Stand at the end of a Shoalhaven street that has been “on the list” since before the last election, and you can already hear the argument coming. Someone will tell you the Council is sitting on $241 million. Someone else will tell you it is broke. They are reading the same audited accounts, and neither of them is lying.

That is not a communication problem. It is a measurement problem — and this month the NSW Government put out a paper about how to fix it.

The scoreboard that quietly disappeared

For a decade every NSW council reported six audited financial performance ratios. In the 2024–25 update to the Code of Accounting Practice they were removed “while under review”. The Office of Local Government’s own Your Council website now carries this line against Shoalhaven’s 2024–25 data:

“Performance Ratios were not collected in the financial year 2024–25 due to a change in the Accounting Code.”

So the last audited scorecard for this Council is 2023–24. In August the Office of Local Government released a discussion paper proposing to bring the ratios back — seven of them, with new benchmarks and two live options on the most important one.

Submissions close at 5pm on Wednesday 7 October 2026.

Why this matters more here than in most places

The Auditor-General’s Local Government 2024 report found three councils in NSW met none of the three sustainability benchmarks. Of those, it said:

“Two of these — Bathurst Regional Council and Shoalhaven City Council — have not met any of the benchmarks for at least three years.”

• The 2023–24 numbers behind that finding: operating performance −9.11%, against a group average of −0.64%.

• Unrestricted current ratio 1.08, against a group average of 3.79.

• Buildings and infrastructure renewals 71.29%, against a benchmark of 100%.

The $241 million and the seven months

Here is where a ratio earns its keep.

Shoalhaven’s last published Cash Expense Cover Ratio was 7.17 months — comfortably above the three-month benchmark. It sounds like a council with a cushion.

The paper proposes replacing it, because the old formula counted money the Council is not allowed to spend.

The new Unrestricted Cash Expense Cover Ratio strips out every externally restricted dollar:

• water,

• sewer,

• waste,

• unspent grants,

• unspent loans,

• developer contributions.

Do that arithmetic on Council’s own 2024–25 statements.

• Cash and investments: $240,976,000.

• External restrictions: $191,645,000.

• What is left is $49.3 million, against roughly $239.7 million of cash operating expenses.

That is about two and a half months.

On the 2023–24 figures it is about 1.6 months.

Same council. Same money. One ratio says seven months, the other says two and a half. Only one of them describes what can actually be spent.

And Note C1-3 of those statements records unrestricted and unallocated cash of nil at both 30 June 2024 and 30 June 2025.

A scorecard, on the proposed rules

Shoalhaven benchmarks as a Regional Town/City. Applying the paper’s proposed tests to published figures:

Unknown

Audited ratios are from Council’s 2023–24 financial statements as published on Your Council. Figures marked “calculated” are my arithmetic on Council’s published 2024–25 Annual Financial Statements, applying the paper’s proposed formulas. They are not audited ratios and should be treated as indicative.

• Three passes,

• three fails, and

• one that cannot yet be calculated because Council does not publish the inputs in that form.

Leverage in particular has improved sharply — 3.27 times on the 2023–24 numbers, 1.70 on 2024–25.

The choice worth watching

Question 1 of the paper asks whether depreciation should stay in the Operating Performance Ratio. Option 1 keeps it, with a benchmark above 0%. Option 2 removes it, with a benchmark above 20%.

For Shoalhaven that is not a technical question.

• Depreciation was $97.3 million in 2024–25.

• Keep it in and the ratio is about minus 0.4% — a fail.

• Take it out and it is about 28% — a comfortable pass.

Depreciation is the cost of wearing out roads, pipes, buildings and pools. A council renewing its assets at 71 cents in the dollar has a direct interest in a measure that stops counting them.

Whatever Shoalhaven puts in its submission before 7 October is worth reading.

And one new ratio aimed straight at us

The paper also proposes a Contributions Expenditure Performance Ratio: how much of the developer contributions a council holds it actually spends, with a benchmark of at least 20% a year averaged over five years. Shoalhaven held $41.4 million in developer contributions at 30 June 2025, up from $37.6 million a year earlier. The balance is growing.

Under the proposed ratio that becomes a published number rather than an argument.

The point of truth

Councillors and candidates will keep making three claims. Each of them now has a number attached.

• “The Council is financially sound.” Which ratio? Operating performance has been negative for years, and the unrestricted current ratio has not reached 1.5.

• “We have money in the bank.” How much of it is unrestricted? At 30 June 2025 the answer printed in the accounts was none.

• “We’re getting on top of it.” Fair — and supported. Leverage has roughly halved, and the operating deficit before capital grants fell from $40.5 million to $1.2 million in a single year. The right follow-up is what drove that, and whether it repeats.

Whichever side of the argument you are on, the honest version is the same: name the ratio, name the year, show the source.

So next time someone tells you the Council is broke — or that it is fine —

• ask them which number they are using.

• Then tell me what answer you got.

Sources: NSW Office of Local Government, Local Government Performance Ratios — Discussion Paper, August 2026; Shoalhaven City Council Annual Financial Statements 2024/25; Your Council NSW council data, Shoalhaven 2023–24 and 2024–25; Audit Office of NSW, Local Government 2024.

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If you are on the pension in Sanctuary Point, one number matters more than any other, and it arrives in the post. At about a quarter to eight on Tuesday night, from the floor of the Shoalhaven council chamber, Cr Bob Proudfoot put a figure on it:

“We’ll need a special rate variation. Could be anything. Could be 20 per cent a year for four years, to even just fix the roads.”

Then, immediately:

“Now, that’s not a threat. These are straight out mathematical facts.”

They are not.

• Twenty per cent a year for four years appears in no staff report,

• no budget paper,

• no Long Term Financial Plan and

• no resolution of this council.

Council’s own draft 2026–27 documents assume a 3 per cent rate peg and state that no special rate variation scenarios have been determined at this stage. The figure entered the public record on Tuesday night, and nowhere else.

And it compounds.

• Twenty per cent a year, four years running, is a cumulative increase of about 107 per cent.

• Your rates would slightly more than double.

Said in the same breath as “this is how we avoid a rate rise”

Cr Proudfoot said it while arguing against the rescission of the land sales program — the program that has been put to this community for a month as the thing that stops rates going up.

Cr Denise Kemp, in the same debate:

“If we do not proceed, all we can do to avoid a rate rise…”

Cr Brett Steele, minutes later:

“We made a firm commitment to our community that we would avoid forcing any massive rate rise onto our residents… We must sell assets.”

So the chamber ran two arguments at once on Tuesday night.

• Sell the land and there will be no rate rise.

Also:

• there may be a rate rise that doubles your rates.

The arithmetic does not let both stand.

The 12 per cent permanent increase this council resolved in December 2024, and IPART approved in May 2025, brings in $11,283,500 — every year, permanently.

The land sales program is budgeted to raise $14.4 million once,

in 2026–27. The CEO told the chamber on Tuesday the whole list is worth about $16 million, of which perhaps $6 million lands this financial year.

Selling every parcel on that list therefore raises,

• one time, a little more than one year of the rate rise Council already has.

• It is not an alternative to rates.

• At best it buys a year, and the land does not come back.

The forty-four per cent

Twenty-five minutes later the debate reached the other number. Cr Kemp:

“Do you forget the last council’s 44 per cent rate rise and the biggest protest in the history of council?”

And:

“I saw Matthew Norris saying — Councillor Norris, sorry — that there was no 44 per cent. Well, you just have to look on the WIN TV and it’s all there. So, you know, about the misinformation, there’s a classic example of misinformation.”

Here is the record, taken from Council’s own confirmed minutes.

On 29 January 2024, item CL24.20, staff recommended lodging a one-off permanent 32 per cent increase. Council did not adopt it.

A motion by Crs Christen and D’Ath to lodge 18 per cent, then 13, then 8 — which compounds to exactly 44.0 per cent — was moved, and lost 3 votes to 10.

A foreshadowed motion for 8/6/6/6 lost 6 to 7.

The following night Council resolved, 12 votes to 1, not to submit any special rate variation application at all.

Rates that year rose by the 4.5 per cent peg and nothing else.

IPART’s own final report of May 2025 records that Shoalhaven

“resolved not to proceed”.

• So there was a 44 per cent motion.

• There was never a 44 per cent rate rise.

• Three councillors voted for it, ten voted against it, and Council then voted 12–1 to lodge nothing.

“Labor had signed off on the proposal of that rate rise to go ahead,” Cr Kemp told the chamber.

• Crs Boyd, Norris and Kotlash voted against the 18/13/8 motion.

Two things are owed to Cr Kemp. The 44 per cent figure is not invented — it is the exact compound of a motion that was really moved by two councillors and really voted on.

And when this council imposed its own 12 per cent, she voted against it. On rates she has been consistent.

Her other claims from Tuesday — the biggest protest in the history of council, 4,000 signatures, then more than 7,000 — are not established by anything on the public record.

• They may well be right.

• They are not verified, and they

• were offered as the answer to a challenge about facts.

“I’m not ruling on the point of order”

Cr Matthew Norris took a point of order and named the clause: 15.11(e) of POL24/97, Council’s Code of Meeting Practice — a councillor commits an act of disorder if they say or do anything “likely to bring the Council… into disrepute”.

His stated ground:

“Facts are incorrect, and it brings council into disrepute… There was no 44 per cent rate put to the community. It was an independent proposal by AEC brought to the floor of this council. Never proposed by this council for the community.”

Acting Mayor Cr Peter Wilkins ruled: “I think we have a difference of view on the facts. So going to rule against that point of order, and we’ll continue with Councillor Kemp.” Cr Kemp: “Thank you. I have proof if needed.”

Ninety seconds later, after the claim about Labor, Cr Norris took the same point again. This time there was no ruling:

“There have been some curious facts raised tonight that I’ve let go through to the keeper. And this is in dispute. Councillor Kemp believes she has evidence. You believe you do. I’m not ruling on the point of order.”

Clause 15.6 of the same code says the chairperson must rule on a question of order immediately, and may first invite the opinion of the Council.

The code does not offer a third option.

In fairness to Cr Wilkins: he had already ruled on the identical point ninety seconds earlier, a chairperson is not the umpire of local government history, and nothing in either code obliges him to give reasons for a ruling.

But “I’m not ruling” is not a ruling. It left a contested claim about a 44 per cent rate rise standing on the record of the meeting with no finding either way — which is exactly the outcome a point of order exists to prevent.

Why it matters

Cr Proudfoot is right about the hard part.

• Council’s finances are poor,

• the roads need money, and

• it has to come from somewhere.

He is also right that staff have been treated unfairly for doing what councillors asked them to do.

But “20 per cent a year for four years” is not a mathematical fact, and it was said inside a debate whose entire premise was that selling land is how we avoid exactly that.

Residents were asked to accept the loss of the

• Nowra youth centre site,

• Wernick Craft Cottage,

• NOAH’s at Ulladulla,

• the Roo Alley at Depot Beach and

• the Myrtle Street land at Milton

on the promise that it protects them from a rate rise.

On Tuesday night, in the speech defending those sales, a councillor floated a rate rise that would double their rates.

Two numbers were said out loud in a public meeting. Neither was corrected.

So here is the question, and you can answer it from your own kitchen table.

If someone had knocked on your door last month and asked you straight — sell the youth centre site and the craft cottage, or pay more in rates — which would you have picked?

And did anybody ask?

Sources

Shoalhaven City Council Ordinary Meeting, 25 August 2026, webcast recording and auto-generated subtitles: Cr Proudfoot called by the chair at 2:08:44; the special rate variation remark at 2:13:04–2:13:09; Cr Kemp from 2:29:40; the first point of order at 2:31:36 and the chair’s ruling at 2:32:03; the second point of order at 2:32:56 and the chair’s response at 2:33:16. Minutes of 29 and 30 January 2024 (CL24.20, MIN24.44) and 17 December 2024 (CL24.403 / MIN24.691). IPART, Final Report — Shoalhaven City Council application for a special variation to general income 2025–26, May 2025. Shoalhaven City Council Code of Meeting Practice POL24/97, clauses 15.6 and 15.11(e).

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On 2 June, at Council’s Finance and Infrastructure Review Panel, the Mayor said something most councils never admit out loud:

“the tourists are costing us money and we don’t get any further money from anybody else to pay for that.”

She is right.

And somewhere in Council’s offices right now, staff are drafting the Economic Development and Tourism Strategy 2035 — a ten-year plan whose stated purpose includes “increasing visitor numbers and spending”. It goes on public exhibition late this year.

Before it does, councillors should read what just happened in Kiama.

Fifty-seven pages, thirty-seven actions, no dollars

Kiama Municipal Council put a Visitor Economy Strategy 2035 on exhibition in May.

• Fifty-seven pages.

• Thirty-seven actions —

  • a Blowhole Point masterplan,

  • harbour activation,

  • a Coast Walk extension to Gerroa,

  • night-time precincts,

  • an accommodation prospectus.

It contains no dollar figures. The section headed “Resourcing the Visitor Economy Strategy” runs four paragraphs without a single number.

Funding will come from

• “Council budgets”,

• “grants”,

• “private sector investment” and

• “partnerships”.

Kiama is under a Performance Improvement Order from the Office of Local Government, extended in May to 30 June 2028.

It is simultaneously negotiating away five holiday parks —

• Kiama Harbour,

• Surf Beach,

• Kendalls Beach,

• Werri Beach and

• Seven Mile Beach

— to private operators, because it cannot otherwise clear its deficit.

Then the arithmetic

Cr Matt Brown, who chairs Destination Kiama, told his council the aim was overnight visitors rather than day trippers:

“quality, not quantity, to reduce the impact on our community.”

Kiama’s own baseline is 1.13 million visitors spending $333 million — $293.70 each. Its 2035 target is 1,841,126 visitors spending $532 million — $288.95 each.

Seven hundred thousand more people, each worth about five dollars less than the ones already there.

Before inflation. Visitor numbers grow at 4.97 per cent a year under the plan; spending grows at 4.80.

The document calls this “Grow High-Value Visitation” and states on page 53 that it

“emphasises value and sustainability over volume”.

It does not survive inspection.

• Page seven claims 1.2 million visitors and $390 million;

• page twenty says 1.13 million and $333 million. P

• age seven puts the average domestic stay at 3.3 nights;

• page fifty-five says 2.6.

• Council’s own 2026 spending target of $350 million sits forty million dollars below the figure printed on its own summary page.

The KPI table gives domestic and international visitors the identical number — 1,362,433 each — which would total 2.7 million against a stated 1.84 million.

Corrected, the international target is about 478,700 against 13,800 international visitors last year:

• thirty-five times,

• lifted from a statewide percentage with no Kiama-specific reasoning.

• The same page claims an increase of “approximately 771,000 visitors”. The actual increase is 711,000.

All of it rests partly on a survey of 104 people in a municipality of 22,970.

Why we are more exposed, not less

Shoalhaven carries a road renewal backlog of about $280 million and a consolidated infrastructure backlog near $158 million.

