Interview CEO South Gippsland April 28th, 2020-Part 3

I asked Kerryn her thoughts on transparency within the organisation

“How would you describe the changes made by the administrators in the last 12 months changes to Question Time and how do you justify those changes when placed in comparison to Casey council’s administrator’s comments?”

“So, I won’t seek to justify them because they are their decisions of the administrators so I will let them speak for themselves in terms of their reasons for changing practices. I’m not 100% sure of what changes have been made and I’m happy for you to give me some information about that my understanding is or my experience so far which unfortunately has only been with meetings without a Gallery so my experience is a little bit limited but we have still had questions to council so we still doing that it’s just that we haven’t been able to take them live with people in the room but it terms of what the past practice was and why the administrators have made a decision to change I can certainly seek comment from them for you but I won’t speak for them”.

“I don’t need their comment brought back to me, I was interested in yours, I believe the CEO is supposed to offer frank and fearless advice to the councillors, in this case it would be the administrators, if the governance will become less or the transparency becoming less or whatever”.

“Sure, that is part of (the CEO role)”.

“Specifically with regard to Casey, their administrator said, that they were changing straight away, within a week of herself being appointed, the way they were conducting Casey’s Question Time and that she said we will read out answers to questions we will do this we will not let people do things and this was the exact opposite of what the administrators here had implemented. They had reduced the number of questions, reduced down to three the number of times people can present to council in 12 months, and they have made it harder for people to ask questions now that is what I mean by transparency and comparison to Casey. Live Streaming was being done and we’re doing the opposite (to Casey’s advice), that’s what I was meaning”.

“Sure I would have to have a look into what Casey previously did and what they are proposing to do it may well be that their practices were more limited than what we had anyway but I’m happy to have a look at it from my point of view we are still taking public questions at the moment and we definitely reading their responses out on the live stream but I’m more than happy to look into it and as you say you know part of my role is to provide advice and I’d be comfortable to provide that”.

The previous Councillors put back in the right for ratepayers to ask questions themselves in a council meeting and that has been now stopped. 

“Yes”.

Also, the chance for the questions to be answered in council was only allowed if the ratepayer turned up and that has stopped.

“Yes”.

 “Now you read them out now because there is no-one in the room anyway that’s fine but yeah if you could look into that?”

“You’re talking about the longer term, Yep I’m happy to have a look at it. You would probably be aware I have worked at a number of different councils and all councils do this stuff slightly differently so happy to have a look into it”.