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.

It's time to go Peter Part Two - depaNews December 2006

It's time to go Peter

The September Bulletin reported on the steps being taken by the employee representatives on the LGSS since July to have Chair Peter Woods stand down after almost 9 1/2 years and allow a member representative to replace him. As background we reported that Woods had agreed in 1997 to stand down in 2001 and to rotate the Chair between employee and employer representatives every four years.

An agreement with the USU in 2001 saw him reappointed with an agreement with the then General Secretary of the USU Brian Harris to stand down when Harris retired from his position. Harris retired in September but Woods remains. We should all learn a lesson from this. It’s so much better to have terms of office included in a Constitution or some other document.

Well, it's now December and Woods remains firmly and resolutely in the Chair.

Hundreds of members used the link provided in the September Bulletin to deny that Woods, consistent with the Divine Right of Kings, should remain Chair as long as he damn well liked. And a lot of people who aren't members used the link to tell us that he should go as well. We had no idea so many general managers and other interested people cared.

The Chair was very agitated at the December meeting of the LGSS Board that the report in our September Bulletin, published also on our "tin pot union website", as he put it, breached Board confidentiality, so it is with some trepidation that we continue to report things we think that members of the LGSS have a right to know.

There is a "general flavour of disclosure"(as a lawyer once described it to us) in the Superannuation Industry Supervision (SIS) Act and it is the SIS Act, together with Corporations Law, that determines how a superannuation fund should behave. The SIS Act requires that boards are obliged to provide certain information to members of the fund but the "general flavour of disclosure" encourages openness and transparency in the stewardship and management of members’ retirement incomes.

Corporations Law regulates public corporations and establishes relatively strict levels of confidentiality - levels now being challenged by shareholder rights organisations and advocates as little more than an excuse to hide things that should ordinarily be accessible by shareholder owners. Public corporations don't have the same obligations to disclose as superannuation funds which comply with the SIS Act.

But an agitated Chair is an agitated Chair so we won't be reporting on what may have been said by individual Board members in debate and we won't be reporting on the numbers of votes cast on particular resolutions. We think people should be more accountable and if you going to say stupid things at Board meetings, you should be game enough to say them outside. Or just not say stupid things at all.

Neither will we report on how many meetings of the Board have been abandoned because the employer representatives have refused to attend, the difficulties in organising shareholder meetings to resolve this issue because LGSA shareholder representatives haven't been available, nor the plethora of things that occur that the employer representatives would like to keep quiet. Well, not yet anyway.

Clearly there are things that are superannuation boards deal with that should be confidential - tendering, business and commercial matters, personal and financial details about individual members etc - but there are many, many things that should be accessible to members as part of our accountability in managing their retirement incomes.

Confidentiality provisions should never be misused to suppress information that is legitimately the right of members. Like, for example, the proper disclosure of how The Chair can hold onto a position he should have handed over back in September and the sorts of things he and the other employee representatives say at Board meetings in defence of that unacceptable practice. Neither will we report what is said at Board meetings about what is happening in the background to make it more acceptable for The Chair to do the right thing. Well, not yet anyway.

An agreement has been reached in principle between the LGSA and the USU shareholders for a Constitution change from 31 March to require a new Chair and the introduction of a rotating two-year term. While we and the LGEA wanted a four year term for the first employee member Chair, and while the LGSA correspondence doesn't mention their acceptance that the new Chair will be a member representative, this is probably how it will all end. No bang, lots of wimpering.

So, despite this agreement, The Chair would still not acknowledge that he would stand down when he was pressed at the LGSS Board meeting on 20 December. We think we can get away with saying what didn't happen at Board meetings.

We expect Woods will be gone as Chair on 31 March and will revert to a position of Board member and that, around that time, he will also become Chair of the Futureplus Board - another of the five boards that ex-councillor Woods sits on, and is remunerated for, as part of his LGSS role.

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.

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