The Development and Environmental Professionals' Association (depa)

Welcome to the depa website. We are an industrial organisation representing professional employees working in local government in New South Wales in a variety of jobs in the fields of environmental health, public health, building and development control and planning.

We take a broad approach to our responsibilities to members and give advice and assistance on professional issues as well as industrial and workplace issues. We understand what members do at work and that allows us to take a holistic approach. Read more about us...

This site will keep you up-to-date with union news and the diverse range of workplace advocacy issues we deal with daily. We have made it easy for members to contact us with online forms.

OH&S Day of Mourning – depaNews April 2009

James Hardie cartoon – April 2009

28 April is the International Day of Mourning

The International Day of Morning commemorates those who have been killed or injured at work. It is a sobering and confronting reminder of something we don't really think about - normal people, just like us, who go to work and don't come home. Its something that happens that not just means a death at work but a personal impact on workmates and a devastating impact on friends and family.

There is no legislative obligation in Australia requiring companies to report in their annual reports lost time due to illness or injuries or death. It makes it very hard to work out whether it is more dangerous to work, for example, for BHP, Lend Lease or Leightons Holdings - just picking three at random. These are all big Australian public companies in which institutional investors like superannuation funds would be long-term investors.

Good health and safety at work is a fundamental and critical part of how a company should be assessed. The concept of shareholder value or providing a profit to shareholders should not override the human cost involved in delivering that value or profit.

BHP in their last reported year killed 11 employees at work and this year to date its 7. At least in BHP's annual report, the statistic is easily found at the front of the report in a prominent way and is dealt with as something which is unacceptable and needs to be improved. Leightons Holdings, for example, make the information hard to find and, in leaving it to much, much later in the report, fails to provide proper recognition of its importance. On an hours worked basis, their figures are worse.

Companies report deaths and injuries in different ways. As a proportion of the workforce, as a proportion of market capitalisation and sometimes in relation to hours worked - but never consistently so that comparisons can be made. Governments should act to make sure they do.

These statistics are a stark indication of things that happen that shouldn't happen and which create incalculable human suffering and misery. Think for a minute how it would be if someone in your household didn’t return from work.

And when you think of companies doing the wrong things about health and safety, it is an appropriate coincidence that the Supreme Court last week found a string of company directors from James Hardie guilty of telling porkies about a media release (which the minutes show had been adopted by the Board) that was untruthful about how the company was funding its huge liability arising from killing its own workers.

Company Chair (who insisted on being described as a Chairman) Meredith Hellicar (picture above) bore the brunt. Described by Justice Gzell as "a most unsatisfactory witness", Hellicar and the rest of the Board were convicted of misleading the public. This conviction also coincided with admissions by James Hardie that the Global Financial Crisis would challenge their ability to finance their compensation fund.

In Business Day in the Sydney Morning Herald on 24 April, Elizabeth Knight said this:

"But as this chapter closes on the great James Hardie saga, one cannot help but wonder about how a company that has for decades played hard and fast with schemes to minimise tax, restructuring to avoid its obligations to compensate its victims, and meddled with the truth, can have survived.

It has been forced to repay liabilities, shamed by unions, governments and victims, publicly flogged by the media, been the subject of a special commission and ultimately brow-beaten into appropriately compensating its victims."

How has it survived, knowing what we know about how it has conducted its business? Simple really, virtually all big institutional investors would be invested in James Hardie (even as they acknowledge its poor governance and health and safety) and in a terribly sad irony, even the superannuation funds to which the dead and dying James Hardie employees belong.

It's time someone found a way of bringing these companies to account.

Why shouldn't there be a legislative requirement that companies call an Extraordinary General Meeting of shareholders whenever there is a death at work? Why shouldn't there be a standard and consistent reporting framework so that institutional investors (and even ordinary members of the community who want to work out which company they think is a good one and which company isn't) can, when they are valuing a company to make a judgement about investment consider how many people they kill and as well as things like their price:earnings ratio?

The James Hardie convictions make us all aware that companies have moral obligations to the community, and those who work for them, as well as a financial obligation to shareholders.

