There is a particular kind of political incompetence that doesn’t just fail to solve a problem. It makes the problem worse, rewards the people responsible, and then punishes everyone else for the resulting mess.
NSW Local Government Minister Ron Hoenig appears to be an expert.
For most of his time in the portfolio, Hoenig has been obsessed with reforming the local government code of conduct. Not, it would seem, to improve governance, but to improve the appearance of control.
Among his more bizarre reforms was insisting that councillors stand when the mayor enters the room, and while speaking during meetings. Because apparently what local government really needs is more medieval pageantry, with a side helping of ableism, rather than the ability to get on with the business of running communities.
Then there were the restrictions on attending meetings by audiovisual link. In a post-Covid world where remote meetings are routine, Hoenig decided that councillors should be physically present, regardless of whether they had children to care for, jobs to attend, or had a contagious disease.
It was particularly punitive for regional councillors, some of whom have to travel hundreds of kilometres for meetings, and thankfully didn’t last long.
His initial reforms were so problematic and unworkable that the NSW Upper House disallowed them.
Councils were then left navigating the confusion of reverting to previous arrangements before yet another set of regulations arrived.
And what has all this achieved?
More confusion, more disorder and less certainty about how councils are supposed to run their affairs.
At the same time, regional councils are under enormous pressure. They are dealing with increasingly complex responsibilities, rising costs, infrastructure backlogs and insufficient funding to do what communities expect them to do. It is not uncommon for councils to have one or two (or more) people at the table who really do not understand what is going on and what their job is.
Throw in the increasingly aggressive, MAGA-style politics infecting Australian public life, and the social media-fuelled tendency towards treating defiance as some kind of virtue, and it is a recipe for disaster.
We are now watching the consequences unfold across NSW.
More than a dozen councils are struggling with the behaviour of individual councillors and the lack of effective mechanisms to deal with them.
They ask for help.
And what has Hoenig delivered?
Threats of administration.
Clarence Valley Council has already been suspended, in an extraordinarily rapid intervention following a bizarre bungled mayoral election. While the exact events are murky, the council had sorted it and held another election, but the sore loser apparently threatened legal action.
Rather than dealing effectively with the individual, Hoenig took the coward’s way out and suspended the entire council. Notably, Clarence Valley was not really given the opportunity to respond to the notice – they were meeting to discuss the submission when the announcement of suspension was already written – which points to some serious governance issues within Hoenig’s office and the Office of Local Government.
Now he is threatening to do the same to Moree Plains Shire Council, an arbitrary, baffling move to suspend an entire council for no good reason.
But in this case, instead of acting too quickly to an unexpected event, he’s failed to act for nearly two years to deal with a known problem, confirmed by multiple independent investigations, censures, referrals and mountains of documentation, and is instead acting unilaterally to punish an entire community.
And in doing so, Ron Hoenig has effectively handed every disgruntled councillor in NSW a guidebook on how to destroy their council.
Lose the mayoral vote? Throw a tantrum. Don’t like a decision? Refuse to accept it. Want to break the entire council so nothing happens at all? Disrupt meetings, refuse to leave when expelled, swear, make threats, escalate the confrontation until someone calls the police, and wait for Ron Hoenig, your sore-loser-in-chief, to show up and reward your behaviour.
They can do whatever they like, safe in the knowledge that Hoenig won’t remove the problem, he’ll remove the entire council.
It is an incredibly dangerous precedent.
The fundamental problem is that the system has no effective way of removing a councillor who is determined to make the institution unworkable.
That is what Hoenig should have been fixing.
The code of conduct desperately needs reform, but not the ridiculous ceremonial nonsense that has consumed so much of the minister’s attention. It needs clear, enforceable standards, effective and efficient processes, and meaningful consequences for councillors who persistently undermine the functioning of their councils. Both process and training needs to be simplified so the person who probably really doesn’t have the intellect to be on council – and there’s one or two on every council – don’t feel stupid or left out.
And they need to introduce recall elections.
A recall election is where you vote to remove someone from office. It happens elsewhere in the world, and the idea was considered in NSW in 2011, but Australia generally has no mechanism of allowing local voters to remove an elected politician between elections.
It is a hard thing to implement because no one wants to put in place a mechanism that could be used to sack them. But the State Government could implement it for Local Governments pretty easily. After all, it won’t affect them.
A recall election would be expensive, but much cheaper than dealing with long running and serious disorder. A local council by-election costs around $250,000 on average, depending on the size and circumstances of the council, and a recall election would be similar. According to one insider, the persistent disorder a single councillor at Moree Plains has already cost ratepayers close to a million dollars.
But even if a recall election is never held, the deterrent effect alone could be enormously valuable. Knowing that voters could remove you before your term expires would give councillors a powerful reason to behave themselves. At the moment, they know they are untouchable. Elected councillors literally cannot be sacked, only suspended for a couple of months after many more months of expensive investigations and reports.
More importantly, it would put the decision where it belongs: in the hands of the voters.
Instead, Hoenig’s preferred solution appears to be collective punishment and democratic destruction.
