To understand the background - the pattern of public ownership (your ownership) of this publication - please look in the right column.
Click on the link to read the transcript [best for dial-up] or the YouTube link [best with broadband broadband] to watch the ABC's Stateline program.
Council has diverted its advertising (and all that advertising revenue) from the newspapers in Nowra and Ulladulla to the Shoalhaven Mail.
Please turn to page 9.
This is described as an 'advertising feature'. It is very clearly election advertising material. It lacks the necessary information about authorisation. There is no election period in NSW local government elections. Anyone who stood for election in 2004 (obviously existing councillors) is obliged to report to the NSW Election Funding Authority on receipts and expenditure for the whole period between the elections (I am obliged to do so from when I said I would be a candidate). Please note that Councillor McCrudden, who in the last issue scare-mongered about possible privatisation of water (which he knows to be nonsense) now talks about dropping swimming pool fees - is this a promise? Uncosted. He is a member of the Shoalhaven Independents Group, he is the mayor's bailiff in the ruling majority. They have proposed doubling pool entry costs.
Councillor Kearney - under the photo of Councillor Wilmott - has used an unusually large number of words, but I can't find policy really.
Please turn to pages 22 - 27, These are the pages of council notices. They no longer appear in normal newspapers, only here. These provide an enormous subsidy to this junk mail TV program.
Please turn to page 39. A curious advertising feature with Councillor Wilmott (under the photo of Councillor Kearney) appearing directly under a tendentious statement by the Huskisson Chamber of Commerce. This chamber, it says, has "had enough of the 'we-are-not-a-political party' Shoalhaven Action Group, known as SAC, working hand in glove with the South Coast Register." What an extraordinary statement. The Huskisson Chamber of Commerce, since its last AGM dominated by developers, is in the middle of a prolonged and open debate in the letters page of the South Coast Register with local community groups. It is definitely the case that the South Coast Register is in recent years, perhaps because it has come under Fairfax ownership, a vastly more independent paper than it may have been in the past. Where is the evidence for the alleged collusion with SAC, an allegation made also in the last Shoalhaven Mail. (Please note that I am not associated with SAC. I stand as an absolute independent.) This is pretty serious stuff — it will be interesting to see if Fairfax lawyers take an interest...
At a recent council discussion of the need for closed 'councillor briefings' the extraordinary statement was made that things were good in the days when you could rely on the Register's journalist, their journalist could be admitted to briefings because she wouldn't report anything! This is not my concept of an open society and a free press. There is a dangerous onslaught on press freedom developing in the council and in what has become a propaganda outlet financed by Council money (your money).
Councillor Wilmott curiously entitles his piece: Ulladulla a basket case? "No"
Are his remarks paid for by the Huskisson Chamber of Commerce? Who did pay for this ad? Regarding Councillor Wilmott's question, I admit that I have on radio twice quoted the Mayor's private remark to me: "Ulladulla's hopeless. They have to go to Nowra or Batemans Bay to shop. They clutch at straws."
Councillor Wilmott advances simplistic argument for development. My view is that Ulladulla contains many fine minds with great visions for the future — also many people impatient for support from council for projects.. and there is division because the council 'leadership' pit people against each other. The Ulladulla community as a whole needs to work together, not shout slogans.
Ulladulla is in a crazy situation of now needing to comment on Council's draft Development Control Plan [DCP56] for its central business district. The conclusion of this process, however, runs unacceptably close to the elections.
The reality also is that this DCP will then be overridden in 2009 by a city-wide Local Environment Plan, which the council must produce to meet State obligations. So what Ulladulla (and other communities) can most usefully do is focus on their long term strategic perspective (e.g. what do we want our place to be like when the population doubles?) and work back from a common vision for the long term to the tactical situations arising in the context of DCPs and LEPs, etc. Not get themselves tangled in fighting at the mileposts.
Councillor Wilmott is one of those I had in mind when I referred on radio this week to the elected council acting like an adolescent boys' imitation of Macquarie Street (the NSW parliament, the 'bull pit'). With a decent council we could be rid of that adversarial community destructive nonsense.
Who paid for this ad? Indeed, has anyone paid?
So, the context.
We have a situation in which the majority (the Watson gang) in the council have wanted or secured these things in recent weeks:
- keeping councillor briefings closed, seeing no need for the public to be informed.. an approach entirely at odds with how state and federal inquiries and hearings run
- two grants of $6000 each (double for the mayor) for an allowance to fund their communication before the elections in September. Reluctantly stopped only by the intervention of the Department of Local Government - and the law.
- Mayoral access to the council computer system in ways entirely at odds with proper practice in all open democracies and in the conduct of the chairpersons of boards of public companies. Stopped because illegal.
....... none of these matters are reported in the Shoalhaven Mail.
In each of these two last matters Councillor McCrudden was most active in damning any decision to give in to the advice from the General Manager and the Department of Local Government.
This is the same Councillor McCrudden who, at a P&C Meeting in East Nowra on 11 June 2008, told the audience that they had made an error going to the media and that they needed to learn that if you want something you go to the people with the power. He made this extraordinary speech after an even more extraordinary remark which puzzled me at the time (and has been explained to me since)... saying he had to go to another appointment and he had to go before the effects of the jab he had had began to wear off... I see it now what he meant, now that the words are on the page. This man, who is obliged under the Local Government Act to provide leadership, has gone to a fine meeting of sensible and articulate community leaders, in the most depressed corner of the Shoalhaven, with too many social problems and makes a joke about drug taking?
Had I understood what I heard at the time I would have called for him to be stopped immediately. This is the same kind of labelling and hateful remark as the Mayor's "be a good Jew" remark last month, which McCrudden then told the press was OK because it was a commonplace.
We are dealing with people who have had power too long, who grasp to retain power by controlling information, by distorting the way the council operates, by picking and choosing among community groups, fomenting local hatred. They usurp authority and abuse it.
It is inappropriate for leaders to believe they have all the power. It is time for fundamentally new approach to how our local government is conducted and interacts with community. I will be setting how we do this out in meetings and in writing in coming weeks... I am hearing views of many and these I take on board as I build my concepts. We can make the change, but first people have to believe we can oust this regime.
