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.
But this isn’t just about numbers. It goes to the heart of governance. Councillors cannot make sound decisions without timely, accurate and complete information.
And it raises a bigger question: are governance bodies such as the Audit, Risk and Improvement Committee (ARIC), the Auditor-General, and the Office of Local Government (OLG) fully informed of these matters – particularly in the context of the Performance Improvement Order (PIO)?
🙋♀️If they are, why haven’t they intervened?
🤔If they aren’t, then Council’s failures go deeper than poor spreadsheets.
The Legal Fees Debacle
On 19 August 2025, Council tabled its agenda papers showing the following “quarterly update of current legal matters”:
-
June 2024 – $4.50m
-
September 2024 – $5.01m
-
December 2024 – $1.32m
-
March 2025 – $1.20m
Those four quarters alone add up to $12.04 million. That is the figure residents saw in Council’s own agenda papers.
Even when Council later admitted the reporting was wrong , claiming the total legal spend for 2024–25 was just $2.275 million and that earlier figures were “cumulative since 2020”, the explanation did not stack up.
If the figures were cumulative, they would only ever go up. Instead, they go up and then down again, which looks exactly like quarterly spending, not a rolling total.
But that is not what the agenda papers said, and not what any reasonable community member would have understood.
🙋♂️Why wasn’t this identified earlier?
🙋♀️Why wasn’t it raised at the council meeting itself?
🤔Why wasn’t it fixed then and there?
We all look forward to these matters being clarified in the next agenda. But in the meantime, councillors, oversight bodies and the community are left making decisions based on faulty information. This is the very opposite of transparency and accountability.
Without corrected figures, councillors, oversight bodies and the community are left making decisions based on faulty information – the very opposite of transparency and accountability.
The Overcharging Fiasco
Lets not forget December 2024.
Council admitted that, between July 2022 and June 2023, around 20 development applications by developers were overcharged a total of $1.5 million under Section 7.11 because of a spreadsheet error.
-
Refunds totalling $625,000 were proposed.
-
Landowners were to be contacted, consents modified, or payments refunded.
-
The overcharges were only identified as part of a later review of Council’s processes.
This is not a minor slip. It is hundreds of thousands of dollars wrongly charged, only corrected after the fact.
The Pattern We Cannot Ignore
Whether it is legal fees or development contributions, the story is the same:
-
Shifting numbers.
-
Confusing explanations, offered only after the community starts asking questions.
-
Major financial consequences for residents and ratepayers.
Transparency is not about cleaning up after the fact. It is about consistent, honest communication in the first place.
Until Council learns how to read and report its own spreadsheets, the community will keep paying the price. And until oversight bodies such as ARIC, the Auditor-General and OLG demand accuracy and accountability, residents will be left wondering: who is really watching over Council, and when will they step in?
#KiamaCouncil #Accountability #Transparency #LegalCosts #PublicMoney #GoodGovernance #Audit #CommunityTrust #Oversight