October 28, 2019
Here is the submission Stephen Mayne has made opposing the City of Melbourne proposal to return to the pre-2013 default position of making tender decisions in council sessions which are closed to the public. You too can make a submission by going to this page and submitting it before 10am on Tuesday.
6.6 Publishing Tender Recommendations (to be decided at October 29 council meeting)
This proposal
from management would represent the biggest backward step on council
transparency over the past 3 years.
And where was the consultation with interested stakeholders?
As the former chair of the Finance and Government Committee who
pushed for the switch from confidential to public in terms of the default
position on tenders, I'm singularly unimpressed and unconvinced about this
proposal.
Where was the email, meeting or phone call making the case on
this issue before we reach the finality of a council decision - a decision to
be made without the ability for stakeholders to present to councillors because
it is being made at a council meeting rather than a committee meeting.
If councillors are minded to proceed with this excessively
secretive proposal, which has been justified in threadbare terms in the officer
report (has there actually been a threat of litigation?), please defer this
matter to a Future Melbourne Committee meeting at least a month from now so
there is both time for consultation with stakeholders and an opportunity for
interested parties to make oral submissions to councillors setting out the case
for retaining or tweaking the current system, rather than making this
significant change.
Finally, I'd like to point out the dreadful timing of this
proposal just days after some of Australia's biggest media companies have
launched their national "Right To Know" campaign.
City of Melbourne is proudly Australia's most open and
transparent council - it shows up the Federal and State government constantly
with its excellent transparency on everything from your councillor expenses
reporting, council reports on interstate travel (see two examples on upcoming agenda), the conflicts of interest
register, a flexible and frequent public questions regime, disclosures of
individual land valuations and best practice disclosure with senior executive
pay, just to name a few.
If having a default position to make tender decisions in confidential council sessions gets up, what's next? Banning public questions? Ditching web casting?
Returning to only maintaining website registers required by law?
Over the course of this current council you have generally
supported this pro-disclosure regime and at times extended it, most notably with
the excellent move to live web cast council and committee meetings.
The only other notable backward step, apart from this proposal,
has been removing best practice granularity with related party transaction
disclosure involving councilors, although this was in accordance with the
accounting standards rather than being a conscious council decision to be more
secretive.
Please think of the optics of this move in the wider context of
council's excellent transparency reputation and the debate about increasingly
secretive practices at other levels of government.
Bureaucrats all too often oppose transparency because they want
to avoid embarrassment and scrutiny and want to maximise efficiency.
Writing most tender reports for decision in confidential sessions
of council will mean less work for officers and less complexity in
administration. And have you actually surveyed your tenderers to see if they
support this move to provide them with less transparency in your decision
making processes?
Imagine if judges came out and said we'd like to deliver all our
judgments in closed sessions of the court, with a summary of the decisions to
be released on a quarterly basis on the court's website.
There would be outrage, as there should be over this proposal to
return to the pre-2012 Doyle era at Town Hall when City of Melbourne was one of
Victoria's more secretive councils.
I look forward to listening to councillors push back on this
proposal on Tuesday night. From time to time there was quite a bit of officer
resistance to the transparency reform agenda pursued in the previous term of
council and it is disappointing to see this proposal to go confidential on
tenders has got this far.
Please don't endorse this proposal without at least having a
more comprehensive consultation and explanation program first.
Regards
Stephen Mayne
Former City of Melbourne councillor
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