Ratepayers are already paying a 12 per cent special rate variation, approved by IPART in May 2025.

IPART’s own assessment was that

“even with the SV, the council will still not be financially sustainable in the long term”.

Three of the four Office of Local Government asset benchmarks —

• the Infrastructure Backlog Ratio,

• the Asset Maintenance Ratio, and

• the Cost to Bring Assets to Agreed Service Level

— appear in Council’s own budget papers as “TBA”. The stated reason:

“asset management planning not currently being mature enough to provide these estimates confidently”.

We have already done this twice

The draft Community Infrastructure Strategic Plan 2056 ran to 511 exhibited pages covering 648 facilities and 1,147 recommendations.

The dollar sign appears in it zero times.

• No capital cost,

• no maintenance liability,

• no asset condition rating for any of the 648 facilities,

• no delivery years.

And we have a finished example of what unfunded maintenance does over two decades.

The Shoalhaven Entertainment Centre was publicly described as a $24–27 million project. Its actual recorded cost, in Council’s own 2026 Contributions Plan,

• is $38.65 million.

• Consultants identified $1.145 million a year in building and fit-out renewal in 2018;

• it has never been funded.

• The Centre lost about $3.07 million in 2024–25 —

  • roughly $59,000 a week

  • and every new home built anywhere in the Shoalhaven now contributes $488 towards recouping a building opened in 2008.

That is the whole Kiama problem, already here, with twenty years of receipts attached.

The number nobody has

There is one more problem, and it is the deepest.

Asked last year what tourism costs, Council told me in writing that

“the tourism budget is unable to be extracted from the activity of the team who work across all industries and many areas of responsibility”.

Asked what tourist infrastructure costs ratepayers, Council replied that

“future revenue strategies and ways to finance infrastructure are questions to be directed to your elected members”.

Four tests

So here is what the Economic Development and Tourism Strategy 2035 must contain before thirteen councillors vote on it.

• A costed action table — capital, operating and renewal for every action,

• with the funding source named.

• A net ratepayer position — what Council earns from visitors,

• set against what it spends on

  • the roads,

  • toilets,

  • rangers,

  • waste collection and

  • car parks those visitors use.

• Whole-of-life costs for every asset proposed,

  • including who pays for renewal in year thirty.

• And targets whose arithmetic survives division,

  • with yield per visitor stated explicitly,

  • so that nobody can call a volume strategy a quality one.

Ours is being written right now, and unlike Kiama’s, it is not too late to say so.

None of this is an argument against tourism

Tourism sustains roughly 5,000 full-time-equivalent jobs here and 8,117 registered businesses, 85 per cent of them sole traders or employers of fewer than four people. Nobody sensible wants an empty Huskisson in January.

But Council cannot charge a bed tax or a visitor levy.

Under the Local Government Act it can only rate landowners.

So every

• toilet block,

• car park,

• road shoulder and

• waste run the visitor economy

depends on is paid for by residents — from Callala Bay to Kangaroo Valley — while the turnover stays private.

The Mayor named that problem out loud in June.

If Council cannot produce those four numbers, what exactly are councillors being asked to approve?

Sources

• Kiama Visitor Economy Strategy 2035, post-exhibition amendments draft (57pp): exec summary pp.7–8; visitor statistics pp.20–21; resourcing p.52; KPI targets p.54; length-of-stay baseline p.55; engagement limitations p.17.

• Kiama Municipal Council, “Council explores strong market interest in Kiama Coast Holiday Parks”, 1 May 2026; “Kiama Council welcomes Performance Improvement Order extension”, 14 May 2026.

• Illawarra Mercury, “Kiama Council: New visitor strategy prioritises ‘quality’ tourism”, 20 May 2026 — Cr Matt Brown quoted.

• Shoalhaven City Council, Economic Development and Tourism Strategy 2035 — engagement page and Invest Shoalhaven project page: plan development January–July 2026, public exhibition and Council approval late 2026.

• Mayor Patricia White, Finance and Infrastructure Review Panel, 2 June 2026.

• Shoalhaven City Council reply to Stephen Prothero, Council ref 3055E / D25/74140, 20 February 2025; and Tourism Staffing and Priorities response, 22 January 2025.

• Budget item CL26.93 (OLG benchmark table); IPART special variation determination, 16 May 2025; draft Community Infrastructure Strategic Plan 2056; Shoalhaven Contributions Plan 2026 (project CCF1); AEC Group Financial Sustainability Review, November 2023.

  ---

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  Donations to help keep Eye on Shoalhaven Council afloat If you get value from this work and would like to help, donations are still very welcome. At the moment, I am not seeking further donations for the GIPA account. We currently have enough in that fund to cover the information-access work already planned.However, there are still ongoing admin and software costs involved in keeping this work going, including more than $120 a month for AI tools that help with research, document analysis, writing and publishing. The posts will always remain free. But if you would like to help cover those running costs, you can donate here.
  
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There is a kitchen behind the shelter in Kinghorne Street where somebody makes toast at six in the morning and eats it standing up, because there is nowhere else to be. About ten people sleep there a night. The block underneath it is on Shoalhaven City Council’s land sales list, and the budget that list feeds needs $14.4 million this financial year.

Ask where that money goes and you get three answers. None of them is written down.

Eleven parts, and only one of them is about money

MIN26.240, carried 7–6 on 28 July, runs to eleven parts. Ten are about selling — six operational parcels, a closed road at Depot Beach, planning proposals to reclassify five community parcels and then sell those too, two studies at Ulladulla, a selling agent, and delegated authority for the Chief Executive Officer to accept an offer.

Part 10 is the only clause about the money:

“Endorse the costs incurred with rezoning, reclassification and sale of the land comprising consultant, legal, conveyancing, valuation and survey expenses be funded from the sale proceeds.”

That is the entire instruction Council has given about the proceeds of its own land. The money pays the people who did the selling. Where the rest of it lands, Council has not resolved.

Three people, three destinations

1. Cr Denise Kemp put it as housing. To a Nowra resident who had come to speak against the sales on Tuesday, she said: “by selling land, isn’t that sort of an opportunity for more houses to be built for these people?” Later she tied it to rates — pensioners, she said, “are the ones that are going to add triple to the homeless if we don’t fix this”.

2. Mayor Patricia White, moving the item on 28 July, put it as asset renewal. The renewal ratios have not been met for years, the buildings are at end of life, and the alternatives are commercial rents or a rate rise. “When they fall down because we can’t go and fix them,” she asked, “what are we going to do?”

3. CEO Andrew Constance put it as the balance sheet. “We have budget repair that we have to make,” he said the same night, “we have debt that we have to address, we’re trying to invest in new assets like Sanctuary Point Library.” For one parcel he was more specific than anybody: proceeds from 77 Princess Street should “immediately go into the Boongarie car park” so Berry can start fixing its parking.

• Housing.

• Rates.

• Debt,

• budget repair and

• a car park.

Not one of them is in the resolution.

What the law actually restricts

One rule is hard, and it reaches exactly one item on the list.

Under section 43 of the Roads Act 1993, money a council receives from selling land that was a public road “is not to be used by the council except for acquiring land for public roads or for carrying out road work on public roads”. That binds the Depot Beach proceeds and nothing else in the package.

Everything else falls under section 409 of the Local Government Act 1993 and lands in the consolidated fund. External restrictions attach to special rates and charges and to specific-purpose grants — not to proceeds from selling operational land. In law, once the parcel is sold, that money is general money.

The fence Council built, then stopped citing

Council did once draw the lines itself. Its Property Strategy, adopted December 2017 after public exhibition, sets them out at page 33:

closed-road proceeds preserved for roads, section 94 land for community infrastructure, and

100 per cent of commercial disposals into the Strategic Property Account — capital only, and

“not to be used to fund service delivery”.

The 28 July report does not name it. Its policy field reads, in full:

“Council’s property sales’ activities are managed within legislative parameters and as such there are no implications to existing policies.”

The next morning Council adopted a new land policy, POL25/29. It is detailed about how to sell — valuations, probity advisers, auction versus direct negotiation. It says nothing at all about where the proceeds go, and the Property Strategy is not in its list of related documents.

An internal restriction can be lifted by resolution, and there is nothing improper in that.

It is harder to explain a $14.4 million program where the restriction was never mentioned, and a replacement policy that does not reference the document holding it.

The case for the other side

Budget repair is a legitimate use of general funds, and a council carrying a renewal backlog is entitled to say so. Mr Constance said it plainly rather than dressing it up. The Berry car park intention is specific, local, and exactly what residents say they want.

But an intention stated from the chair is not a resolution, and it is not an account.

On Tuesday the rescission motion was lost 7–6 on the Acting Mayor’s casting vote, with Cr Karlee Dunn crossing the floor and Mayor White on leave. The sales proceed. The destination is still a set of sentences in a transcript.

What you can do

Three things Council could publish without disclosing a buyer or a price. Which account the net proceeds land in.

Whether page 33 of the Property Strategy still applies, and if not, when Council resolved to stop applying it. And for each parcel sold, which of the three stated purposes its money served.

Ask your councillor for those three by email, so the answer is in writing.

And tell me this one. The report says the program should net about $12.97 million after costs.

If that turns up in Council’s account next winter, what should it buy where you live — the road outside your house, the buildings those services sit in, or the debt? Say which in the comments. Right now that choice belongs to nobody, because Council has not resolved to make it.

Sources: Shoalhaven City Council Ordinary Meeting business papers and minutes, 28 July 2026 (CL26.157, CL26.160 and Attachment 1 POL25/29; MIN26.240); budget report CL26.129, 29 June 2026; recording of the Ordinary Meeting of 25 August 2026 (CL26.187); Shoalhaven City Council Property Strategy, December 2017, p.33; Local Government Act 1993 s409; Roads Act 1993 s43.

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Donations to help keep the show afloat and pay for GIPA and legal costs
Donations to help keep Eye on Shoalhaven Council afloat If you get value from this work and would like to help, donations are still very welcome. At the moment, I am not seeking further donations for the GIPA account. We currently have enough in that fund to cover the information-access work already planned.However, there are still ongoing admin and software costs involved in keeping this work going, including more than $120 a month for AI tools that help with research, document analysis, writing and publishing. The posts will always remain free. But if you would like to help cover those running costs, you can donate here.

Want to understand how council Code of Conduct complaints really work?
I’ve released a plain-English PDF guide to help residents understand when a complaint is appropriate, who it should go to, what evidence is needed, and what mistakes to avoid.Buying the guide also helps fund Eye on Shoalhaven Council by contributing to the software, research and publishing costs behind the work.
Learn the process. Support independent local scrutiny. Available here:
https://4917955029345.gumroad.com/l/ycxrkd

Want to understand how to use GIPA to request council information?
I’ve released a plain-English PDF guide to help residents understand when to make a GIPA application, how to ask for the right documents, what timeframes and fees apply, and what to do if access is refused.
Buying the guide also helps fund Eye on Shoalhaven Council by contributing to the software, research and publishing costs behind the work.
Learn the process. Support independent local scrutiny. Available here: https://4917955029345.gumroad.com/l/oaazmv

GIPA - information you have paid for or you are supporting me with
Here are the current applications to council, seeking documents. At the moment I have one matter before NCAT. I will fight for transparency.

Defamation
Disclaimer: This article provides analysis and commentary based on publicly available information and council transcripts. It does not make allegations of misconduct by any individual. Readers should verify details independently before drawing conclusions.

Use of AI
Here is a quick disclaimer, or explainer on the use of AI in the Eye.

Contact links for the Council
I encourage you to take up your democratic right and engage with councillors, here are the contact details - send them questions or comments, text is best as they tend to ignore emails. Here is the link to the contact information.

Questions you can ask the Mayor at meetings or if you see her!
Here are some questions community members have submitted that you can use if you’re at a public meeting with the Mayor. Please keep your question polite and to the point, and if you get an answer, follow up afterwards in writing to confirm what you heard and reduce any “misunderstanding” later. Then let the Eye community know what she said so we can keep a shared record. Here’s the link to the questions

Our Policies
Check out our policies here https://s.craft.me/07xnRagW9JJSad

Five minutes is what you get at the lectern in the Shoalhaven chamber. Stan Bavanda used all of his on a policy number, said over and over the way you do when you suspect nobody in the room has read it. Then he sat down, and Cr Denise Kemp asked whether he had written the deputation himself, or whether the questions “came from elsewhere.” “No, no — 100 per cent my work, my research.” “Okay,” she said, “because I’ve seen that elsewhere.”

The item was CL26.189, a rescission motion on Council’s new policy for acquiring and disposing of land. It carried 10–1. Cr Kemp was the vote against; Cr Bob Proudfoot had left the chamber. The replacement policy now goes to a councillor workshop.

The number he kept saying

It was POL22/47 — Development and/or Disposal of Council Lands, spoken in the chamber as “twenty-two forty-seven”. Clause 2 of it commits Council to allow public comment before any final decision is made to dispose of land or property.

Mr Bavanda said a letter from a Council senior executive had confirmed to a member of the public that POL22/47 is the relevant policy for land sales.

Then the part that matters:

• the July land sales report, CL26.157, does not mention it.

• Its Policy and Statutory Implications field says there are “no implications to existing policies” — a line he said has run in every land sales report since 2024.

This masthead went through the same trail on 10 and 11 August. In the same 28 July business paper, two smaller property items — Moss Street and Comerong Island Road — cite POL22/47 by name and number. So did a June road closure at Kioloa. The directorate named the policy on the small items and left it off the twenty-parcel one.

The answer from the property counter

Cr Debbie Killian put the question to staff directly: does POL22/47 have relevance here, should it have been referenced — or is Mr Bavanda mistaken?

The reply, from Council’s Manager of Building and Property Services, Gary George, was candid — and it is the most important thing said about land sales all night:

“Now has it been applied across the board? We find it very difficult to apply that to all divestments of Council property because we’re undertaking multiple minor divestments, you know, we’re closing roads, we’re hiving off a little bit, we’re selling it to adjoining property owners. For us to go out and consult with the community on all of those divestments would be a huge amount of work.”

That is a fair point about slivers of closed road; the volume is real.

But it is not an answer about twenty parcels with community tenants on them, and it confirms the premise. The rule was not applied across the board.

Consider is not consult

The replacement policy, Mr George explained, carries a purpose clause about giving consideration to the interests of the community — predominantly for community-classified land, “not operational lands, and that’s for simplicity.”

Cr Killian’s objection was one word wide. “I do not believe that consideration of community concern is sufficient to replace community consultation, because there’s no threshold.”

Then the example that should worry everybody — the Anchor Avenue reserve at Mollymook: “it’s a drainage reserve. Did we know how much the community loves it? No, we didn’t.”

Cr Jemma Tribe put it plainer: the policy is “simply replacing the word consult with consider.”

The case for leaving it alone

Cr Proudfoot argued the other side, and argued it seriously: the policy exists, staff are trained to administer it, “by and large they get it right”, and councillors should not call workshops to review how professionals do their jobs. He read out the report’s defence — the public may make deputations when a sale reaches Council. Cr Ben Krikstolaitis called that thin: “there’s limited spaces and we do vet people that come out.”

