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Dear Mr. Limkin, [Director Local Govt. Tas].
RE: Compliance with Tasmania's Local Govt. Act
Thank you for your correspondence yesterday. Together with your previous advice to me, increasingly the evidence is that the Tasmanian Local Govt. Act 1993 provides, and increasingly so, less and less protection for ratepayers and citizens as time passes.
Given your advice here that essentially ‘expert advice’ need not be backed by appropriate qualifications and experience given the Act’s silence/silences this is a wondrous proposition. I submit that it is a ‘creature’ of its own making that ought not be allowed to either exist or persist.
Here it appears that ‘the Act’ intended to provide ratepayers and citizen’s with the security of a ‘professional guarantee’ based upon appropriate professional qualifications and experience. Given your advice, that can only be an empty provision. Given your advice, ‘the Act’ is rendered meaningless consequent to ‘the Act’s’ silence/silences. It appears to me that a General Manager can deem her/his advice to be ‘expert’ on her/his own cognisance and apparently it is absolutely, or functionally, unchallengeable. This takes ratepayers and citizens into perilous territory.
By comparison, if a General Manager was to offer ‘professional advice’ – either personally or via a consultant – to Council in regard to say epidemiology relative to COVID-19 management, given your advice, it seems that ‘expertise’ can be based on any expertise a General Manager deems relevant – informal, professional, non-medical, whatever. Is that actually the case? Is that actually your advice to me? Is that in the end a credible proposition?
Perhaps if a private citizen had unfettered access to extraordinary resources it might be the case that advice, flawed advice, advice that could be demonstrated to be flawed could possibly consider a challenge. In any event claims of level playing fields appear somewhat hollow.
Your advice previously that in order to initiate a claim of discrimination in Local Government one needs to go well beyond the ‘work place’ thus rendering one’s, a perpetrator’s, accountability functionally discretionary. In recent times we have seen such propositions relative to discrimination and harassment in other jurisdictions being contested and sometimes leading to compensation. In Local Govt. a litigant is in essence suing themselves and the expense of it escalates with every step.
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Therefore it seems that the law is indeed an ass as Dickens told us when in the eye of the law; when the law supposes that a wife acts under her husband’s direction … IF the law can suppose that, the law is indeed an ass … indeed, idiotic. Likewise, the ‘fiscal bar’ can be levitated, or floated, to whatever level –higher or lower – required to protect management’s interests for whatever reason. Typically, it seems, facilitated by SECTION 62/2 of ‘the Act’.
Managers in the bureaucratic paradigm of Tasmania’s local governance bitterly resent the challenges ‘the citizenry’ might bring to their paradigm – their turf, their fiefdom. To them ‘outsider thinking’ is a personal affront and especially so when it is ‘informed and evidence based’.
To challenge the protectors of the ‘bureaucratic world view’ is a challenge to those who have made themselves ‘masters’ beyond their actual authority, often beyond their expertise and many times beyond their qualifications. Typically, they manage to penetrate even glass ceilings with extraordinary ease. They become entities that are no longer public ‘servants’ as they expect, rather demand, obedience and compliance – and concerningly they are authorised penalise non-compliance.
These unelected, unrepresentative ‘masters’ flaunt and exploit the folly of ‘representational democracy’ in its 21st C reality. They have come to accept into their houses only knowledge that is translated into their terms: within their belief systems; to fit their ideologies; to match their knowledge bases. This should not be accepted, for constituencies, communities living out cultural realities, know that to accept that rationality, and its subjectivity, it will betray all that they have struggled to put into words and build a cultural landscape that over time will generate new worlds – new realities, new opportunities.
My complaint on this occasion was evidence based, and that was provided. Most importantly my intention was in parallel to garner a better understanding of the status quo in Tasmania’s local governance. These days, every time I use that term, Ronald Regan comes to mind albeit that I do not share, never have shared, his ‘world view’. I rarely think of him, and almost never kindly, but he did give us one truism … “status quo is quite simply Latin for the mess we are in”. In this, I find myself in furious agreement.
I dare say that there will be other occasions upon which I will seek your advice. However, please know, that your illumination of ‘the Act’s silences’ and its trickledown effect has led to a much better understanding.
Yours sincerely,
Ray Norman
Ray Norman
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