The Herald got it right in their editorial on Monday 27 April:

"The core legal argument of James Hardie is that it was not the company's fault that people died terrible deaths. It was the fault of subsidiary companies, not the parent company. Therefore the liability lay with them. The compensation trust set up by the parent company went beyond its legal requirements. Misleading comments were made by the public relations department, not the board or senior management.

That, in a compressed nutshell, is the James Hardie case. It is morally repugnant, and transparently so."

Robbo's Pearls...

Je ne regrette rien

Lucky Edith Piaf, not regretting anything. Who wouldn’t like to live their life like that. Here are some of our regrets over the last 33 years:

The first historic consensus opposing the introduction of term contracts for senior staff was in 1991, and included the employers’ organisations as well as the predecessor of Local Government Professionals (sic), the Institute of Municipal Management. We regret the employer’s organisation abandoning that position, and the history of antagonism to getting rid of the concept of senior staff by LG Professionals (sic).

We regret that LGNSW, up until they responded to the recommendations in Operation Dasha, participating in the unfair dismissal of more senior staff and particularly general managers than anyone else, and probably collectively, more than everyone else.

The role of the Cabinet Office in 1998 rolling the recommendation made by the Local Government Minister at the time Ernie Page, in the five year review of the Local Government Act, that term contracts should be removed because of anticipated flowback into the State SES - which was nonsense. And the decision of the Cabinet that fell for it.

The role of the Office of Local Government, and their SES staff who had been provided with permanent tenure by the Government Sector Employment Act 2013 (something that in the local government we knew nothing about) not flowing a similar provision for senior staff in local government when the SES had been a model for that arrangement in 1993.

OLG’s historic defence of their standard contract and assertion in a variety of investigations, including Operation Dasha, supporting “the “termination without reasons clause... in the event that there was a breakdown in the relationship between the Councillors and the general manager”

And in taunting local government that if they ever delivered a consensus view between the employers and the unions, they would deliver that through the Minister, and then failing to do so.

ICAC in 2002 after investigating Rockdale Council and making findings about corrupt councillor behaviour made observations about “the importance of protections for local government employees involved in the development process”, and then did nothing about it.

ICAC in July 2003, considering correspondence from depa identifying “corruptibility issues that arise from term contracts” after both Rockdale and Tweed, and doing nothing about it, and in a meeting with us in July that year having some pious wanker reject our concerns which he asserted “to some extent that’s the obligation of public service”.

The ICAC 2016 report in Operation Farra at Mid-Western Council observed “the ‘no reason’ provisions in the standard contract, however, could create an uncertain employment environment for a general manager. The Commission’s concern is that such uncertainty could be used to improperly influence the action of a general manager” and, then did nothing about it.

And in Operation Dasha ignoring the submission depa had made about problems with planning and the employment relationships of senior staff, with recommendations for change, that included repealing section 340. We should have been called to give evidence.

We were not able to reach agreement between the unions and LGNSW on transitional arrangements for senior staff similar to the employment protections in section 354D of the Local Government Act continuing senior staff on “the same terms and conditions that applied to the staff member immediately before the transfer day.” This had been the unions’ collective position for a number of months until abandoned in a meeting depa could not attend on 19 March, when an agreement was made by everyone else for what is in the current arrangements.

And obviously I regret spending an hour and a half at the dentist that day and being unable to argue against that happening, and forgetting the first rule of politics - “be there”.

How it could happen that this legislation was carried without dissent, with the support of the Liberal/Coalition Opposition and all Independents, who for most of those years opposed doing anything about this, but who nevertheless subsequently found an interest in doing something about unfair employment practices for senior staff and thought they should trumpet as if it were a revelation, and their idea.

Nevertheless, we record our appreciation and acknowledgement of three people and their critical role in moving LGNSW towards this position in 2021 - President Linda Scott, CEO Scott Phillips and Director Workforce and Legal, Adam Dansie, notwithstanding his awful advice given to Campbelltown to unfairly legitimise disadvantage against a group of employees, predominantly our members.

The LGEA has participated in support over this time, and the USU which, while they were late to the party, they brought a connection to Government, without which this would not have happened. And the new CEO of OLG, doing his best to get over the abject failures and connivance of the past.

Useful Links

Picture Gallery

depa Golf day 2015