Then two SIG councillors crossed — Cr Brett Steele (”a workshop wouldn’t be a horrible idea”) and Acting Mayor Peter Wilkins, who had used his casting vote against the land sales rescission earlier the same night. Eleven of the twelve present agreed the policy was not ready.

Cr Kemp’s objection at the item was that this is operational territory councillors may not enter: “I’ve seen similar things to these questions… So I question the motive.” She is entitled to say so.

But Mr Bavanda answered her to her face, on the record, and a Council manager confirmed his substance later the same night.

A resident who reads the policy register and finds something real is not a problem to be traced to a source.

What the workshop has to settle

Council reached the right outcome 10–1. Three things the workshop has to fix — the three Mr Bavanda asked.

● Where is the threshold? What size, value or type of divestment triggers consultation — written down, not decided case by case behind the counter.

● Does the rule cover community land and unformed road reserves, or only operational land? He asked for one paragraph of legal advice. Not unreasonable.

● Who reviews the rulebook? The section that administers land sales wrote the policy governing land sales. That is not an accusation — it is why organisations keep those two jobs apart.

What you can do

Ask your councillor for the workshop date, and ask that its outcome come back to an open meeting rather than being settled in the room.

Then answer this one, because you can and I can’t: is there a scrap of Council land near you — a drainage reserve, a laneway, an unformed road, the grass beside the hall — that you’d notice if it went? Under the policy as drafted, somebody in an office decides whether you’d care. Name yours in the comments.

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Donations to help keep the show afloat and pay for GIPA and legal costs
Donations to help keep Eye on Shoalhaven Council afloat If you get value from this work and would like to help, donations are still very welcome. At the moment, I am not seeking further donations for the GIPA account. We currently have enough in that fund to cover the information-access work already planned.However, there are still ongoing admin and software costs involved in keeping this work going, including more than $120 a month for AI tools that help with research, document analysis, writing and publishing. The posts will always remain free. But if you would like to help cover those running costs, you can donate here.

Want to understand how council Code of Conduct complaints really work?
I’ve released a plain-English PDF guide to help residents understand when a complaint is appropriate, who it should go to, what evidence is needed, and what mistakes to avoid.Buying the guide also helps fund Eye on Shoalhaven Council by contributing to the software, research and publishing costs behind the work.
Learn the process. Support independent local scrutiny. Available here:
https://4917955029345.gumroad.com/l/ycxrkd

Want to understand how to use GIPA to request council information?
I’ve released a plain-English PDF guide to help residents understand when to make a GIPA application, how to ask for the right documents, what timeframes and fees apply, and what to do if access is refused.
Buying the guide also helps fund Eye on Shoalhaven Council by contributing to the software, research and publishing costs behind the work.
Learn the process. Support independent local scrutiny. Available here: https://4917955029345.gumroad.com/l/oaazmv

GIPA - information you have paid for or you are supporting me with
Here are the current applications to council, seeking documents. At the moment I have one matter before NCAT. I will fight for transparency.

Defamation
Disclaimer: This article provides analysis and commentary based on publicly available information and council transcripts. It does not make allegations of misconduct by any individual. Readers should verify details independently before drawing conclusions.

Use of AI
Here is a quick disclaimer, or explainer on the use of AI in the Eye.

Contact links for the Council
I encourage you to take up your democratic right and engage with councillors, here are the contact details - send them questions or comments, text is best as they tend to ignore emails. Here is the link to the contact information.

Questions you can ask the Mayor at meetings or if you see her!
Here are some questions community members have submitted that you can use if you’re at a public meeting with the Mayor. Please keep your question polite and to the point, and if you get an answer, follow up afterwards in writing to confirm what you heard and reduce any “misunderstanding” later. Then let the Eye community know what she said so we can keep a shared record. Here’s the link to the questions

Our Policies
Check out our policies here https://s.craft.me/07xnRagW9JJSad

We’re sitting down with Councillor Gemma Tribe — an independent councillor who received around 22,000 votes in the 2024 mayoral election and someone who has already experienced Shoalhaven Council from two very different perspectives.

She was first elected in 2012 as part of Team Gash, alongside the now Mayor Patricia White. Today, you’ll generally find her on the other side of the chamber on the Council’s most contested votes. fileciteturn1file0L2-L8

So what changed?

We talk about her time in the Liberal Party, why she left, the pressure to vote with a bloc during her first period on Council, and why she says she came back determined to make up her own mind on every issue.

But we also get behind the public meetings.

How much work does a councillor actually do? Do they really read hundreds of pages of business papers? How much influence do Council staff have? What happens when councillors disagree with the administration? And what went wrong with the recent proposal to sell a group of Council properties?

This isn’t a campaign interview and it isn’t intended to tell you whether you should agree with Gemma Tribe.

It’s an opportunity to hear, at some length, how one of Shoalhaven’s elected councillors thinks the place actually works.

It is 104 years old, it is timber, and Julie Ashby wants you to understand that it is not a block of land with a shed on it. “If it’s gone, it’s gone,” she said of Wernick Craft Cottage on ABC Illawarra on Wednesday morning. “You don’t get it back.” Asked what talking to her council has been like since July, she said: “We have had no letter, no phone call, no email, no personal communication from any of the Council representatives to this day.”

On Tuesday night Council voted on whether to rescind the July resolution that put around twenty parcels of Council land — including the block under her cottage — on a path to sale.

With Mayor Patricia White on leave, the chamber was twelve. It tied six all. Acting Mayor Peter Wilkins used his casting vote against, and the rescission was lost.

Then, near the end of the debate, CEO Andrew Constance answered a question from Cr Denise Kemp and did some arithmetic out loud.

The numbers, from the chair

“The properties in this item are estimated about $16 million dollars.” The contribution towards this year’s budget is “probably around $6 million, depending on what the market does.” And then the sentence that matters most: “We have tried to ensure that there are more properties available as a contingency to meet the budget requirement of $14.4 million, which was set in the budget.”

The $14.4 million is not a talking point. It sits in Council’s budget report of 29 June, which records that the budget “incorporates projected cash inflows of… $14.4M from the land sales program” and warns that failing to realise them “would present a financial risk to Council.”

• So the year needs $14.4 million.

• This list is expected to deliver about $6 million of it.

• Mr Constance also said Council is “looking at potentially a three year period in relation to these transactions.”

• Eight months of the financial year remain.

Two readings of one word

The CEO’s own word was contingency, and his sentence has two readings.

1. Either the twenty-parcel list already carries more properties than it needs — but the whole list is worth about $16 million spread over as long as three years, so it cannot produce $14.4 million in eight months.

2. Or there are further properties held in reserve that have not appeared on any published list.

Council has not said which.

Cr Jemma Tribe told the chamber the fear she hears across the whole local government area is simple: “They’re worried about what will be for sale, and will they be given any notice?” The CEO half-answered her, inside somebody else’s question, and the room moved on.

Two accounts of the same money

The next morning on ABC Illawarra, Acting Mayor Wilkins put it differently again: “without the 16 million, which will go towards roads and roads and budget repair as well, we’re in a massive hole.”

In the same interview he said reclassifying the community land “could take two or three years and might not eventuate.”

Both cannot be doing the same work.

A three-year figure that might not eventuate is not this year’s $14.4 million. And the July staff report states the proceeds “are not budgeted to operating or capital expenditure in the 2026/27 budget” — while Council’s 2017 Property Strategy, never rescinded, directs commercial disposal proceeds into the Strategic Property Account and says they are “not to be used to fund service delivery.” Roads can be capital works. “Budget repair” is a different destination, and only one of the two is in an adopted strategy.

The reason for the silence, and its limit

Mr Constance gave a real reason for the silence Julie Ashby described. Council “can’t telegraph” what it is doing in property, he said, because “some investors go and land bank around things.”

That is a genuine probity concern, not an excuse — anyone who has watched a rezoning knows it is not invented. But it explains why Council cannot name a buyer or a price. It does not explain why it cannot name the properties. The twenty are already public. What is not public is the contingency, and it is the contingency people are frightened of.

Cr Debbie Killian, who moved the rescission, was not arguing Council doesn’t need money. “Yes, Council needs the money. I admit that.”

Her point was narrower:

“if we got all 14 million of this plus another 10 million, we wouldn’t be able to guarantee that there was no rate rise.”

What we should be asking for

This is fixable without abandoning the land sales strategy. Council could publish three things:

• which properties are expected to settle this financial year and make up the $6 million;

• what the contingency properties are; and

• which account the proceeds land in.

None of that discloses a buyer or a price. Council publishes a Delivery Program and an Operational Plan every year. This belongs in one of them.

Residents are being asked to accept an assurance —

• nobody is being turfed out,

• consultation is coming

— from the same majority that put twenty parcels into a single business paper in July on three days’ notice. That is not a claim of bad faith. It is that the assurance and the arithmetic were given on the same night, and they do not sit easily together.

Residents are entitled to judge the assurance against the record.

What you can do

One rescission did succeed on Tuesday, 10–1: the acquisition and disposal of land policy goes back to a councillor workshop.

• Ask your councillor when that workshop is,

• ask for its outcome to be reported to an open meeting rather than settled in a room, and

• ask the three questions above by email so the answer is in writing.

And tell me what’s near you. If your hall, your reserve, your old RFS shed or your little strip of Crown road turned out to be on the contingency list, would you have any way of knowing before the sign went up?

Name it in the comments and I’ll ask about it.

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Donations to help keep the show afloat and pay for GIPA and legal costs
Donations to help keep Eye on Shoalhaven Council afloat If you get value from this work and would like to help, donations are still very welcome. At the moment, I am not seeking further donations for the GIPA account. We currently have enough in that fund to cover the information-access work already planned.However, there are still ongoing admin and software costs involved in keeping this work going, including more than $120 a month for AI tools that help with research, document analysis, writing and publishing. The posts will always remain free. But if you would like to help cover those running costs, you can donate here.

Want to understand how council Code of Conduct complaints really work?
I’ve released a plain-English PDF guide to help residents understand when a complaint is appropriate, who it should go to, what evidence is needed, and what mistakes to avoid.Buying the guide also helps fund Eye on Shoalhaven Council by contributing to the software, research and publishing costs behind the work.
Learn the process. Support independent local scrutiny. Available here:
https://4917955029345.gumroad.com/l/ycxrkd

Want to understand how to use GIPA to request council information?
I’ve released a plain-English PDF guide to help residents understand when to make a GIPA application, how to ask for the right documents, what timeframes and fees apply, and what to do if access is refused.
Buying the guide also helps fund Eye on Shoalhaven Council by contributing to the software, research and publishing costs behind the work.
Learn the process. Support independent local scrutiny. Available here: https://4917955029345.gumroad.com/l/oaazmv

GIPA - information you have paid for or you are supporting me with
Here are the current applications to council, seeking documents. At the moment I have one matter before NCAT. I will fight for transparency.

Defamation
Disclaimer: This article provides analysis and commentary based on publicly available information and council transcripts. It does not make allegations of misconduct by any individual. Readers should verify details independently before drawing conclusions.

Use of AI
Here is a quick disclaimer, or explainer on the use of AI in the Eye.

Contact links for the Council
I encourage you to take up your democratic right and engage with councillors, here are the contact details - send them questions or comments, text is best as they tend to ignore emails. Here is the link to the contact information.

Questions you can ask the Mayor at meetings or if you see her!
Here are some questions community members have submitted that you can use if you’re at a public meeting with the Mayor. Please keep your question polite and to the point, and if you get an answer, follow up afterwards in writing to confirm what you heard and reduce any “misunderstanding” later. Then let the Eye community know what she said so we can keep a shared record. Here’s the link to the questions

Our Policies
Check out our policies here https://s.craft.me/07xnRagW9JJSad

There is a pergola at the back of Noah’s in Green Street, Ulladulla, and for a while it wasn’t draining properly.

In July, councillors deciding whether to put the land under it on the market were asked from the chair whether they’d want to walk a child into a centre with mould growing up the walls.

Last Tuesday night Cr Gillian Boyd told the chamber she had driven down and looked for herself.

There is no mould.

AI-GENERATED IMAGE (ILLUSTRATIVE): This is a digitally created image used for commentary. It is not a real photograph and does not depict an actual event or conduct. Any resemblance to real people is used for identification only; no factual claim is implied. If you are depicted and have concerns, contact me and I will review or remove it.

Three claims about the buildings on Shoalhaven’s land sales list were tested out loud on Tuesday 25 August, in front of a full gallery, during the debate on Cr Debbie Killian’s rescission motion CL26.187.

Two did not survive contact with the record.

The third turned into something most of the room did not know.

Claim one — “the building is full of mould”

On 28 July, moving CL26.157 — the resolution that put around twenty parcels on a path to sale — Mayor Patricia White spoke about the early-intervention service at 158 Green Street, Ulladulla. It had “major structural problems”, she said, and Council had spent “over $100,000 on that building, to bring it up to standard”.

Then: “Do you wanna go to a childcare centre that all the mould is growing up the walls?” And later: “Hundreds of thousands of dollars down at Noah’s Ark down in Green Street because they had to have their backyard completely ripped up and new drainage works etc put into it.”

On 25 August Cr Boyd told the chamber she had gone and looked.

“There is no mould. The roof that needed repair was an attached pergola that wasn’t draining… It’s all been fixed and it was fixed months ago and paid for by insurance.”

A “functional and well-maintained building”, she said, built for delivering services to children with disability and their families.

Cr Boyd rendered the July claim as “the building is full of mould and the roof needs repair”, which is not in the July transcript in those words.

• But both accounts agree the drainage work happened.

• They disagree about who paid.

• The Mayor put Council’s spend at hundreds of thousands of dollars.

• Cr Boyd says insurance paid.

Claim two — “the youth centre is end of life”

Speaking against the rescission motion, Amanda Smith told councillors: “The youthy is already at end of life.”

Cr Jemma Tribe — who said she had volunteered as a director at the service — asked where that came from. “Do you have access to a building report post the refurbishment?”

Ms Smith said she had heard it at last month’s meeting. “That’s not in any report,” Cr Tribe replied, “and who said it exactly?” Then: “It hasn’t been said from any staff, because it’s simply untrue, and I would hate for people to think that it’s a danger to go into the building.”

Ms Smith was right that she had heard it. It was said at the July meeting — by the Mayor, moving the motion: “The Youth Service is almost at end of life, so if we don’t make some moves to do some changes there’ll be a fence go up because nobody will be able to use it.”

Cr Tribe was right about where it wasn’t. The phrase “end of life” appears nowhere in the 28 July business paper. Neither does “mould”.

What the staff report says about 132 Kinghorne Street is the opposite of a condemned building: “Council has recently entered into a lease agreement with NYS extending its lease until 29 February 2028, providing medium-term tenure certainty.”

The report argues for consolidating the Kinghorne and Plunkett Street lots on property-strategy grounds. It makes no finding about the condition of anything.

