In the interests of all?

 

Laws and regulations as well as principles of integrity and transparency require that councillors who have a personal interest in a matter under consideration by council declare that interest, usually recusing themselves from debate, influence and voting on such matters.

For all our sakes that is as it should be and we congratulate councillors for respecting this requirement though the course of 2022.

Such personal interests may take a number of forms and are not limited to pecuniary interests. There is nothing extraordinary or improper about councillors, from time to time, having a personal interest connected with matters that come before council.  After all they too are residents in our shire - or at least most of them are.

However the extent to which councillors’ have personal interest in matters that come before council may become a matter of legitimate concern for the community.

The publicly available minutes of council’s 24 meetings in 2022 reveal a total of 29 individual declarations of interest, 12 of those being declared as pecuniary interests.

Five councillors had no occasion to declare an interest during 2022.  Councillors Brazier, Burton, Hodges and Kasby declared an interest on one occasion each.  Councillor de Masi recorded two and Councillor Jethi declared five.

Second on the list was Councillor Blue who declared an interest on 8 occasions, two of those being pecuniary interests.

Topping the list was Mayor Gangemi, declaring an interest on ten occasions, with six of those declared as pecuniary interests.

To put this in context:

• Council considered 321 agenda items across 24 ordinary & extraordinary meetings.

• Of those, 21 items were confirmation of the minutes of the preceding meeting.

• Of the rest, 178 items were moved and adopted “en masse” (without debate or consideration) via a procedure referred to as a “call of the agenda”.  (These are typically routine and/or uncontroversial items such as roads and traffic recommendations.)

That leaves a total of 122 items that were individually considered, sometimes debated, and voted upon.  Far from all of those were particularly significant or subject to particular controversy, but let’s run with that number.

Of those, the mayor declared an interest in ten items - or 8.2% of “significant” matters considered by council.

In fact the mayor accounted for more than a third of all declarations of interest.  While 11 of the 13 council members clocked up a total of 11 declarations of interest between them, Mayor Gangemi and Councillor Blue together accounted for 18.

We are glad that the mayor and councillors have been punctilious in declaring their interests where necessary.  However we feel that the community may be concerned to learn that their mayor declared an interest in about 1 in 12 “significant” matters considered by council.

We are not suggesting any impropriety or illegality.  We simply raise the possibility that, given the apparent extent of the mayor’s pecuniary and non-pecuniary interests, the community might consider themselves not best served with him as mayor, especially as a “full-time” mayor who, we understand, works out of council offices on a day-to-day basis.