Introduction

Introduction MAY 2015

Launceston City Council expends $99 million of public monies each year yet:

•  It appears to use no professional practices to assure probity;
•  Nor does it engage in open consultation processes with its constituency; and
• Nor does it appear to adhere to the Organisational Values Council espouses. 

Moreover,  Council does not appear to have a commitment to protecting its operations, and its constituency, from  the kinds of practices and opacity that tend to lead to untoward outcomes.

Consistently, ratepayers are faced with vague budgets that provide insufficient detail to enable realistic performance reviews, regionally focused cost centres that are allowed to grow exponentially and unsustainably, few articulated objectives or benchmarks, and repeated evasiveness regarding questions from ratepayers.

The net effect is to present an appearance of questionable governance and unprofessional management that surely has no place in Tasmania's largest local Council, particularly given the growing fiscal pressures on the community. 

This is particularly galling when such operations seem to be open to questionable practices. When a musingplace operating under aegis of Local Government becomes caught up in the kind of unaccountability put forward here.