Claim three — the lease that was already signed

Then, near the end of the debate and before the vote, CEO Andrew Constance told the chamber something new. “I can confirm for the benefit of Council that prior to this meeting that Director Norwood and I have extended the lease for Noah’s by an additional three years at Green Street in Ulladulla, with year-on-year for another two years in terms of option.” He tied it to a possible good outcome: reclassification could “facilitate potential transfer of that property… into the future for Noah’s”, subject to Crown Lands requirements and a public inquiry.

It was not concealed. The July report told councillors the lease was “structured as a 3 + 1 + 1 year term (providing a five-year commitment to Council)” and would be “returned to Council for execution” once the operator signed.

One sentence, inside an item covering twenty-odd properties. But it was signed before the meeting and disclosed after the debate, while councillors argued about tenants being moved on.

And the arithmetic is worth noticing.

Three years plus two one-year options is exactly five years.

Under section 47 of the Local Government Act 1993, a lease of community land for a period “exceeding 5 years” — counting any period it could run for if an option is exercised —

• requires public notice,

• notice on the land and

• notification of neighbours.

Five years exactly falls to section 47A instead.

Council’s own report calls 158 Green Street community-classified land. Whether notice was given, and under which section, the public record does not say.

What is still unresolved

Three questions, all answerable from documents Council already holds.

· Who paid for the Green Street drainage works — insurance or ratepayers — and what did Council actually spend on that building?

· Is there a current building condition report for 132 Kinghorne Street, and does anything in it support “end of life”?

· When was the Green Street lease executed, under what delegation, and was public notice given?

Mayor White is on a leave of absence until 22 September and has not been asked to respond. The claims quoted here were made in open meeting and are on the webcast.

The questions go to Council, and I’ll publish the answers.

What you can do

If your club, hall, cottage or service leases a Council building, have you ever seen a condition report for it? Not been told one exists — seen it. Tell me. Tuesday night showed what happens when nobody has: a building’s condition gets asserted in debate, repeated in good faith a month later, and argued about in front of a full gallery, while the document that would settle it is never produced. It took one councillor a car trip to Ulladulla to check. That should not be the system.

Please share this with 2 friends who care about Shoalhaven.

Donations to help keep the show afloat and pay for GIPA and legal costs
Donations to help keep Eye on Shoalhaven Council afloat If you get value from this work and would like to help, donations are still very welcome. At the moment, I am not seeking further donations for the GIPA account. We currently have enough in that fund to cover the information-access work already planned.However, there are still ongoing admin and software costs involved in keeping this work going, including more than $120 a month for AI tools that help with research, document analysis, writing and publishing. The posts will always remain free. But if you would like to help cover those running costs, you can donate here.

Want to understand how council Code of Conduct complaints really work?
I’ve released a plain-English PDF guide to help residents understand when a complaint is appropriate, who it should go to, what evidence is needed, and what mistakes to avoid.Buying the guide also helps fund Eye on Shoalhaven Council by contributing to the software, research and publishing costs behind the work.
Learn the process. Support independent local scrutiny. Available here:
https://4917955029345.gumroad.com/l/ycxrkd

Want to understand how to use GIPA to request council information?
I’ve released a plain-English PDF guide to help residents understand when to make a GIPA application, how to ask for the right documents, what timeframes and fees apply, and what to do if access is refused.
Buying the guide also helps fund Eye on Shoalhaven Council by contributing to the software, research and publishing costs behind the work.
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Defamation
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Use of AI
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Contact links for the Council
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Questions you can ask the Mayor at meetings or if you see her!
Here are some questions community members have submitted that you can use if you’re at a public meeting with the Mayor. Please keep your question polite and to the point, and if you get an answer, follow up afterwards in writing to confirm what you heard and reduce any “misunderstanding” later. Then let the Eye community know what she said so we can keep a shared record. Here’s the link to the questions

Our Policies
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Claire Young arrived at half past five with 786 signatures in her hand, collected door to door, in pen, by her neighbours at Mollymook Beach. She spoke for five minutes about a flat patch of grass where thirty-odd people play cricket at a time in summer, and asked Council for one thing.

“Council, you asked our community what it values, and now Council, I respectfully ask that you listen to the voice of your community.”

At ten minutes to ten the Acting Mayor thanked everyone for their attendance and closed the meeting. Her item was never reached. Nor was the item “Ben” had waited for. He had come about the Greenwell Point wharf, now closed and gated, and the slipway removed without consultation, and he put seven questions on the record and one hard sentence: “The community is being treated as the enemy.” Both items go to September.

In between, the man in the chair voted more often than anyone else in the room.

The arithmetic

Mayor White is on approved leave of absence from 3 August to 22 September. That is her business and her family’s, and it is not the subject of this article. It has one consequence that is entirely public: with the Mayor away, Council has twelve voting members, not thirteen.

The Shoalhaven Independents Group holds seven of the thirteen seats. SIG is not a loose alliance of independents — it is a political party registered with the NSW Electoral Commission, with its own registered officers. Seven of thirteen is a majority. Six of twelve is a tie.

Section 370(2) of the Local Government Act 1993 gives the person presiding, in the event of an equality of votes, a second or casting vote. Deputy Mayor Peter Wilkins chaired in the Mayor’s absence. Cr Wilkins was elected on the SIG ticket.

Four divisions finished six-all. He resolved every one.

• Cr Tribe’s amendment to keep meetings starting at 5.30pm rather than 1pm. “It’s six all, and my casting vote will be against.” Lost.

• Cr Killian’s amendment to keep the moment of silence and reflection instead of restoring the Christian prayer. Lost.

• The prayer motion as printed. “Six all, and I will vote for the original motion.” Carried 7–6.

The rescission motion on July’s land sales — the Youth Centre, the SALT homeless shelter, Wernick Craft Cottage, Noah’s at Ulladulla.

“As the Chair, I do have the casting vote and that is against. So it is lost, the rescission motion, 7 to 6.”

None of that is unlawful. The casting vote is in the Act and it is used in every chamber in the state. But look at what it did. The Mayor’s absence took a seven-vote majority down to six.

Four times, the chair supplied the seventh. And on the prayer motion it did more than hold a line — a tied motion is otherwise simply lost, so that vote did not preserve a deadlock, it built a majority for a motion that had failed to attract one.

In fairness, Cr Wilkins did not vote as a machine — he supported the rescission of the land disposal policy, which carried 10–1 — and the six-all splits were not a clean party line, with Cr Dunn voting for the land sales rescission.

The bloc was not perfect. The seventh vote did not need it to be.

“Listen to the community”

Six deputations were heard. Read them one after another and the same sentence keeps surfacing.

Will Clark, 30 years in Nowra and a volunteer at the SALT shelter, on the Kinghorn Street land:

“the complete and total disregard to communicate effectively with the ratepayers … The Council is beholden to the ratepayer, not the ratepayer beholden to the Council.”

Stan Bavanda, on Policy 2247 — the policy requiring public comment before Council disposes of land, which he says has gone unmentioned in every land sales report since 2024: “Communities were blindsided.”

The Wernick Craft Cottage petition, in its own words:

“Council must listen to the community and stop this desperate money grab.”

Two of those speakers were then asked from the bench whether they knew what they were talking about. Cr Kemp asked Mr Bavanda whether he had written his own deputation — “because I’ve seen that elsewhere.” She asked Mr Clark whether he was aware there was a housing crisis. He replied: “Is that a serious question?”

Moving to skip ahead to the confidential reports, the chair observed: “We’ve worn out most of the crowd.”

The ruling nobody has to explain

Shoalhaven’s Code of Meeting Practice, POL24/97, is precise about half of this. Clause 15.3: when a point of order is taken, the chairperson must suspend the business, permit the councillor who raised it to state the provision of the code they say has been breached, and then rule. Clause 15.6: the chair must rule immediately.

Early in the night the chair applied that correctly, asking that any point of order be identified by reference to the code. Minutes later, during Cr Killian’s questions to the first deputy, the chair himself called a point of order — that the matter had been debated previously and this was not the forum for it — without naming a clause. Cr Killian said she was asking a question, not debating. She was then accused from the floor of “harassment of our deputies” and said she was finding the exchange distressing. Later Cr Norris raised a point of order about the repeated raising of points of order without any reference to the code at all.

Here is the gap, and it is the one worth fixing.

• The code makes the councillor name the clause.

• It does not require the chairperson to give reasons for a ruling, or to name the provision the ruling rests on. That is true of POL24/97, and true of the Draft 2026 Code that returns for adoption next month.

• A councillor who disagrees has exactly one remedy — a motion of dissent under clause 15.8 — and is expected to move it without ever being told what the ruling was based on.

What happens next

I am going to hold this to one article a day.

There is more in Tuesday night than one piece can carry honestly. Across the coming week I will take the issues one at a time —

• the land sales and Policy 2247,

• the meeting time,

• the prayer clause,

• Greenwell Point, and

• the Collingwood Beach video and who made it

— with the documents behind each, and with video highlights from the webcast so you can watch the moments yourself rather than take my word for them.

One thing before then. If you were in that gallery on Tuesday, or have written to a councillor in the past month about Wernick Cottage, the Youthy, SALT, Noah’s, Anchor Avenue, Depot Beach, Myrtle Street or the Greenwell Point wharf, I would like to know something you can answer without holding a single document.

• Did you get a reply?

• And did the reply answer the question you actually asked?

Tell me in the comments. I will count them.

Quotations here come from an audio transcript of the 25 August 2026 webcast. The recording dropped out in places and some tallies were announced while the audio was breaking up. Everything above is being checked against the official minutes and the webcast, and where the record is contested I will correct it in print. Two things remain unresolved: the individual names for the Code of Meeting Practice division, where the chair announced “six all” but the names read out do not add up, and how the substantive motion on meeting start times was finally dealt with.

Please share this with 2 friends who care about Shoalhaven.

Donations to help keep the show afloat and pay for GIPA and legal costs
Donations to help keep Eye on Shoalhaven Council afloat If you get value from this work and would like to help, donations are still very welcome. At the moment, I am not seeking further donations for the GIPA account. We currently have enough in that fund to cover the information-access work already planned.However, there are still ongoing admin and software costs involved in keeping this work going, including more than $120 a month for AI tools that help with research, document analysis, writing and publishing. The posts will always remain free. But if you would like to help cover those running costs, you can donate here.

Want to understand how council Code of Conduct complaints really work?
I’ve released a plain-English PDF guide to help residents understand when a complaint is appropriate, who it should go to, what evidence is needed, and what mistakes to avoid.Buying the guide also helps fund Eye on Shoalhaven Council by contributing to the software, research and publishing costs behind the work.
Learn the process. Support independent local scrutiny. Available here:
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Want to understand how to use GIPA to request council information?
I’ve released a plain-English PDF guide to help residents understand when to make a GIPA application, how to ask for the right documents, what timeframes and fees apply, and what to do if access is refused.
Buying the guide also helps fund Eye on Shoalhaven Council by contributing to the software, research and publishing costs behind the work.
Learn the process. Support independent local scrutiny. Available here: https://4917955029345.gumroad.com/l/oaazmv

GIPA - information you have paid for or you are supporting me with
Here are the current applications to council, seeking documents. At the moment I have one matter before NCAT. I will fight for transparency.

Defamation
Disclaimer: This article provides analysis and commentary based on publicly available information and council transcripts. It does not make allegations of misconduct by any individual. Readers should verify details independently before drawing conclusions.

Use of AI
Here is a quick disclaimer, or explainer on the use of AI in the Eye.

Contact links for the Council
I encourage you to take up your democratic right and engage with councillors, here are the contact details - send them questions or comments, text is best as they tend to ignore emails. Here is the link to the contact information.

Questions you can ask the Mayor at meetings or if you see her!
Here are some questions community members have submitted that you can use if you’re at a public meeting with the Mayor. Please keep your question polite and to the point, and if you get an answer, follow up afterwards in writing to confirm what you heard and reduce any “misunderstanding” later. Then let the Eye community know what she said so we can keep a shared record. Here’s the link to the questions

Our Policies
Check out our policies here https://s.craft.me/07xnRagW9JJSad

There are seventeen public parking spaces behind the Berry Hotel. They sit on 455.27 square metres at 77 Princess Street, zoned SP2 — Car Park and Servicing — and they belong to Shoalhaven ratepayers.

On Tuesday night Council will be asked to pull the Berry Hotel’s development application out of the ordinary assessment process and determine it in the chamber.

What is being asked

Item CL26.201 is a notice of motion from Cr Peter Wilkins. It asks that Council “Call In” DA2026/1558 relating to the Berry Hotel, 120 Queen St Berry, “and be reported to Council for determination due to the public interest.”

His stated reason is parking.

“The main thrust of the recent submissions from residents relates to the lack of onsite parking relative to the scale of the proposed redevelopment of the Berry Hotel at certain times in the thriving township,”

the motion says, noting

“disputed numbers in parking requirements between the developer and residents.”

On its face, that is a councillor doing what residents asked. Berry Forum told Council in July that the redevelopment could put “an additional 75 vehicles competing to find spaces in Berry every weekend at lunchtime.”

Bringing a contested application into the open chamber is a defensible answer to that, and it is the kind of thing this masthead usually argues for.

The problem is what the same business paper leaves out.

Thirteen for. None against.

On 24 June 2024 Council resolved to “remove 77 Princess Street Berry (Lot 1 in DP 209665) from Council’s Land Sales Strategy and not be considered for sale,” and to “note the considerable community feedback provided against the sale of this Council Land.”

Thirteen councillors voted for it. None voted against. Patricia White, now Mayor, was among the thirteen.

On 28 July 2026, in the amendment that became MIN26.240, Council resolved instead to “defer the decision to rescind resolution MIN24.341 (24 June 2024) for 77 Princess St, Berry (Lot 1 DP 209665) until the Development Application (DA) for 120 Queen St, Berry (Lot 1 DP 578257) is finalised.”

Read fairly, that amendment helped the car park.

The staff report had proposed rezoning and selling 77 Princess Street; the amendment stopped that happening in July.

But it did not restore the 2024 protection either. It parked the question — and tied the timing of the answer to the Berry Hotel’s development application.

The amendment was moved by Cr Wilkins. So is Tuesday’s call-in. The same deferral appears again in Tuesday’s paper, at part 9 of CL26.188.

The connection nobody has put on the record

Berry Forum’s secretary told the 28 July meeting that the applicant’s own documents “refer to the parking spaces at 77 Princess Street” — the council car park.

He also told councillors that when an earlier application for the site was lodged in September 2023, “Council outsourced the assessment due to a potential conflict of interest related to its ownership of 77 Princess Street car park.”

The Chief Executive Officer rejected that reading at the same meeting: “the suggestion that we are somehow conflicted from our assessment team in relation to being able to assess the DA on the hotel and this block, that’s not there. There is no conflict of interest.”

He also told councillors Council cannot simply build more parking there, “because of the right of carriage which we don’t own.”

