Qld council watchdog swamped, understaffed
Fraser Barton and Marty Silk |
Misconduct allegations against Queensland local government officials are being dismissed because watchdogs don’t have time to investigate them properly.
A parliamentary committee has heard the Office of the Independent Assessor is so swamped with allegations it has only had time to probe one in five complaints in the current financial year.
Independent Assessor Kathleen Florian says some allegations are referred to the Crime and Corruption Commission or referred back to local governments.
However, she says the OIA’s backlog is so large that it’s had to dismiss 63 per cent of the complaints it received in the last quarter of 2021.
“The OIA has dismissed a large number of matters where there is evidence of misconduct, but there is no public interest in proceeding, or where proceeding is not a justifiable use of resources, given the growing backlogs of notice,” Ms Florian told the committee on Wednesday.
The backlog has been growing since a raft of legal changes in 2018, with a lack of resources and short-staffing also having an impact.
Councillors have faced strict integrity rules since the 2018 changes, which included a new code of conduct for local government members and a new definition of misconduct.
The laws created new criminal offences, mandated reporting requirements for councillors and procedural fairness requirements
Staff at Councillor Conduct Tribunal, which deals with OIA cases after they’re investigated, have also had to be trained to understand the laws.
CCT president June Anstee said cases involving the new conflict-of-interest provisions of the laws have surged since 2018.
“These sorts of matters of conflict of interests weren’t really being investigated, they weren’t really on the radar of counsellors,” she told a committee hearing on Wednesday.
“They weren’t really on the radar of anybody, it was just a community change in values in relation to ethics and integrity.”
Ms Anstee said given how long it took to bed in the changes at the CCT, the OIA was still investigating misconduct allegations from 2020.
“We haven’t even reached the misconduct matters for 2021 due to the backlog,” she added.
“Because you will only be seeing decisions under this new act for 18 months from the tribunal, so that’s 2019 up to June 2020. We haven’t had time to do the rest.
“So we’re basing this on a period of 18 months, really, because of our difficulties in processing those matters.”
The CCT president said the average time taken to decide “simple cases” was about 200 hours involving three-member tribunals.
More complicated cases could take up to 300 hours, with the weight of work on the chair of each panel due to the requirement to write the full reasons for each decision.
AAP
