session were procedural reports such as council meeting timetable 2021, summary of briefings to administrators, update on community support package. So at least something for the press releases.

And one of those motions passed in open session was the new Council Transparency Policy (C75) passed in July 2020. Seems it has been all down hill after they passed that policy.