Both statements are on the public record.

What is not on the record anywhere in Tuesday’s business paper is the connection between them.

• CL26.201 does not mention 77 Princess Street.

• It does not say that Council owns the car park the parking argument is partly about, or

• that a resolution of this Council makes the future of that car park contingent on the very application it now proposes to determine.

This is not an accusation. It is a gap.

A council is allowed to own land near a development it assesses. It happens constantly, and there are established ways to manage it — outsourcing the assessment in 2023 was one of them.

Nothing here establishes that any councillor has a conflict of interest, and nothing here suggests anyone is acting in bad faith.

What it establishes is that the disclosure has not been made where it counts, which is in front of the councillors before they vote.

• Berry is owed that disclosure before the decision, not after it.

• If the advice is that there is no issue, say so in the chamber and put it in the minutes.

• That protects the councillors as much as the community — Cr Wilkins included, whose stated reason for the call-in is a resident concern he is entitled to press.

What you can do

The Ordinary Meeting is Tuesday 25 August, 5.30pm, Council Chambers, Bridge Road, Nowra, and it is webcast. CL26.201 sits under Notices of Motion.

Three questions worth putting to your councillors before then.

1. What conflict-of-interest advice have you received about determining DA2026/1558 while part 3 of MIN26.240 stands?

2. Will you move to confirm MIN24.341 and take 77 Princess Street off the table outright, rather than leaving the rescission deferred? And

3. is DA2026/1558 required to go to the Local Planning Panel — because if it is, what does a call-in actually achieve?

And one for you, which needs no documents at all. If you park in Berry on a weekend: how many laps of the block does it take you — and would you rather keep seventeen public spaces or have the money they would sell for? Say so in the comments, because that is the trade Council is quietly holding open.

Please share this with 2 friends who care about Shoalhaven.

Donations to help keep the show afloat and pay for GIPA and legal costs
Donations to help keep Eye on Shoalhaven Council afloat If you get value from this work and would like to help, donations are still very welcome. At the moment, I am not seeking further donations for the GIPA account. We currently have enough in that fund to cover the information-access work already planned.However, there are still ongoing admin and software costs involved in keeping this work going, including more than $120 a month for AI tools that help with research, document analysis, writing and publishing. The posts will always remain free. But if you would like to help cover those running costs, you can donate here.

Want to understand how council Code of Conduct complaints really work?
I’ve released a plain-English PDF guide to help residents understand when a complaint is appropriate, who it should go to, what evidence is needed, and what mistakes to avoid.Buying the guide also helps fund Eye on Shoalhaven Council by contributing to the software, research and publishing costs behind the work.
Learn the process. Support independent local scrutiny. Available here:
https://4917955029345.gumroad.com/l/ycxrkd

Want to understand how to use GIPA to request council information?
I’ve released a plain-English PDF guide to help residents understand when to make a GIPA application, how to ask for the right documents, what timeframes and fees apply, and what to do if access is refused.
Buying the guide also helps fund Eye on Shoalhaven Council by contributing to the software, research and publishing costs behind the work.
Learn the process. Support independent local scrutiny. Available here: https://4917955029345.gumroad.com/l/oaazmv

GIPA - information you have paid for or you are supporting me with
Here are the current applications to council, seeking documents. At the moment I have one matter before NCAT. I will fight for transparency.

Defamation
Disclaimer: This article provides analysis and commentary based on publicly available information and council transcripts. It does not make allegations of misconduct by any individual. Readers should verify details independently before drawing conclusions.

Use of AI
Here is a quick disclaimer, or explainer on the use of AI in the Eye.

Contact links for the Council
I encourage you to take up your democratic right and engage with councillors, here are the contact details - send them questions or comments, text is best as they tend to ignore emails. Here is the link to the contact information.

Questions you can ask the Mayor at meetings or if you see her!
Here are some questions community members have submitted that you can use if you’re at a public meeting with the Mayor. Please keep your question polite and to the point, and if you get an answer, follow up afterwards in writing to confirm what you heard and reduce any “misunderstanding” later. Then let the Eye community know what she said so we can keep a shared record. Here’s the link to the questions

Our Policies
Check out our policies here https://s.craft.me/07xnRagW9JJSad

Full Detail

The Milton Ulladulla Historical Society has a collection and no council building to keep it in.

In April 2021 Shoalhaven City Council bought a block at 26 Myrtle Street, Milton, and recorded in a confidential report that the property was being acquired as “a strategic purchase to assist Council in investigating options relating to the Milton Ulladulla Historical Society.” The price was $690,000.

On Tuesday night councillors decide whether to sell it in three pieces.

What is being decided

On 28 July, by seven votes to six, Council resolved to sell proposed Lots 1, 2 and 3 at 26 Myrtle Street.

Crs Debbie Killian, Matthew Norris and Gillian Boyd have moved to rescind that decision (CL26.187).

Their replacement motion (CL26.188) does not save the block. It does something smaller and more basic:

it sends 26 Myrtle Street out for community consultation and brings it back to Council on its own, before anything is sold.

Cr Boyd also put a question on notice. Council’s written answers are in Tuesday’s business paper, and they are worth reading in full.

The history the report does not dwell on

The land was bought under MIN21.238C on 27 April 2021 — a confidential report, considered in closed session.

Three years later, Council’s own Land Sales Strategy listed the site among land “acquired for a specific strategic outcome” and advised that “whilst these sites could be sold, it is not recommended.” On 8 April 2024 councillors resolved to “recognise these sites (including 26 Myrtle Street) are not considered for sale at this time.”

Cr Boyd records that the July decision “has created considerable community anger and disquiet, especially among members of the CWA and Milton Ulladulla Historical Society,” and that there was “general community understanding that the sale of the land in 2017 was predicated on Council commitment that it would be sold for community purposes.”

Council’s answer places the purchase in 2021 and calls it “a standard commercial transaction on normal market terms.”

The two accounts do not line up, and nothing in Tuesday’s paper reconciles them.

The paragraph that should stop the room

Council obtained and paid for two independent valuations, $650,000 and $730,000. Both “assessed the property on the basis of a hypothetical three-lot subdivision scenario.”

Council paid $690,000 — a price that “reflected the site’s potential development value, despite no subdivision approval having been obtained and no subdivision works having been completed by the vendor.”

And then, in Council’s own words: “This ensured the vendor received the benefit of the land’s assessed development potential at the time of sale. No discount, benefit or other was provided to Council.”

Seven months later Council lodged the development application itself.

The three-lot subdivision was approved on 2 February 2022.

• We bought the potential,

• then paid to realise it, and

• are now being asked to sell the result.

Nobody decided. It lapsed.

Council’s case for selling is not frivolous, and it deserves to be met on its own terms.

The land is classified operational, not community.

No covenant, trust or condition requires community use. The Community Infrastructure Strategic Plan has since been completed and identifies no need for a community facility on the site. On those facts a sale is lawful, and arguably tidy.

But read the answer to the question of who decided Milton would not get the thing the land was bought for. There isn’t one. “No Council resolution was identified that formally allocated a lot for community use.” The intention was “informally intended.”

Funding never came, “Council’s financial position has changed considerably,” and “this did not occur.”

A purpose strong enough to justify $690,000 of public money in a closed session was

• never strong enough to be written down,

• funded or voted on — and the community that was told about it was never told it had stopped.

What Milton is owed

Not a veto. A decision made in daylight.

The rescission motion does not even ask Council to keep the land. It asks for consultation, and for a separate report on this one block with the history in it: what it was bought for, what happened to that purpose, and what the money will be used for now.

That is not an obstacle to the sale.

It is the minimum record a community should have before public land it was told was for them is sold to someone else.

What you can do

The Ordinary Meeting is Tuesday 25 August, 5.30pm, Council Chambers, Bridge Road, Nowra. It is webcast. CL26.187 and CL26.188 sit under Notices of Motion.

The arithmetic is tight. The July resolution carried 7–6. Mayor Patricia White has a leave of absence. If the remaining twelve vote as they did in July it is six all, and under section 370(2) of the Local Government Act the person presiding has a casting vote as well as an original vote.

And one question I would like answered by people rather than papers. Were you ever told what 26 Myrtle Street was bought for? If you were at a CWA or Historical Society meeting where it was discussed, that account matters. Leave it in the comments.

Please share this with 2 friends who care about Shoalhaven.

Donations to help keep the show afloat and pay for GIPA and legal costs
Donations to help keep Eye on Shoalhaven Council afloat If you get value from this work and would like to help, donations are still very welcome. At the moment, I am not seeking further donations for the GIPA account. We currently have enough in that fund to cover the information-access work already planned.However, there are still ongoing admin and software costs involved in keeping this work going, including more than $120 a month for AI tools that help with research, document analysis, writing and publishing. The posts will always remain free. But if you would like to help cover those running costs, you can donate here.

Want to understand how council Code of Conduct complaints really work?
I’ve released a plain-English PDF guide to help residents understand when a complaint is appropriate, who it should go to, what evidence is needed, and what mistakes to avoid.Buying the guide also helps fund Eye on Shoalhaven Council by contributing to the software, research and publishing costs behind the work.
Learn the process. Support independent local scrutiny. Available here:
https://4917955029345.gumroad.com/l/ycxrkd

Want to understand how to use GIPA to request council information?
I’ve released a plain-English PDF guide to help residents understand when to make a GIPA application, how to ask for the right documents, what timeframes and fees apply, and what to do if access is refused.
Buying the guide also helps fund Eye on Shoalhaven Council by contributing to the software, research and publishing costs behind the work.
Learn the process. Support independent local scrutiny. Available here: https://4917955029345.gumroad.com/l/oaazmv

GIPA - information you have paid for or you are supporting me with
Here are the current applications to council, seeking documents. At the moment I have one matter before NCAT. I will fight for transparency.

Defamation
Disclaimer: This article provides analysis and commentary based on publicly available information and council transcripts. It does not make allegations of misconduct by any individual. Readers should verify details independently before drawing conclusions.

Use of AI
Here is a quick disclaimer, or explainer on the use of AI in the Eye.

Contact links for the Council
I encourage you to take up your democratic right and engage with councillors, here are the contact details - send them questions or comments, text is best as they tend to ignore emails. Here is the link to the contact information.

Questions you can ask the Mayor at meetings or if you see her!
Here are some questions community members have submitted that you can use if you’re at a public meeting with the Mayor. Please keep your question polite and to the point, and if you get an answer, follow up afterwards in writing to confirm what you heard and reduce any “misunderstanding” later. Then let the Eye community know what she said so we can keep a shared record. Here’s the link to the questions

Our Policies
Check out our policies here https://s.craft.me/07xnRagW9JJSad

AI-GENERATED IMAGE (ILLUSTRATIVE): This is a digitally created image for commentary. It is not a real photograph and does not depict an actual event or conduct. Any resemblance to real people is for identification only; no factual claim is implied. If you are depicted and have concerns, contact me and I will review or remove it.

Somewhere in the Shoalhaven Regional Gallery this year, visitor number 5,001 walked through the door.

Nobody noticed.

On paper, that was the moment Council hit its annual visitation target for the whole gallery — with another 74,437 people still to come.

The gallery finished the year on 79,438 visits against a target of 5,000.

• Council’s Quarter 4 performance report, going to councillors on Tuesday 25 August, records that as a green light.

It is not an isolated case.

• Library events: target 125, delivered 690.

• Library visits: target 105,000, delivered 318,525.

• Online library visits: target 200,000, delivered 812,053.

• Paid attendance at gallery programs: target 50, delivered 1,105.

• Events on council land: target 55, delivered 300.

• Audit committee meetings: target 1, held 5.

A target you beat by 1,489 per cent is not a stretch.

It is a number chosen so that nothing can go wrong.

Green ticks over the top of red

The headline is that

• 90 of 122 actions are complete and another 26 are on track —

  • 97 per cent for “Effective, responsible and authentic leadership.”

Look underneath.

• Action 1.1.1.03 is marked Completed with a green tick.

  • Its own measure is red:

    • the Disability Inclusion Action Plan 2026–2030 was due by 30 June 2026 and is now scheduled to launch on 3 December. Six months late, scored as done.

• Action 1.2.1.02 is marked Completed.

  • Both its measures are red: 44,447 people attended the Shoalhaven Entertainment Centre against a target of 53,000, and 41,079 bought tickets against a target of 50,000.

    • Nearly 9,000 fewer people through the doors than planned, scored as done.

• Action 1.2.1.04 is marked On Track.

  • It sits at 50 per cent against a 100 per cent target that fell due in June.

“Completed” in this report means staff finished the activity.

Measures that don’t measure what they say

The contact centre KPI is titled “Calls to the Contact Centre answered within 60 seconds.”

• Target: 60.

• Achieved: 44. Green.

Those are seconds, not percentages.

The actual answer to the question the measure asks is buried in the comment beside it:

74 per cent of calls were answered within 60 seconds.

That figure appears nowhere in the target or achieved columns.

Internal audits: target 100 per cent, reported 95 per cent, amber. The comment says four audits were commissioned and “two audits were completed.” Two of four is 50 per cent.

Property vacancy rate: 0 per cent, green — with a note that a habitable building at 16 Berry Street, Nowra was demolished and is now vacant land.

• Remove the property, remove the vacancy.

GIPA compliance: 100 per cent — measured against eight formal applications,

• while 506 informal information requests,

• 69.4 per cent of everything received,

• sit outside the measure entirely.

What actually slipped

Six actions are amber, red or deferred, and they are not the trivial ones.

• Affordable housing: requires attention.

• The Asset Management Plans: stalled, “as a result of competing priorities.”

• The South Nowra employment precinct: on hold, waiting on funding.

• A fair and equitable rating system: deferred, and it “did not commence in 2025/26 as intended.”

• Of the six Sustainable Financial Futures objectives, the worst is asset management at 57 per cent — the same asset management performance the 2026/27 budget was expressly built to improve.

• Housing, rates fairness, employment land, and the roads and pipes. The four hardest things Council does, all behind.

And then, the ask

Buried in the same report is a request. From 2026/27, Council will stop publishing quarterly performance reports and publish two a year instead.

The stated reasons:

quarterly reporting “requires substantial staff time,” is “resource intensive relative to the level of community engagement,” and produces reports that are “often operationally focused and difficult for the community to meaningfully engage with.”

That last line is an admission.

The business case is missing too.

• Not one hour of staff time is quantified.

• Not one dollar is estimated.

• Not one engagement figure is published —

  • no page views,

  • no downloads,

  • no submissions — despite

    • “the level of community engagement” being the entire justification. Under Financial Implications, the report states: “There are no financial implications.” If the saving is real, there is a financial implication. If there isn’t one, there is no case.

External Consultations: Nil. Council did not ask the community before proposing to halve the community’s reporting. The item is filed under Community Strategic Plan objective 4.3.1 — “Develop community trust and respect through transparent interactions and reporting.”

In the same document, the action for improving corporate reporting is scored 100 per cent complete, green.

