July depaNews - Special Transmission Issue

Faster than a speeding bullet…

 

More powerful than a locomotive…

 

Able to leap tall building in a single bound…

 

Look, up in the sky…

Last issue we had some real problems with distribution. Some members got it and some didn’t.

There are fundamental problems when an organisation wants to broadcast over the Internet. Even though we only send 1300 or so individual depaNews, systems are alert to mass distribution, which they invariably regard as spam, and then step in and stop it being delivered. Our IT people tell us that around 85% of email transmissions are spam - so we get it.

To get around it, organisations like ours would send depaNews out at around 120 each hour which would mean that if your name is Aardvark, you would get it much quicker than Zorro. Zorro would get it eight or nine hours later and that’s not good enough for an organisation that, when we have something to say, we want you all to know immediately. Sometimes we also get pretty excited when we think we’ve got a good story, are some good pictures, and we want it out there instantly.

So this issue has gone out under a whole lot of new arrangements which, if it all goes well, means that everyone will get it within an hour. So Zorro will get it just as fast as Aardvark. But while the new system will allow a broadcast like this, we need to have multiple servers to allow this to happen and the more complicated something is, there are more things that can go wrong.

Sometimes a new technology does require a little bit of patience and while we hope it’s not necessary with this issue, we are hoping for the best. 

North Sydney presented with depa Cup

The Council might not have turned on lunch, or even morning tea (like councils have for previous victors) but the Mayor of North Sydney Councillor Julie Gibson last week presented the 2013 depa Cup to the North Sydney team which won the depa cup on Union Picnic Day Golf Day on Friday 8 March.

The only team member not present was Alex Williams on holidays in Cuba.

Pictured above left to right, are Brett Maina, Warwick Wynn, Mayor Julie Gibson and Joseph Hill outside North Sydney’s office in Miller Street.

The depa golf day will be held again at Blackheath on Friday 14 March.

Looks like an early favourite for our Worst HR Award

There is never a shortage of poor HR decisions in local government. It’s amazing the number of miscreants, sociopaths, people-haters and venal simpletons who find their way into HR and management councils. Every year there is always a handful of councils that contest our prestigious Worst HR in Local Government Award, traditionally announced in our December issue.

And while things might happen during the year which give a clear indication that one Council may simply edge out the rest, is unusual to have a hot favourite emerge only halfway through the year.

How about this Council (which will remain nameless until the bookies properly set the odds) as an early favourite:

• Fought the LGEA by contesting their claim that 18 engineers should get the Civil Liability Allowance and when the Commission looked at it, the 18 got it! And they spent more than $50,000 in legal costs to fight it.
• A Director of Corporate Services with anger management issues who shouted at representatives of the unions at a Consultative Committee meeting telling them that they knew nothing about industrial relations, he was the only expert because he’d done it for five years (when there were delegates there who had done it for decades) and when his boorish and boof-headed behaviour found the Council in the Commission and he was caught out, “apologized” in a smug and self-important email that satisfied no-one and, of course, wasn’t game to turn up in the Commission himself anyway.
• As part of a restructure made a couple of USU members redundant and then tried to cheat them out of their 1 July Award pay increase. Unsuccessfully, of course.
• One of the only councils in NSW to not have a policy regulating contact between councillors and staff when implicit in the Code of Conduct is that Councillor contact should only happen consistent with the policy. Maybe the only Council. Does any other Council not have a policy?
• Suspend two employees, have an “independent” investigation conducted which, when it didn’t provide the result they wanted, referred it to a barrister for review to try to unpick it to set it aside. Their independent investigation with their investigator, should be enough.

And that’s just for starters. More next month.