The legal case concluded in August 2020 with a highly detailed report of the proceedings written up in this publication. During the following 4 months, rather than review the documents and bring those deemed able to be released back to Council to be made public, the officers seemingly sat on the job and did nothing for 16 long weeks. At the end of the 4 months officers presented the 3 administrators with a report on December 16th Council meeting recommending the following:
This report recommends that Council not release any confidential documents relating to the ‘Bald Hills Wind Farm matter’ for the following reasons: 

• There is considerable material already on the public record. The Victorian Supreme Court (47 page) judgment provides a comprehensive summary of the complaint investigation, including Council’s decisions. (refer Attachment [2.2.1] – Victorian Supreme Court Judgment – Bald Hills Wind Farm vs South Gippsland Shire Council and Second to Six defendants – [2020] VSC 512 and 513 – 18 August 2020). A Queens Counsel opinion that founded the basis of Council’s decisions has also been made public. 

• There is no useful public purpose in diverting the resources required to be devoted to vetting documents. The resources are better directed to responding to COVID-19 challenges and delivery of the Council Plan. 

• Attempts to release material collected for the specific purposes of the investigation which contain personal and commercially sensitive material may give rise to another set of proceedings being brought against the Council.

Editor Comment: Let us examine these “reasons”. Clearly personal and sensitive information would not have been released so using that excuse to prevent any documents being released, even the ones already on the public record is not a valid argument.

So, from their own report to the administrators, the officers say they have not looked at the documents and effective taken 16 weeks to produce a few pages of Council report recommending to continue the process by doing more nothing.

Is this good governance? To have the officers come back with a report that basically says, “we don’t want to action that Council resolution so please have another look at this and allow us to cancel the action. From a good governance point of view, these sorts of officer reports are supposed to be for times when events change that require a reversal of a current Council resolution. Effectively, this report amounts to a reversal of a previous Council decision by the staff and should have been stated as such.

In this case however, it has been made clear by the officer report that they just do not want to action the report. They claim not to want to put any time or effort into actioning the report and then say it is not in the public interest to release any documents-without reviewing the documents to inform themselves of that opinion. This is not the role of officers to second guess Council resolutions they may not agree with and to enable transparency to remain lacking. And it is not good enough when the administrators rubber stamp such a process without comment.

Council should use a Council meeting to discuss and explain the reasons that led to their decision being taken. Listen to the explanation given here by the administrators for such an important matter to the community. They efficiently detailed their thoughts into just 11 seconds of the live-streaming recording. This compares to the previous agenda item on Covid-19 support package update where they spent 5 minutes and three seconds patting themselves on the back when informing the ratepayers what they already discussed and approved at earlier Council meetings on the covid-19 relief to the community.

And finally, taking 4 months to decide to do nothing and then release this report the week before Christmas-have to wonder.

Listen to the full and frank discussion on Agenda item 2.2 Bald Hills Windfarm