Six-monthly is the legal floor — section 404(5) of the Local Government Act 1993. Quarterly is a choice Shoalhaven has made since 2021. The practical cost of going back to the minimum is timing:

• under the new model, the last public performance report before the June budget vote will cover the period to 31 December, six months stale by the time the money is committed.

Credit where it is due

This report does several things genuinely well, and the criticism is worth less if that is not said.

It publishes its six problem actions with real explanations rather than burying them.

It gives three years of gallery attendance, and the Audit Office of NSW found fewer than one in five councils bother with trend data at all.

It names a responsible manager against every single measure.

Development application assessment times came down to 104 days. And the candour about Entertainment Centre ticket sales — cost-of-living pressure, audiences becoming selective about what they will pay for — is the best piece of analysis in the document.

That is the point. Council can report well when it chooses to. The problem was never the frequency.

Tuesday

The recommendation asks councillors merely to “note” the change. Noting is not deciding. Councillors can amend that recommendation, and the questions worth asking are short:

● How many staff hours does a quarterly report actually take — in numbers?

● How many people read the last one?

● Why is an action six months late marked “Completed”?

● Who set a visitor target of 5,000 for a gallery that had 28,293 visitors two years ago?

Sources: Shoalhaven City Council Ordinary Meeting agenda, 25 August 2026, item CL26.178 — DPOP 2025/26 Quarterly Performance Budget Reporting (April to June), pp. 22–29; Attachment 1, DPOP Quarterly Performance Report 2025-26 (April–June). Audit Office of NSW, Council reporting on service delivery, 1 February 2018. Local Government Act 1993 (NSW) ss 404, 428.

Please share this with 2 friends who care about Shoalhaven.

Donations to help keep the show afloat and pay for GIPA and legal costs
Donations to help keep Eye on Shoalhaven Council afloat If you get value from this work and would like to help, donations are still very welcome. At the moment, I am not seeking further donations for the GIPA account. We currently have enough in that fund to cover the information-access work already planned.However, there are still ongoing admin and software costs involved in keeping this work going, including more than $120 a month for AI tools that help with research, document analysis, writing and publishing. The posts will always remain free. But if you would like to help cover those running costs, you can donate here.

Want to understand how council Code of Conduct complaints really work?
I’ve released a plain-English PDF guide to help residents understand when a complaint is appropriate, who it should go to, what evidence is needed, and what mistakes to avoid.Buying the guide also helps fund Eye on Shoalhaven Council by contributing to the software, research and publishing costs behind the work.
Learn the process. Support independent local scrutiny. Available here:
https://4917955029345.gumroad.com/l/ycxrkd

Want to understand how to use GIPA to request council information?
I’ve released a plain-English PDF guide to help residents understand when to make a GIPA application, how to ask for the right documents, what timeframes and fees apply, and what to do if access is refused.
Buying the guide also helps fund Eye on Shoalhaven Council by contributing to the software, research and publishing costs behind the work.
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Questions you can ask the Mayor at meetings or if you see her!
Here are some questions community members have submitted that you can use if you’re at a public meeting with the Mayor. Please keep your question polite and to the point, and if you get an answer, follow up afterwards in writing to confirm what you heard and reduce any “misunderstanding” later. Then let the Eye community know what she said so we can keep a shared record. Here’s the link to the questions

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AI-GENERATED IMAGE (ILLUSTRATIVE): This is a digitally created image for commentary. It is not a real photograph and does not depict an actual event or conduct. Any resemblance to real people is for identification only; no factual claim is implied. If you are depicted and have concerns, contact me and I will review or remove it.

Somewhere in Shoalhaven, over the winter just gone, 77 people sat down and wrote to their council.

• Some used the exhibition portal at 11pm after work.

• Some copied a template from a church noticeboard.

• Some spent real effort explaining, in their own words, why a prayer read aloud before council business did or did not belong in a chamber meant to represent the whole of the Shoalhaven — Christian and Muslim and Buddhist and no religion at all.

• They did what public consultation asks:

  • they trusted someone would read what they wrote and weigh it.

The report going to Tuesday’s meeting is the answer to that trust.

What it does — and does not — show is a case study in how a council can meet every legal requirement of consultation while leaving almost no visible trace of having been tested by any of it.

A decision made before the consultation began

Council placed the 2026 Draft Code of Meeting Practice on exhibition on 16 June 2026 — and the draft already included a Prayer in the Order of Business, because Council had resolved that outcome at the same meeting that authorised the exhibition. The 42-day comment period was, on the document’s own account, a chance to respond to a decision already made, not to help shape one.

Of the 77 submissions, 47 supported keeping the prayer and 29 objected — a majority, not a rout.

• The report’s recommendation is exactly what was exhibited.

• Nothing changed.

• It says so plainly: “The recommendation of this report reflects the Council’s resolution of 16 June 2026.” Council has full discretion here — prayer, silence, or neither are all lawful — which makes the absence of any comparative reasoning more notable, not less.

The argument that goes unanswered

Four of the 29 objecting submissions made a specific, textual argument: that a prayer is inconsistent with the Code’s own Meeting Principles.

Clause 2.1 of the Code Council is being asked to adopt states meetings should be “Inclusive: Decisions respect the diverse needs and interests of the local community.” Sixteen more asked for the moment of silence and reflection to be reinstated instead — the compromise the Code itself would seem built to accommodate.

• The report records that argument.

• It does not engage with it.

• There is no staff assessment of whether a prayer sits comfortably with a principle Council is adopting in the same document.

• The only response to all 29 objections is one sentence: “Council has discretion.”

• True, and not an answer.

No way to check the working

Here is the wall a resident hits looking further.

The 77 submissions were given to councillors “confidentially in accordance with Section 10A2(a)… as disclosure could reasonably be expected to reveal an individual’s personal information” — a standard, defensible privacy position.

But it means the only version of what 77 residents said that the public will ever see is staff’s two-paragraph categorisation.

• No de-identified excerpt,

• no sense of the range or intensity of view within either group.

• No minute or options paper showing councillors saw more than a tally.

• If any internal deliberation weighed the inclusivity argument against the historical-precedent one, none of it is visible in this business paper.

• The thinking, if it exists, exists somewhere the public cannot follow it.

What is genuinely operational, and what is not

Some of Tuesday’s item is not discretionary at all.

The ban on councillors meeting privately with staff about agenda items, the requirement to authorise the chair’s expulsion power at the start of the term, and the shift from “livestreaming” to “broadcasting” meetings live all flow directly from the Local Government (General) Amendment (Meetings) Regulation 2026, effective 26 June. Council has no real choice — refusing exposes it to legal challenge, as the report’s own risk section notes. That is genuinely operational, and treated as such, with the source clause cited line by line.

• The Prayer is a different kind of decision — a values choice about what a secular civic meeting looks like. It deserves an honest account of the arguments on both sides and why one prevailed, rather than folding into a compliance document alongside mandatory regulatory housekeeping. Splitting the Order of Business into its own resolution, proposed because it drew the most submissions, is a step in the right direction procedurally. It is not a substitute for showing the reasoning.

A smaller, genuinely open governance question is punted entirely:

• whether Notices of Motion should name a funding source before a vote.

• One submission asked for it.

• Staff present the option, quote the model wording, and recommend nothing — leaving a real accountability improvement to the floor with no staff view either way.

What better practice looks like

None of this needs more paperwork. It needs the report to show its working:

a considered response to the strongest objection rather than a discretion clause, a handful of de-identified excerpts so residents can judge the categorisation themselves, and a plain statement of why 61 per cent support outweighs a principled inclusivity objection sitting inside Council’s own code.

A council that wants residents to keep writing submissions needs those residents to believe the process reads them — not just counts them.

Council meets at 5.30pm on Tuesday 25 August in the Council Chambers, Bridge Road, Nowra. Item CL26.177. The meeting is webcast.

Please share this with 2 friends who care about Shoalhaven.

Donations to help keep the show afloat and pay for GIPA and legal costs
Donations to help keep Eye on Shoalhaven Council afloat If you get value from this work and would like to help, donations are still very welcome. At the moment, I am not seeking further donations for the GIPA account. We currently have enough in that fund to cover the information-access work already planned.However, there are still ongoing admin and software costs involved in keeping this work going, including more than $120 a month for AI tools that help with research, document analysis, writing and publishing. The posts will always remain free. But if you would like to help cover those running costs, you can donate here.

Want to understand how council Code of Conduct complaints really work?
I’ve released a plain-English PDF guide to help residents understand when a complaint is appropriate, who it should go to, what evidence is needed, and what mistakes to avoid.Buying the guide also helps fund Eye on Shoalhaven Council by contributing to the software, research and publishing costs behind the work.
Learn the process. Support independent local scrutiny. Available here:
https://4917955029345.gumroad.com/l/ycxrkd

Want to understand how to use GIPA to request council information?
I’ve released a plain-English PDF guide to help residents understand when to make a GIPA application, how to ask for the right documents, what timeframes and fees apply, and what to do if access is refused.
Buying the guide also helps fund Eye on Shoalhaven Council by contributing to the software, research and publishing costs behind the work.
Learn the process. Support independent local scrutiny. Available here: https://4917955029345.gumroad.com/l/oaazmv

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Use of AI
Here is a quick disclaimer, or explainer on the use of AI in the Eye.

Contact links for the Council
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Questions you can ask the Mayor at meetings or if you see her!
Here are some questions community members have submitted that you can use if you’re at a public meeting with the Mayor. Please keep your question polite and to the point, and if you get an answer, follow up afterwards in writing to confirm what you heard and reduce any “misunderstanding” later. Then let the Eye community know what she said so we can keep a shared record. Here’s the link to the questions

Our Policies
Check out our policies here https://s.craft.me/07xnRagW9JJSad

The short version

• A code of conduct finding is not a criminal finding. The worst a council can do to a councillor is censure them. The Model Code’s own stated purpose is to help officials “understand and comply with the standards of conduct that are expected of them.”

• Clause 5.24 of the NSW Procedures lets a general manager resolve a complaint about a councillor by “explanation, counselling, training, mediation, informal discussion, negotiation, a voluntary apology or an undertaking not to repeat the offending behaviour.” Clause 5.31 gives the mayor exactly the same power over the general manager.

• Both clauses say “may”. Neither says “must”. And no council is required to report how often it uses them.

• Over three years, NSW councils generated 4,289 code of conduct complaints. The Office of Local Government took action against 14 councillors. That is not a system that corrects behaviour. It is a system that files paperwork.

What a code of conduct actually is

Start with the thing almost every public discussion of this subject gets wrong.

• A code of conduct complaint is not a charge.

• A finding of breach is not a conviction.

• Nobody goes to gaol.

• Nobody gets a record.

The NSW Model Code of Conduct is made under section 440 of the Local Government Act 1993, and it says what it is for on its own first page:

it is prescribed to assist council officials to “understand and comply with the standards of conduct that are expected of them”, to

“fulfil their statutory duty to act honestly and exercise a reasonable degree of care and diligence”, and to

“act in a way that enhances public confidence in local government.”

• Understand.

• Comply.

• Confidence.

• Those are the words. Not punish, not convict, not destroy.

The consequences match. Under clause 7.58 of the Procedures, the sanctions a council may impose on a finding of breach are:

• for a general manager,

• disciplinary action under their contract of employment;

• for a councillor, formal censure under section 440G — or censure plus referral to the Office of Local Government.

That is the ceiling. A public statement of disapproval and, in the worst cases, a referral upstairs.

The State Government has now said this in writing itself. Its June 2026 Policy Statement: Improving Councillor Accountability puts it in a single sentence:

Parliament has said it too, in the fine print. The Councillor Conduct Bill now sitting in the Legislative Council contains a proposed section 733G which stays conduct proceedings against a councillor if criminal proceedings are commenced over substantially the same conduct. You do not need a provision separating two processes unless the two processes are different things.

So: a corrective instrument,

• with a corrective purpose,

• carrying corrective consequences,

• expressly distinguished from the criminal law.

The root cause is behaviour. It always was.

Strip away the acronyms and the clause numbers and every code of conduct complaint in NSW starts in the same place:

• a councillor or a member of staff behaved outside their obligations.

  • Someone shouted.

  • Someone leaked.

  • Someone leaned on an officer.

  • Someone sat in a decision they had an interest in.

  • Someone said something in public about their own council that was not true.

That is the root cause. Not the complainant. Not the procedure. Not the reviewer’s invoice. The behaviour.

The evidence on where that behaviour comes from is reasonably consistent, and it is not flattering to anyone who wants to blame the people making complaints.

The Wingecarribee public inquiry — the council whose civic offices were declared vacant — found

“repeated instances of inappropriate behaviours by some Councillors during meetings, briefings, and in other interactions with staff”,

and then made the finding that matters most:

“The failure of the other Councillors to effectively respond to those instances of behaviour contributed to the creation of a permissive environment.”

Read that again.

1. The Commissioner did not only blame the people behaving badly.

2. He blamed the people watching them do it.

The Central Coast inquiry landed the same point on the administration: councillors “were not adequately supported by a GM who was able to provide strong leadership.”

The Balranald inquiry described a “lack of respect in the Council Chambers and in Staff dealings, poor morale throughout the organisation”, and a “failure to maintain a healthy and safe work environment for Council staff” — which is worth pausing on, because it reframes councillor behaviour as what it actually is when it lands on employees: a work health and safety problem.

The academic work points the same way. New Zealand’s Local Government Commission, reviewing codes of conduct across its whole sector, reported that “poor behaviour can often stem from members’ frustration with the systems their council has for working together to make decisions” — frustration with briefings, with information flow, with being managed rather than informed. Australian research on councillor role confusion has found for years that councillors keep reaching into operational matters because nobody has ever successfully explained to them where the line is.

None of that excuses the behaviour. All of it tells you the behaviour is addressable — because it has causes, and the causes sit inside the building.

The tool that already exists

Here is the part that should end the debate, and never does.

Clause 5.24 of the Procedures for the Administration of the Model Code of Conduct:

“Where the general manager considers it to be practicable and appropriate to do so, the general manager may seek to resolve code of conduct complaints about councillors, other than those requiring referral to the Office under clause 5.20, by alternative means such as, but not limited to, explanation, counselling, training, mediation, informal discussion, negotiation, a voluntary apology or an undertaking not to repeat the offending behaviour. The resolution of a code of conduct complaint under this clause is not to be taken as a determination that there has been a breach of the council’s code of conduct.”

Clause 5.31 gives the mayor the identical power over complaints about the general manager, word for word. Clause 6.13(b) gives an external conduct reviewer the same options again.

Look at what is in that list.

• Explanation.

• Counselling.

• Training.

• Mediation.

• Informal discussion.

• Negotiation.

• A voluntary apology.

• An undertaking not to do it again.

And a closing sentence that goes out of its way to protect the person: resolving it this way is not a finding that they breached anything.

That is the entire “training and internal discipline” answer, already drafted, already prescribed, already in force in every council in New South Wales. It has been sitting there since 2020.

• It costs almost nothing.

