Wednesday, 22 March 2023

Local government accountability

Evan MULHOLLAND (Northern Metropolitan) (17:33): (128) In this adjournment I am seeking the action of the Minister for Local Government regarding the decommissioning of the council accountability website Know Your Council. Knowyourcouncil.vic.gov.au was launched in 2015 by the Andrews Labor government with a supposedly strong commitment to improving openness and accountability across Victorian councils, yet seven years later we have seen the same government quietly axe this particularly important avenue of public accountability. Dean Hurlston, vice-president of Ratepayers Victoria, highlighted the importance of having a website like Know Your Council, as it provided Victorians with an apples-versus-apples comparison of 79 LGAs on essential services such as waste management, animal management, maternal and child health and – perhaps the biggest cause of frustration to residents – their council rates. The Department of Jobs, Skills, Industry and Regions has come up with a very interesting way to replace this information and navigate without this website. They have decided to publish a complicated web of Excel spreadsheets that presents us with no less than 24,000 rows of data to sift through.

What a way of visualising that. Chief executive of Transparency International Australia Clancy Moore likened being able to find any piece of information in this MCG-sized Excel sheet to finding a needle in a haystack. Funny that – it is almost like the government does not want you to know these things about your local councils. Whilst the department website says a transition to a new site with improved navigation and functionality is underway, this website was shut down back in December and we are yet to hear from the minister any further updates.

This is happening at a time when local councils are in the headlines for all the wrong reasons, with repeated failures to carry out their basic duty. I am glad another member for Northern Metropolitan is in the chamber, because he will know about Merri-bek not collecting their rubbish on time and he will know about Yarra City Council’s move to bypass residents and community consultation and ram through a bin tax which was opposed by local residents. We want residents to have more accountability from their local government and to be able to see how their local government compares with other local governments. I call on Minister Horne to provide us with an update on how and when the Know Your Council website will be replaced with a much more open and easily accessible alternative, and I ask her to take action to ensure this is achieved with great urgency.