Tag: community deserves answers

Creative Accounting or Community Gaslighting?

This post is the part of a Follow the Money  series shining a light on Kiama Council’s ongoing failure to even interpret its own spreadsheets.

I’ve been digging into Kiama Council’s legal expenses and what I’ve found is confusing, frustrating, and frankly concerning.

Here are the comparisons that matter:

Council Population (approx.) 2023/24 Legal Costs Spend Per Resident
Kiama 23,400 $3,369,000 $144
Port Macquarie–Hastings 50,560 $250,000 $5
Shellharbour 76,200 $858,000 $11

Kiama, with the smallest population, spent by far the most on legal bills. At $144 per person, Kiama’s costs tower over Shellharbour ($11) and Port Macquarie–Hastings ($5).

A pattern of costly errors

This blowout is not an isolated issue. Council’s financial reporting on major risk areas keeps needing “fixes” after the fact:

If developer levies can be overcharged, and legal costs can be double-counted, what confidence can the public have in any top-line figure?

Meanwhile, “Other Legal Expenses” jumped from $204,000 in 2020/21 to $3.3 million in 2023/24 — a sixteen-fold increase in three years. In the same period, total legal expenses rose from $416,000 to $3.37 million.

Where Council points… and where the money actually goes

Council is very happy to outline where Land & Environment Court (LEC) costs are spent — case lists, updates, outcomes — and it is true that LEC matters account for around 53% of legal costs (excluding the Daoud Federal Court case).

But here’s the catch:

  • Probity/General legal advice soaks up another 37%.

  • When I asked for a breakdown of these “other” costs, the Public Officer refused to provide it.

This is the deflection at play.  Council points to the unavoidable LEC cases, but goes silent on the categories where the blowouts are happening.

Are LEC costs really unavoidable?

Council insists LEC costs are unavoidable. But the record shows many cases should never have reached court at all.

  • Yes, developers have a legal right to appeal to the LEC.

  • But how Council manages those appeals is absolutely within its control. If cases are lost because Council misapplied its own LEP or DCP, or if politically motivated decisions collapse under scrutiny, those costs are self-inflicted.

  • Time and again, matters defended at great expense have been lost or forced into costly conciliation — suggesting they should never have been taken to court.

LEC costs are not automatically unavoidable. Too often, they are the price we pay for poor governance.

Code of Conduct costs

On top of this, $69,080 was spent on Code of Conduct complaints in the past reporting year, even though:

  • 10 complaints were lodged,

  • only 2 reached investigation, and

  • 2 breaches were found (leading to councillor censure).

That is an extraordinary spend for very little outcome.

And the contradiction is glaring: the Mayor has claimed Codes of Conduct are being “weaponised” — yet he himself lodged the complaint that led to a censure later overturned in the Supreme Court, costing the community just over $200,000.

Why this matters

It all beggars belief.

Residents should not need to become forensic accountants to follow the money. When legal spend is this high — and when we keep seeing corrections across legal costs and developer contributions — the only responsible response is radical transparency.

So why isn’t it happening?

  • Why isn’t Kiama Council publishing legal spend by category, with clear totals, every quarter?

  • Why aren’t the Office of Local Government and the Audit, Risk & Improvement Committee (ARIC) demanding answers on the developer contribution overcharge, the double-counting of legal costs, and the “Other Legal” blow-outs?

  • Why is it left to community members to do the oversight work that should already exist?

The bottom line

Transparency in legal and developer-contribution accounting is not optional — it is a core measure of good governance. Until figures are itemised clearly, corrected promptly, independently reviewed, and made public without community pressure, trust in Kiama Council will continue to slip away.

Disclaimer

I am a community member, not a forensic accountant. This post reflects in-depth analysis of Kiama Council reports, combined with concerns raised by community members and councillors. It is a genuine attempt to understand and explain how and why Council’s legal expenses have escalated.

I look forward to Kiama Council’s response.

#KiamaCouncil #Accountability #Transparency #Governance #LegalCosts #CommunityVoice #LocalGovernment

Getting to the Root Cause of the Wicked Problems at Kiama Council

This post is the part of a Follow the Money  series shining a light on Kiama Council’s ongoing failure to even interpret its own spreadsheets.

I am not an accountant. I am a community member, like the majority of our residents, reading the same public reports and trying to understand where our money goes. We should not need a crystal ball to interpret basic financial information. We deserve numbers that make sense.

The last Council agenda included a “quarterly update” on legal costs that, when added together, came to $12 million. Days later, Council issued a media release saying the number was wrong, that the real figure was $2.275 million.

But that is not what the agenda papers said, and not what any reasonable resident would have understood.

And here is the deeper issue:

🙋‍♀️Why did the error have to be picked up by the community?

🙋‍♂️Why was it not identified earlier? Why was it not raised in councillor briefings?

🙋‍♀️Why was it not corrected before the agenda went public?

This goes to the heart of a wicked problem in local government.

The councillor’s impossible workload

Council agendas are released six days before each meeting. Councillors are provided with briefing sessions where they can ask for clarification on complex issues. But how many councillors have the time to attend these sessions? Most have full-time jobs.

And even if they do attend, they face the daunting task of wading through agendas that, once supplementary papers are included, can run to 800 pages or more. How can councillors reasonably be expected to spot errors buried deep in financial tables or misleading cumulative totals?

Why accuracy matters

Councillors can only make sound decisions if they are given timely, accurate, and complete information. When they are forced to second-guess whether the numbers in front of them are right or wrong, they cannot do their jobs effectively.

That responsibility does not lie with councillors. It lies with the executive team. Their role is to ensure the data provided to councillors, and to the public, is clear, concise, and correct.

The wicked problem

This is why the $12 million legal cost debacle matters so much. Not just because the number was wrong, but because it shows how fragile the system is. If councillors cannot trust the information they are given, and if the community has to play watchdog just to keep the books straight, then we do not have transparency. We have a system that is exhausting, confusing, and corrosive to trust.

The financial year before last, Council’s own financial statements showed that 37 percent of all legal costs were grouped into “Other”. With no clear breakdown, ratepayers have no idea what “Other” really means or how that money was spent and when questioned the Council Public Officer refused to answer the question.

Where to from here?

In our next posts, we will dig into specific examples of how these failures in reporting play out:

  • The weaponisation of the Code of Conduct and the hundreds of thousands of dollars wasted as a result.
  • The ballooning of “Other” legal costs and what sits behind them.

Getting to the root of this wicked problem means demanding better.  Councillors, and the community, deserve information they can rely on. Nothing less.

🤑Did you know that for a family of four in Kiama, $576 a year is effectively going straight to Council’s legal bills?

In my next blog, we will unpack what this figure really means, how it compares to other councils, and why residents deserve to know where their money is going.

Stay tuned — because when it comes to Council’s finances, it is time we all started asking tougher questions.

#KiamaCouncil #LegalCosts #Accountability #Transparency #CommunityVoice