• It produces no reviewer’s fee,

  • no twelve-month timeline,

  • no confidential report,

  • no censure motion,

  • no reputational damage to anyone.

And there are two things wrong with it.

The first is that it is discretionary. Both clauses say “may”, conditioned on the officeholder considering it “practicable and appropriate”.

There is no obligation to attempt informal resolution before escalating. A general manager who never once picks up the phone to a councillor is fully compliant with the Procedures.

The second is that nobody has to say whether they used it.

Clause 11.1 requires the complaints coordinator to report seven categories of statistics to the council each year —

• total complaints,

• referrals to reviewers,

• preliminary assessments,

• investigations,

• outcomes,

• OLG reviews, and,

• at 11.1(g), “the total cost of dealing with code of conduct complaints made about councillors and the general manager during the reporting period, including staff costs.”

Count the clauses in that list that ask how many complaints were resolved by explanation, counselling, training or an apology under clause 5.24.

None. The one intervention the system says it wants is the one intervention it never counts.

Eight ways to fix behaviour. One way to punish it. Source: Procedures for the Administration of the Model Code of Conduct (2020) and the Local Government Act 1993 (NSW).

What the evidence says actually works

The best peer-reviewed study on this question is Downe, Cowell and Morgan, published in Public Administration Review in 2016 — a study of what separated well-behaved councils from badly-behaved ones under a code of conduct regime almost identical in architecture to ours.

Their finding, verbatim: organisations with consistently good conduct “have multiple leaders who demonstrate good conduct but also act to preempt the escalation of problems and thereby minimize the explicit use of ethics regulation.”

What that looked like in practice, in their words:

“It often meant working informally to resolve complaints prior to (or avoiding) deploying the formal ethics machinery. This included having a quiet word with politicians whose behavior was ‘sailing close to the wind’ and giving them an opportunity to improve. That these practices occurred more often in some councils than in others, and reflected the extent of conduct issues in each case, suggests a significant causal effect.”

And on formal sanctions, the same study: “In many instances, however, these sanctions did not lead to significant change of behavior.”

Their conclusion is the sentence this whole article is built around: “codes do not ‘act’ unless interpreted and translated into actions by human agents.”

The UK’s Committee on Standards in Public Life reached the same place from the opposite direction in 2019, warning that

“a system which is overly formal… can actually inhibit high ethical standards as it precludes light-touch, informal action to address potential issues at an early stage.”

New Zealand’s Local Government Commission: “Investigations and penalties under the code do little to address the cause of that behaviour.” And: “Many mayors and chairs spoke about the value of early, informal intervention when councillors appeared frustrated or disruptive.”

Victoria’s anti-corruption commission, IBAC, on where the responsibility sits:

“People in leadership positions set the ethical tone of an organisation and are key to building organisational integrity and corruption resistance. It is essential that they communicate expected standards of behaviour and values to staff, lead by example, appropriately supervise employees, and act on suspected misconduct or corrupt conduct.”

And our own ICAC, in eight words that should be printed on the wall of every council chamber in the state:

What is not the answer

1. Not a complaints arms race. A code of conduct complaint aimed at a vote you disliked, or a debate you lost, will fail — and it will make the next well-founded complaint from anyone slightly harder to land. The Office of Local Government’s own words: complaints are “weaponised for political reasons, or to silence dissent from other elected representatives”, and “the volume of frivolous complaints is crowding out the ability of the OLG and the sector to adequately deal with councillors who abuse their office or cause serious governance problems.” In a published guideline in June 2025 the regulator went further: it has seen “councils’ codes of conduct increasingly being weaponised to discourage or punish councillors for making legitimate public comment.”

2. Not denial. The reflex to treat every complaint as an attack on the institution, and every complainant as a nuisance to be managed, guarantees the behaviour continues. Councils do not have a complaints problem. They have a behaviour problem that expresses itself as complaints.

3. Not deflection. “It’s vexatious.” “It’s political.” “It’s the same person again.” Sometimes all three are true. None of them is an answer to the conduct alleged, and none of them is available as a reason to decline a complaint that discloses a breach. Threshold provisions are for filtering; they are not a place to decide the merits quietly and call it triage.

4. And not the administrative round-and-round — the referral, the delegation, the re-delegation, the assessment of the assessment, the review of the decision to decline the review. The Office of Local Government’s own description of the process it administers: “expensive, overly legal, prone to political sparring and not timely, with average timeframes exceeding 12 months and more than 24 months if they are then referred to OLG for further investigation.”

5. Twelve months. For behaviour that could have been addressed with a conversation in the week it happened.

The confession inside the complaint

So here is the uncomfortable arithmetic at the centre of this.

Between 2020–21 and 2022–23, NSW councils generated 4,289 code of conduct complaints. Out of all of them, the Office of Local Government took action against 14 councillors by suspension or reprimand, referred 4 to the Civil and Administrative Tribunal, and disqualified one on ICAC recommendations.

Nineteen outcomes from four thousand two hundred and eighty-nine complaints. About four-tenths of one per cent.

4,289 complaints. 19 outcomes. Source: Office of Local Government (NSW), Councillor conduct and meeting practices: A new framework, September 2024, p. 4.

You can read that number two ways.

1. The sector’s preferred reading is that the complaints were mostly rubbish.

2. The other reading — the one that nobody administering a council wants to say out loud — is that a system generating four thousand complaints and correcting almost no behaviour is a system whose corrective mechanism has been switched off at the front end.

Both readings can be true at once. And both point at the same two clauses.

They are the officeholders in whom clauses 5.24 and 5.31 vest the power to resolve those complaints by

• explanation,

• counselling,

• training,

• mediation or

• an apology,

• without a finding against anybody.

If complaints are piling up unresolved and expensive, one of two things is true:

• either the power was never used, or

• it was used and it did not work.

Neither is a fact about the complainant. Both are facts about the administration.

There is a further problem, and it is structural rather than personal. In NSW, complaints about councillors go to the general manager.

Complaints about the general manager go to the mayor.

Neither the Local Government Act section that sets out the general manager’s functions (s 335) nor the section that sets out the mayor’s (s 226) imposes any duty at all to maintain standards of conduct or organisational culture.

The mayor is “the leader of the council and a leader in the local community” — an office, not an obligation. The general manager’s listed functions run to day-to-day management, implementing decisions, advising, appointing and dismissing staff. Conduct does not appear.

The two people the entire complaint system routes everything through have no statutory duty to fix behaviour, a discretionary power they need never exercise, and no obligation to disclose whether they exercised it.

Where this leaves Shoalhaven

Shoalhaven City Council is one of a small number of NSW councils under a live section 430 investigation.

It is under a Performance Improvement Order placing senior recruitment under OLG supervision until March 2027.

In 2021 it ranked ninth in the state for code of conduct reports to the Office of Local Government — 11 reports, $13,420 in cost.

Council is obliged, every year, to have its complaints coordinator report seven categories of code of conduct statistics — including total cost including staff costs — to the elected council. That report is a public document. It should be trivially easy for any resident to find the last three years of it and read the trend.

If Council believes it has a complaints problem, that report is the evidence.

• Publish it, prominently, with the numbers for the current term.

• And add the one line the Procedures do not require: how many complaints were resolved under clause 5.24 or clause 5.31 by explanation, counselling, training, mediation or an apology.

If the answer is a healthy number, this masthead will say so, plainly, on the front page.

If the answer is none, then the case is closed, and it was never about the complainants.

The honest caveats

Three, because a piece arguing for evidence should not skip the evidence that cuts the other way.

1. There is no Australian evaluation showing that councillor training reduces misconduct. None. The 2018 OLG induction and professional development guidelines are made under section 23A — councils must consider them. Councils must report participation in their annual reports. Nobody appears to collate or publish sector-wide compliance, and nobody has ever tested whether councils with better induction have fewer conduct problems. The case for mandatory training in NSW is currently a reasonable belief, not a finding. It should be argued as such.

2. The “quiet word” model has a real failure mode, and it is favouritism. The international literature on graduated, start-low-escalate-reluctantly regulation records exactly this risk: inconsistency, uneven application, and regulators pursuing the easy cases while avoiding the hard ones. A mayor who has a quiet word with allies and makes formal referrals about opponents would be doing precisely what clause 5.31 permits. Which is why the answer is not “abolish sanctions” — it is start low, escalate reluctantly, and mean it when you do, with the numbers published so the pattern can be seen.

3. And the current reform direction runs the other way. The Stage 2 proposal centralises complaint handling with OLG, routes complaints away from councils entirely, and creates a Privileges Committee of experienced mayors and councillors appointed by the Minister to review the less serious matters. Whatever its merits, it moves the correction further away from the room where the behaviour happens — at precisely the moment the evidence says proximity and speed are what work.

What would actually fix it

Four things, all available now, none requiring the Bill to pass.

1. Make informal resolution the default, not the discretion. Amend clauses 5.24 and 5.31 to require the general manager or mayor to consider alternative resolution first and to record, in writing, why it was not attempted.

2. Count it. Add an eighth category to clause 11.1: the number of complaints resolved by alternative means, broken down by method. What gets measured gets used.

3. Make induction and conduct training mandatory and reported by name — and then, for the first time in this country, evaluate whether it works.

4. Publish the cost data. OLG requires every council in NSW to report its code of conduct costs annually. It publishes none of the aggregate — while running a reform justified partly on cost. If cost is the argument, the number belongs in public.

None of that is radical. Most of it is a paragraph of drafting.

The alternative is what we have: a corrective system used as a courtroom, a courtroom that never reaches a verdict, and everyone involved insisting the problem is the person who filled in the form.

Sources

Office of Local Government, Procedures for the Administration of the Model Code of Conduct for Local Councils in NSW (2020), cll 5.24, 5.31, 6.13, 7.58, 11.1 · Model Code of Conduct for Local Councils in NSW (2020), Part 1 · Councillor conduct and meeting practices: A new framework (September 2024), pp. 4–6 · Policy Statement: Improving Councillor Accountability (June 2026), p. 13 · Free speech in local government in NSW: A guideline (June 2025) · Councillor Induction and Professional Development Guidelines (2018) · Local Government and Other Legislation Amendment (Councillor Conduct) Bill 2025, proposed s 733G · Local Government Act 1993 (NSW) ss 226, 335, 439, 440 · Wingecarribee Shire Council Public Inquiry, Commissioner’s Report (30 June 2022), p. 7 · Central Coast Council Public Inquiry Report (10 February 2022), p. 37 · Balranald Shire Council Public Inquiry Report (25 November 2019), pp. 18, 21 · Audit Office of NSW, Regulation and Monitoring of Local Government (May 2023) · ICAC, “Codes of conduct” · IBAC, Local Government Integrity Frameworks Review (2019) · Downe, Cowell & Morgan, “What Determines Ethical Behavior in Public Organizations: Is It Rules or Leadership?”, Public Administration Review 76(6), 2016 · Committee on Standards in Public Life (UK), Local Government Ethical Standards (2019), p. 28 · Local Government Commission (NZ), Local Government Codes of Conduct (September 2021), paras 30, 44, 51 · van der Heijden, Responsive Regulation in Practice (2020) · South Coast Register, “Shoalhaven Council in top ten code of conduct reports” (October 2021).

Please share this with 2 friends who care about Shoalhaven.

Donations to help keep the show afloat and pay for GIPA and legal costs
Donations to help keep Eye on Shoalhaven Council afloat If you get value from this work and would like to help, donations are still very welcome. At the moment, I am not seeking further donations for the GIPA account. We currently have enough in that fund to cover the information-access work already planned.However, there are still ongoing admin and software costs involved in keeping this work going, including more than $120 a month for AI tools that help with research, document analysis, writing and publishing. The posts will always remain free. But if you would like to help cover those running costs, you can donate here.

Want to understand how councilCode of Conductcomplaints really work?
I’ve released a plain-English PDF guide to help residents understand when a complaint is appropriate, who it should go to, what evidence is needed, and what mistakes to avoid.Buying the guide also helps fund Eye on Shoalhaven Council by contributing to the software, research and publishing costs behind the work.
Learn the process. Support independent local scrutiny. Available here:
https://4917955029345.gumroad.com/l/ycxrkd

Want to understandhow to use GIPA to request council information?
I’ve released a plain-English PDF guide to help residents understand when to make a GIPA application, how to ask for the right documents, what timeframes and fees apply, and what to do if access is refused.
Buying the guide also helps fund Eye on Shoalhaven Council by contributing to the software, research and publishing costs behind the work.
Learn the process. Support independent local scrutiny. Available here:https://4917955029345.gumroad.com/l/oaazmv

GIPA - information you have paid for or you are supporting me with
Here are the current applications to council, seeking documents. At the moment I have one matter before NCAT. I will fight for transparency.

Defamation
Disclaimer: This article provides analysis and commentary based on publicly available information and council transcripts. It does not make allegations of misconduct by any individual. Readers should verify details independently before drawing conclusions.

Use of AI
Here is a quick disclaimer, or explainer on the use of AI in the Eye.

Contact links for the Council
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On 23 September 2025, Shoalhaven City Council resolved to abolish its Arts Advisory Committee. The resolution was unanimous. The wording was “not proceed with the following committees and thank any remaining members for their service.”

This morning — 14 August 2026, ten months and three weeks later — Council’s website is still inviting people to join it.

• The page is live. It says the Committee “will meet at least four times a year, usually hosted at the Shoalhaven City Council administrative centre.” It says members “are appointed for a voluntary term of two years.” And it says, in the present tense: “Shoalhaven City Council is calling for applications from community representatives to join the Committee.”

• There is no committee. There has not been one since 23 September 2025, and it had not met since 23 December 2023 before that. A resident who fills in that form is volunteering for a body that has been dead for two and a half years and formally buried for one.

• That page is not a typo. It is the whole system in one URL.

Nobody can tell you how many committees Shoalhaven has

Start with the simplest question you could ask about a committee system: how many committees are there?

Shoalhaven City Council gives three different answers.

1. Answer one — the website. Council’s Council Committees page lists thirteen. Aboriginal Advisory. Inclusion & Access Advisory. Natural Area Volunteers Group. Rural Fire Service Strategic Planning. Mayor’s Relief Fund. Shoalhaven Local Transport Forum. South Coast Cooperative Library Service. Youth Advisory. Finance and Infrastructure Review Panel. Affordable Housing Action Taskforce. Land Use Planning & Development Advisory. Motor Sports Working Group. Low-Cost Rental Initiative Working Group.

2. Answer two — the last full resolution, CL24.289 of 28 October 2024. That one continued fifteen bodies, not thirteen. Eight of the fifteen are not on the website list at all.

3. Answer three — the current resolution, CL25.303 of 23 September 2025. That one continued eleven.

None of these three lists matches either of the other two.

The website list includes four bodies the current resolution does not mention: the Land Use Planning & Development Advisory Committee, the Low-Cost Rental Initiative Working Group, the Shoalhaven Local Transport Forum and the South Coast Cooperative Library Service. It omits two the resolution expressly continues: the Audit, Risk and Improvement Committee — the only committee Shoalhaven is required by law to have — and the Shoalhaven Heads Estuary Taskforce.

