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No surprise either in his calling it a 'wake-up call' for local government.
The CCC found that "of 13 investigations into allegations of serious misconduct in local governments last year, eight showed serious flaws in how councils supervised the purchase of goods and services". That's eight for 130 councils and however many purchasing decisions.
Simpson is quite right when he says that "the community has a reasonable expectation that government at all levels be open and accountable and local government is no exception". I don't know of anyone in local government who would object to that.
Perhaps, though, we should be asking Simpson where the openness and accountability were in his local government so-called reform process, when he consistently failed to provide a business case to support it and continually changed tack to evade challenges.
Let he who is without sin cast the first stone, Minister.
Allowing the Auditor General to scrutinise local governments in the same way as he is able to do for state agencies is probably a sensible way to go. As the author of the CCC report observed in his recommendation, this is consistent with the recommendation of the (Parliamentary) Public Accounts Committee in 2006 and one is forced to ask why successive governments and ministers have failed to act on this recommendation.
Let he who is without sin cast the first stone, Minister.
However, recent experience with State Government agencies shows that this is in no way a panacea.
Perhaps we should also be asking Simpson's Ministerial colleague, the Minister for Health, where the openness and accountability were in the recent Healthway scandal.
And the Minister for Health also needs to tell us where the openness and accountability were in respect of Health Department procurement that drew a similar adverse finding from the Crime and Corruption Commission.
The CCC's second recommendation could be taken to be a not-very-veiled criticism of the Local Government Department and, by inference, this Minister and previous ministers. The recommendation reads: "that the Department of Local Government and Communities actively oversights risk management reviews prepared by local governments pursuant to the Local Government (Audit) Regulations 1996 to ensure that they include appropriate assessment of misconduct risks arising from procurement, and mechanisms for reducing those risks".
This clearly raises the question of why the Department hasn't been doing this and whether the Minister should have made sure that it did do so.
Let he who is without sin cast the first stone, Minister.
Well well...they are catching on I think. “Wake-up call”...must be another word for Reform.
ReplyDeleteCouncil Reform and Council Amalgamation has been used interchangeably throughout this whole dismal process with little or no regard to the difference. Amalgamation is the result of combining or uniting something whereas Reform is the improvement or amendment of what is wrong, corrupt, unsatisfactory, and so on and no ‘Amalgamation’ is going to fix that. Or was Col/Homer hoping to drown the need for Reform using Amalgamations as the vehicle?
I'm surprised that ensuring councils will be publicly audited annually, henceforth, was not a part of "reform". Perhaps that would have put the councils backs up?
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