Administration doesn’t just remove the councillors who might be causing trouble. It removes every elected representative, including those who have done absolutely nothing wrong.
It also locks voters out of their own local government. There’s plenty of ill-informed loudmouths on the socials right now saying stuff like “Good! Maybe then they’ll listen to the community!”
Nuh. In administration, no local view is taken into consideration. There is no community voice. You have no rights. You have no say. You get nothing. It’s like you local community being put under military law without the guns.
There are circumstances where administration is justified and appropriate. A council whose financial systems have collapsed, whose records cannot be trusted or whose governance has genuinely failed – usually because of a failure of staff, not of elected council – may need an experienced administrator to restore order. It is a good thing to spare councillors from making hard and ugly decisions, likely well beyond their skill set, to right the ship.
But that is a world away from suspending an otherwise functioning council and bringing in an administrator because one councillor is being difficult.
Hoenig may not appreciate just how dangerous a political game he is playing. Minns should.
Moree Plains is home to some of the largest and most sophisticated agricultural enterprises in Australia. Some of these farming operations are bigger than companies listed on the stock exchange.
These are serious people running serious businesses. They need their local council to function, their roads built and their infrastructure maintained. They do not have time for political theatre.
They will not appreciate the money wasted dealing with one recalcitrant councillor. And they certainly will not appreciate being told that the solution is to take away their elected representatives.
So far, the serious agricultural interests around Moree have largely kept their powder dry. They’re generally too busy to be bothered with small matters, and probably would have been unaware of the issues before this week.
But when they start clearing their throats, things tend to move quickly.
The NSW Coalition has so far been a spectacular disappointment as an opposition. The Nationals in particular have appeared lacklustre, leaderless, uninformed and utterly unprepared to govern.
Even the extraordinary blunder of promising to axe the New England Renewable Energy Zone has failed to generate the political reaction one might have expected, with most dismissing it as a dumb and ill-thought-out stunt from a party that had already accepted defeat.
But nothing focuses the mind of a political party quite like a group of very wealthy, very influential and very angry people deciding that a change of government is absolutely essential.
If the major agricultural interests around Moree Plains decide that the Minns Government is a threat to their communities and their businesses, the Coalition – both Liberals and Nationals – could suddenly have a swell in its ranks, renewed purpose in its step and some very substantial support behind it.
And guys who report annual profits in millions don’t make political donations in tens and twenties.
Nor will it necessarily stop at Moree. As the chaos spreads to other councils, so will the reaction from other serious interests that do not have time for such nonsense.
You can already see the wider problem in comments on stories about Moree Plains Shire Council. People are asking why their own councils aren’t facing administration. What about Tamworth, Glen Innes, Walcha, Lismore, Tweed, Kempsey, Lithgow, Orange? And how the hell does Snowy Monaro escape if one badly behaving councillor is enough to bring down an entire council?
The mayors of councils right across the state that have had to discipline a councillor or had a hard debate over a controversial issue will be nervous. The disorder will be emboldened. Hoenig has effectively made dysfunction a pathway to victory, with potentially disastrous consequences for local government across NSW.
There are less than five months until the NSW election in March. Plenty of time for this disaster to spread faster than a bushfire in drought.
Most voters barely know which local government area they live in, let alone who their councillors are. But they notice when things stop working. They notice when councils are sacked, services deteriorate and democratic rights are taken away.
Which is why Anthony Albanese should be worried too.
There is a familiar political polling question: is the country heading in the right direction, or is it on the wrong track? It’s one of the most reliable indicators of electoral outcome. And local council ceasing to function? That’s absolutely the wrong track.
With the next federal election not long after the NSW election, the political consequences of failing to get local government back to order will not stop at the state border. NSW accounts for almost a third of the seats in the federal House of Representatives, and as goes NSW, so goes the nation. But even beyond the hard maths of electoral reality, that general feeling of chaos, of unease, of everything being wrong, is contagious.
So Hoenig will not only lose the state election, he could potentially lose the federal election for Labor too.
Chris Minns has a very narrow window to stop this madness. Because it will not take long for sore losers in councils across the state to figure out that all they need to do to stop local government in its tracks is behave so badly the cops get called. Job done.
He need to step in, withdraw the threat of administration and direct OLG to suspend the councillor as they should have done months ago, sack Ron Hoenig, and put somebody competent into this incredibly important portfolio.
Then he should get on with the serious business of reforming the code of conduct, creating effective mechanisms for dealing with councillor misconduct and protecting local democracy from those determined to undermine it.
Ron Hoenig failed to deal with one councillor, and now expects all of Moree Plains to pay the price.
If Chris Minns now fails to deal with Ron Hoenig, he – and all of his colleagues – will pay the price come March.
End rant.
Dr RK (Kath) Crosby is the CEO of research and strategy company KORE CSR, former strategist for the Australian Democrats, and holds a PhD in political behaviour. She is also a well known migraine and health advocate, and the Publisher of New England Times and North Coast Times.
All opinion and comment on New England Times Engage is the opinion of the writer and not New England Times.
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