A recent open letter to the Prime Minister by Glen Innes Severn Mayor Margot Davis was incorrectly interpreted by some as being about mental health rather than money.
Of course, the letter was framed by a recent Mayoral Minute on psychosocial risk, with the toxicity and misinformation in Glen Innes passing the point of causing real harm long ago. And it does talk about the harm done to the community by the SRV process. But the core ask of the open letter was a restoration in Federal Assistance Grant funding.
There is in unquenchable link between politics, money, and mental health.
Particularly here in the New England, where the National Party and it’s socially warping tentacles of power often have real consequences on businesses and livelihoods should you dare question one of their chosen sons.
Trust me, I know.
The extent of sulking because we dare to write actual news and hold people to account is astronomical. Unsurprisingly, Brendan Moylan’s mates are still sulking more than a year on from that editiorial and on occasion sending another complaint to the Australian Press Council for them to reject. And both Moylan and Kevin Anderson have from time to time stopped sending us press releases because we dared to question the veracity of some of their claims rather than just copying and pasting nonsense like most other outlets.
We have no problem with Barnaby or his people though, so maybe its a skill issue rather than a Nationals issue. But it is, none-the-less, an issue. We have had advertisers tell us that they were cancelling their advertising because of political pressure from elected people who don’t like our coverage.
Small people that don’t want the people of New England to know what’s going on, so they bully the only paywall free news outlet that does investigative reporting to try and get us to shut up.
Clearly, they haven’t met me.
Surprisingly, it is from local councillors – and more shockingly, council staff – that the really inappropriate tantrums over news coverage emanates.
New England Times has now been around for over two years, and while we have gained the respect of our audience – and we have around 50,000 readers every month, making us second only to the Northern Daily Leader – we have struggled to attract the same kind of respect from councils across the region.
Not because of any particular coverage, but from the very beginning.
As well as generally poor cooperation and support from most – but not all – of the 12 LGA’s we cover, we have, at times, been subjected to a concerning level of hostility from elected councillors and council staff. The level of hostility, and in some cases outright abuse, New England Times has been subjected to has reached the level where we have recently been advised that we should cease to cover local councils entirely in order to reduce the risk of psychosocial harm to our staff.
I wrote to all 12 councils this week to let them know that coverage of any local council matters will be significantly restricted for the time being. We will do our best to ensure important information is still communicated, while we try and cut the contact between our journalists and both elected councillors and council staff to minimal levels as we work the problem.
While the fourth estate absolutely should be subjected to and expect a fair level of criticism, just as anyone in the political realm should, it is the personal nature of this hostility, extending well beyond our core journalists, that causes the unacceptable level of risk, and has left us in this astonishing position.
Setting aside the fairly routine death and rape threats I personally get – and have for decades over my various media roles, this ain’t new for any woman in media – there’s been a couple of clanger moments when the shockingly inappropriate behaviour is on display for all to see.
Exhibit A, that a lot of people saw, was a member of Armidale Regional Council staff posting in the Council account (in response to use needing to post that we were not getting any information about the closure of Armidale Airport) an admission that they do not send us press releases or answer our queries because they don’t like us, with a pretty clear ‘you don’t do journalism the way we want you to’ vomit of smugness. Like there’s some exception to Council’s media policy that says you can just ignore a media outlet if you feel like it.
We were contacted by two elected members of Council after this ugly event who apologised and asked us to go directly to them if we were not getting press releases or answers, but we got no apology from Council – nor answers to outstanding questions such as who the acting GM was and for updates on the airport closure. Whether we get releases is still a bit variable – we’ve had one in 3 weeks.
Of course, Council claims they’ve only put out one release in 3 weeks. Which indicates a bigger problem… Armidale Regional Council thinking the toxic cesspit that is Facebook is a more important channel than media, and that they don’t need to communicate things like flouride being added back to the water, the consultation on the destination management plan or the draft reconciliation action plan going on public exhibition, or anything that happened in the May 28 Council meeting, to anyone not checking the blue feed of hate several times a day.
To answer the next obvious question, yes, ARC does have a media policy. No, they don’t pay any attention to it. And because of the bind we currently find ourselves in, largely triggered by the actions of an elected councillor elsewhere, we literally can’t report on these things – we need Council to send us a press release so we don’t lose our insurance or make situations hundreds of kilometres away worse.
To be fair, the lack of professionalism of council communication staff – and other political staffers – we frequently encounter is, in most cases, lack of skill, rather than lack of will. Armidale aside, the issues we have with getting information from smaller councils is often because the communications team is a well meaning 22 year old part time administration staff member who has been lobbed the comms workload by a general manager that doesn’t understand how critically important it is, and that it is a specialised, skilled profession that requires training and experience.
And it should be a team of people – not one person – for each and every council in the region. A council the size of Armidale should have at least five people in their comms team, including one dedicated to media relations, one for social media, one dedicated to website content, and one one newsletters and other ratepayer communication, complete with an on call roster and a variety of skill sets to deliver effective communications across all channels. For Glen Innes or Uralla size councils, two or three dedicated staff with good broad skill sets may suffice, if you have up-skilled other staff who can be seconded to assist in times of emergency or crisis response when 24/7 efforts may be required.
There are of course stellar exceptions – Tamworth Regional Council’s excellent communication team do a great job, and have copped some direct abuse from an elected councillor who didn’t get it – Mark Rodda was rightly censured for that. Gunnedah too takes communication seriously, and has the privilege of one of the region’s best journos, Marie Low, on their very solid team.
But most of the people we deal with literally don’t know how to put together a decent press release, what things require a press release, what kind of timelines are needed to put together a story, or the appropriate way to respond to a media inquiry. We tried reaching out to the Minister for Local Government, Ron Hoenig, to get help with this – perhaps some OLG support to run workshops or training given it is a serious issue in half of the councils we cover – and were basically told that’s a council problem and they don’t care.
And so it comes back to money. It costs money to hire good comms people. It costs money to run training and workshops.
And in the absence of money to effectively communicate what councils are doing, the toxicity of skepticism and rhetoric of hate fills the void. Locals turn on each other. And the mental health of our communities pays the price.
So I’m joining Mayor Davis’ call for the Federal Assistance Grants to be reinstated to 1% – which isn’t a new thing, Jamie Chaffey led the call for it when he was still Mayor of Gunnedah – and for both federal and state governments to stop pushing costs on to local government.
But I’m going to add that there should be specific grants to support councils to communicate effectively. Both federal and state levels know too well that the communication landscape has become more complex and put more money into communications both in government departments and electoral staff to deal with it, they should know local government needs to do the same.
(Public interest journalism grants to keep them honest would be really great, thanks, journos cost money too.)
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