Quo Vadis OLG?

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Published: Monday, 26 June 2023 12:29

What, with the Award and all, and a new Government more accessible and more philosophically aligned to unions, the Office of Local Government’s Employment Reference Group has not met for months. That doesn’t mean that the things that are important to the local government unions and the employers are not being dealt with, just that they’re not being dealt with in the frustrating, obtuse, sloth-like, dawdling manner they have been over the last almost 2 years since the industry consensus on getting rid of senior staff below the level of GM was established.

This has been an issue we’ve argued about for at least seven years when OLG told us that if we can get a consensus with the employers about what to do, then they will present it to Government. It wasn’t an encouragement, it was a cruel hoax, put to us by someone who didn’t believe a consensus was possible. So then, when we did, they dawdled.

We are not the only ones to be disappointed with the OLG and its indifference, bordering on hostility, to the historic consensus to provide fair employment for local government senior staff by putting them all back on the Award, nor their embarrassing statistics about the how long it takes conducting investigations, particularly those against councillor’s behaving badly, nor the secrecy of their processes and their refusal to be transparent, nor their preference to cover up rather than admit error, and fix it.

The NSW Audit Office on 25 May released a report on the effectiveness of OLG, finding OLG:

• does not conduct effective, proactive monitoring to enable timely risk-based responses to council performance and compliance issues,
• has not clearly defined and communicated its regulatory role to ensure that its priorities are well understood,
• does not routinely review the results of its regulatory activities to improve its approaches, and
• lacks an adequate framework to define, measure and report on the OLG’s performance, limiting transparency and its accountability.

Wow, tell us what you really think!

If you’re interested, here is the report: https://www.audit.nsw.gov.au/our-work/reports/regulation-and-monitoring-of-local-government-0