Thank goodness councils can be sacked. Heaven knows they need to be held accountable to a much higher degree than has been the case.

The biggest problems seem to arise where development pressure and big money are involved. Scott Prasser mentions the issue of Gold Coast City councilors accepting payments from developers without full declaration. He also mentions problems with small councils undergoing rapid growth.

The accountability of councils around the country needs to be brought into question in relation to a lack of balance in decision-making on new developments, which basically amounts to them foregoing their duty of care to current residents and blatantly favouring already rich and powerful developers.

The great problem here of course is that state governments are of the same mindset.

This is presumably why the most blatant bribe payments to GCC councilors, which amounts to the most obvious and horrible corruption of those councilors’ duty to make impartial decisions, goes virtually unpunished, while others get clobbered for much lesser things.

My council has always been well short of the mark when it comes to proper management of development sites. Government regulatory officers pick them up on it all the time, but it just continues unabated. It seems that the state government can’t reconcile its own legislation with an underlying desire to let development proceed as uninhibitedly as possible.

In the article Scott Prasser advises that "Earlier this month, new Local Government Minister Andrew Fraser sacked the Johnstone Shire Council in far north Queensland........ And to show he means business, Fraser also told the Douglas Shire to show cause why it, too, should not be sacked."

It is interesting to see the reasons given for the sacking. "First, there is no allegation of corruption, although the Johnstone Shire was having some financial difficulties. Rather, based on advice from external investigators, the grounds for dismissing the Johnstone Shire and the impending sacking of the Douglas Shire, are largely because of the councillors' inabilities to work together and with shire staff......"

Scott further contended "...... That [the minister's] decision is supported by the Opposition indicates that the minister has no covert political motivations." I submit that this may not necessarily be so. It may be that government and opposition have a common interest in the removal of these two local government bodies. That common interest may lie in the concealment of the respective State and Federal governments' arguable long-term policy deficiencies with respect to coastal development and urban waste water disposal as it has affected ocean pollution and regional climate change.

A regular contributor to this forum, KAEP, made these statements in posts:

"Cyclone Larry was largely a man made disaster based on unusual thermodynamic imbalances in the East Australan Current and Coral Sea caused by banana growers."

"The second law [of thermodynamics] states that heat energy will move to cold; ordered systems to disordered ones. In Larry's case, tropical, and, recently, earthquake heated waters around Vanuatu moved to cooler polluted waters in the East Australian Current that have been polluted by significant runoffs from the Gulf of Papua and from burgeoning banana spraying operations around Innisfail."

Intense cyclones in north Queensland, and exacerbated drought in SE Australia; both able to be connected to long-term State and Federal policies on waste water disposal and migration respectively! If KAEP is right, reason enough for getting rid of what might turn out to be 'whistleblowing' local councils? Read KAEP's posts!