It also lists the Shoalhaven Local Transport Forum as a committee, on a page headed “Council Committees,” when Council’s own page for that body opens with the sentence: “The Shoalhaven Local Transport Forum is a technical review forum, not a committee of Council under the Local Government Act 1993.”

This is not a website problem. A council that cannot publish an accurate list of its own committees does not have a committee system. It has a filing cabinet nobody opens.

The actual number is sixty-five

Below the thirteen, or eleven, or fifteen, sits a much larger structure that almost never gets counted.

Twenty-eight Section 355 management committees. These are the volunteer committees that actually run things — Berry Showground, Milton Showground, Shoalhaven Rugby Park, Vic Zealand Oval, Worrigee Equestrian Common, the community centres at Bomaderry, Callala Beach, Culburra Beach, Huskisson and North Nowra, the halls at Burrill Lake, Callala Bay and Greenwell Point, the tennis courts at Culburra, Currarong, Erowal Bay, Huskisson and Shoalhaven Heads, the Ulladulla Slipway, the Huskisson Wharves, the former Pyree School. Each has a committee. Each committee has an executive. Each can spend up to $5,000 in a single transaction under delegation from Council.

Twenty-two Accredited Community Forums, as listed on Council’s website on 14 August 2026. Basin Villages Forum. Berry Forum. Milton 2538. Kangaroo Valley. Vincentia. Tomerong. Hyams Beach. Red Head Villages. Twenty-two resident bodies which Council formally accredits and which act, in Council’s words, “as a conduit between Council and communities on matters of local concern.”

Fifteen council committees — taking the resolution list and the website list together and counting each body once.

Sixty-five bodies.

By our estimate they generate around 360 meetings a year. That is more than one committee meeting for every working day of the year, in a local government area of 110,000 people.

What it costs — and why we had to work it out ourselves

Here is the report Council put to its own councillors in September 2025, asking them to decide the future of the committee system. This is the entire Financial Implications section, quoted in full:

“There are costs to the Council with respect to the administration, preparation of agenda, attendance by staff and Councillors at meetings, and actioning the request of the Committees. These costs vary dependent upon the operations of each Committee and frequency of meetings.”

That is it.

• No dollar figure.

• No staff hours.

• No FTE allocation.

• Not one number.

Now here is the entire Financial Implications section of the report Council put to councillors in October 2024, when it made the same decision about the same system:

“There are costs to the Council with respect to the administration, preparation of agenda, attendance by staff and Councillors at meetings, and actioning the request of the Committees. These costs vary dependent upon the operations of each Committee and frequency of meetings.”

The same paragraph. Word for word. Two years running.

Council abolished thirteen bodies across those two resolutions.

1. It has never published what any of them cost to run, and

2. therefore has never published what abolishing them saved.

3. Councillors voted unanimously, twice, on a system whose price they were not told and did not ask.

So we built the number. Every assumption is set out below so it can be checked, argued with and beaten. These are estimates on standard local-government loaded-cost assumptions, not Shoalhaven salary data. If Council publishes its own figures, we will replace ours with theirs and say so.

Two things about that table.

The first is that the cash figure — roughly $441,000 a year — appears nowhere in any Shoalhaven budget document, delivery program, operational plan or annual report. It is real money spent by real officers on real Tuesday nights, and it has no line.

The second is that the volunteer figure is the larger of the two, and it is not Council’s money at all. Around fourteen thousand hours a year of unpaid work by Shoalhaven residents flows into this structure. Using the NSW Government’s own 2025 NSW State of Volunteering Report methodology — 4.9 million NSW residents contributing 1.3 billion hours and delivering $205.3 billion in benefits to the NSW economy — those hours are worth closer to $2.2 million. We have used the conservative $45 figure. Either way, the community is the largest single contributor to a system nobody has ever costed.

For context on the per-meeting figure: this model puts a report-bearing committee meeting at about $2,900 in officer time, which is consistent with the $3,900 combined staff-and-councillor estimate this masthead published for the Land Use Committee’s 9 June meeting. The numbers have not moved. Council’s silence on them has not moved either.

The performance record: five committees, dead an average of nineteen months

Council’s own September 2025 report contains the most damning paragraph in the file, and it is not in the financial section. It is the list of committees that had stopped meeting:

• Shoalhaven Sports Board — paused since 29 November 2023

• Nowra CBD Revitalisation Strategy Committee — paused since 5 December 2023

• Arts Advisory Committee — paused since 23 December 2023

• Homelessness Advisory Committee — paused since 27 June 2024

• Shoalhaven Economic Growth Advocacy Group — paused since 31 July 2024

All five were formally wound up on 23 September 2025. That is an average of about nineteen months between a committee stopping and Council noticing in writing.

And Council did notice, earlier, and did nothing. On 28 October 2024 — eleven months before they were abolished — CL24.289 listed those same five bodies, plus the Motor Sports Working Group, as committees whose re-establishment would be “subject to separate report/s to the Council for consideration.”

So the sequence is: the committees stopped meeting in late 2023. The October 2024 annual review knew they had stopped and deferred the decision. The September 2025 annual review buried them. Two years, two reviews, and the only thing either review produced was a delay.

That is what an annual review is for. That is what this one did not do.

What best practice actually says — and it is not a secret

The remarkable thing about all of this is that nobody has to invent the answer. The standards exist, they are published, and in one case the NSW Government has already imposed them on Shoalhaven — for exactly one of its sixty-five committees.

The Audit, Risk and Improvement Committee is the control group.

Under the Local Government (General) Amendment (Audit, Risk and Improvement Committees) Regulation 2023, which commenced 1 July 2024, and the Office of Local Government’s Guidelines for Risk Management and Internal Audit for Local Government in NSW (November 2023, issued under s23A of the Local Government Act 1993), a council’s ARIC must have:

• terms of reference adopted by resolution, having regard to OLG’s model terms of reference (cl 216K)

• an independent chairperson and at least two independent members meeting published independence and eligibility criteria (cl 216C, 216D). A council may appoint one councillor member, who cannot be the Mayor and who cannot vote

• an express test for who is taken not to be independent (cl 216F)

• hard term limits — four-year terms, one reappointment, no more than eight years in any ten

• a performance assessment of every member before reappointment

• and an update to the governing body “after every committee meeting”

Now apply that list to the other sixty-four bodies at Shoalhaven. None of it applies. Not one element.

The rest of the guidance says the same thing in different words.

The Australian Institute of Company Directors, Not-for-Profit Governance Principles (3rd edition, April 2024), Principle 2, sets out seven things any committee charter should cover as a minimum: “The committee’s purpose; Its delegated authority (if any); Its members; Its chair; How often it will meet; How it will report to the board; How often it will be reviewed.”

Read the last two again. How it will report. How often it will be reviewed. They are on the AICD’s minimum list — the floor, not the aspiration — and neither exists for any Shoalhaven body outside the ARIC. The AICD also notes that committees “may be formed for a specific short-term project, such as a particular information technology project” — the sunset principle, stated by the country’s peak directors’ body.

CIPFA, the UK public finance institute, in its Position Statement: Audit Committees in Local Authorities and Police 2022, is blunter still. Committees should “report annually on how the committee has complied with the position statement, discharged its responsibilities, and include an assessment of its performance” — and, CIPFA adds, “The report should be available to the public.” And on size: “Large committees should be avoided.” CIPFA and SOLACE’s Delivering Good Governance in Local Government framework, updated by an addendum published 15 May 2025, requires an authority to “conclude whether their governance is fit for purpose.”

The Institute of Internal Auditors – Australia puts the test in one sentence: a committee’s objectives “should be clearly defined and documented in a charter or terms of reference, and its efficiency and effectiveness measured by reference to its objectives.”

And on size, there is actual evidence rather than assertion. Oliver, Hollingworth, Briner, Swann, Hinds and Roche, Effective and efficient committee work: A systematic overview of multidisciplinary literatures, published in Evidence Base in 2018 — a synthesis of 39 systematic reviews and nine further reviews — found that “in general, groups with six to twelve members tend to perform better than those in either smaller or larger groups.”

Shoalhaven’s Land Use Planning & Development Advisory Committee has thirteen voting members, and they are the Council. The Affordable Housing Action Taskforce has around seventeen or eighteen people in the room. The Finance and Infrastructure Review Panel has thirteen, three of them the CEO, the Chief Financial Officer and a Director.

And on the volunteer committees, the regulator has already told councils what to do.

Office of Local Government Circular 16-24, “Section 355 committees”, issued 15 August 2016, says this:

“There have been several recent cases of section 355 committees failing to meet basic governance and accounting standards.” “Committees should be able to demonstrate clear links with the goals of the council’s Delivery Program, while meeting required standards of governance.” “Following the upcoming local government elections, councils are encouraged to review the operations of all section 355 committees to ensure they continue to be fit for purpose, and their functions and expenditures align with the goals of the incoming council’s Delivery Program.”

Ten years ago the regulator told councils to review every s355 committee, after every election, against the incoming council’s Delivery Program. There has been an election since. Shoalhaven’s s355 committees were rolled over in one item in October 2024 with no review of any of them. Shoalhaven’s governing policy for its twenty-eight s355 committees is POL22/72, adopted in 2005. Its stated review date is 1 December 2024. It is now twenty months overdue. And the “Shoalhaven City Council’s Management Committee Guidelines” that POL22/72 requires all twenty-eight committees to comply with could not be located in Council’s policy register or document system at all.

Twenty-eight volunteer committees, spending public money under delegation, governed by a policy older than the iPhone that points to a rulebook we cannot find.

Why this is a known failure, not an unlucky one

None of this is novel. It has been documented, by auditors and inquiries, repeatedly.

The Queensland Audit Office, Insights on audit committees in local government (Report 10: 2024–25, tabled 28 March 2025), is the most directly comparable audit published in Australia. Of the 65 Queensland councils that had audit committees in 2023–24, “5 did not have an independent chair” and 37 did not have a majority of independent members. A further two councils had audit committees that did not meet at all during the year. Meeting durations “ranged from 25 minutes to 4 hours.” And on reporting back: “For 8 of the 10 audit committees we examined, we found the chair provided minutes to the council, not a report on its activities.” On whether committees did what their own terms of reference said: “4 of the 9 councils had risk management as a responsibility in their charters, however, there was no evidence of these committees reviewing risk assessments throughout the year.”

The Victorian Auditor-General’s Office, Audit Committee Governance (tabled 31 August 2016), found the thing that matters most: “only one of the audit committees we examined has a follow-up process in place for assessing whether completed management actions have effectively mitigated the risks and issues they are meant to address.” VAGO also found that “the biggest concern for committee members is the volume of the papers received and the time available to review that information prior to meetings,” and recommended formal independent performance reviews every three years.

*VAGO’s Oversight and Accountability of Committees of Management (tabled 5 February 2014)* examined nearly 1,200 community-based committees managing around 1,500 Crown land reserves — Victoria’s equivalent of the s355 layer. Its finding was aimed at the department that oversaw them, and it is the finding that should worry Shoalhaven: the department’s “governance of CoMs requires significant improvement.” The recommendations were risk-based categorisation of committees, skills-based appointment, and developing “an informed approach to understanding the funding needs of committees of management.” The failure VAGO identified was not in the volunteers. It was in the body above them.

The NSW Audit Office has said the same about NSW, every year. Local Government 2025 (published 28 January 2026) reports that “All councils have established an ARIC, but six did not have the required number of independent members,” under an executive-summary heading that reads simply: Not all ARICs cover the required aspects of council operations. Local Government 2021: “Twenty-seven councils do not have an internal audit function.”

The Office of Local Government’s own public inquiry into Balranald Shire Council (Commissioner Roslyn McCulloch, 25 November 2019) described a body that will sound familiar. Of the Bidgee Haven Hostel Committee: “It was described as a Section 355 Committee, however it did not make independent decisions about the Hostel but rather, was only authorised to consider matters for recommendation to the Council.” The Commissioner also recorded that “the Director of Corporate Services and other staff dreaded attending the meetings as they were often verbally attacked by Councillors and committee members.”

A committee that was a s355 committee in name only, decided nothing, and drove staff out of the room. That is what happens at the far end of a structure nobody reviews.

And the academic literature has a name for the pattern. Hendriks, Bolitho and Foulkes, “Localism and the paradox of devolution: delegated citizen committees in Victoria, Australia” (Policy Studies, 2013), studied exactly this structure and concluded that these committees “have devolved responsibility to perform managerial and administrative services, but, paradoxically, they have limited influence on the broader functioning of local democracy.”

Volunteers get the work. They do not get the influence. That is the finding, peer-reviewed, thirteen years old.

The seven systemic failures

Pull it together and the same seven faults appear across the whole structure.

1. One — no accurate register. Three lists, three answers, four bodies on the website that the current resolution does not mention, two in the resolution that the website omits, and a live recruitment page for a committee abolished eleven months ago.

2. Two — no cost. The same unquantified paragraph two years running. Sixty-five bodies, roughly 360 meetings, an estimated $441,000 a year in cash, and not one number in front of the people voting.

3. Three — no test for continued existence. Committees do not have to justify themselves. They have to not be removed from a list. Five sat dead for an average of nineteen months. The annual review that was meant to catch that saw it in October 2024 and deferred.

4. Four — no action tracking. There is no published action register for any Shoalhaven committee — no resolution, officer, due date, status, evidence of result. This is precisely the failure VAGO singled out in 2016. Council’s own April 2026 Land Use Committee resolution on the Nowra Precinct Renewal Strategy simply vanished from the papers by June.

5. Five — advisory bodies with no power, and a governing body advising itself. POL25/91 says in terms that the Land Use Committee “does not have the power to incur expenditure (directly or indirectly), or the power to bind Council,” and that its voting members are “the Mayor and all elected Councillors.” That is the Council, in a different room, on a different night, unable to decide anything. Referring a matter to it adds no expertise, no independent member, no community voice. It adds a date.

6. Six — no independence anywhere it matters. One committee in sixty-five has an independent chair, and only because the NSW Government made it compulsory. Everywhere else the chair is the Mayor or a councillor. The Affordable Housing Action Taskforce is chaired by “the Mayor or one (1) Councillor.” The Finance and Infrastructure Review Panel is chaired by the Mayor. Meanwhile the one body that did seat three people with lived experience of homelessness and required a chair who was neither a councillor nor the CEO — the Homelessness Advisory Committee — is the one that got abolished.

7. Seven — the governance documents have expired. POL22/72 is twenty months past its review date. The Management Committee Guidelines it mandates cannot be found. Attachment 1 to both committee resolutions — the document containing every committee’s purpose, delegation, sitting fees, membership and quorum — is published “under separate cover” and is not retrievable by the public at all. The single most useful document about Shoalhaven’s committee system is the one you cannot read.

Council named this risk itself. Here is the Risk Implications section of its own October 2024 report, quoted in full:

“There is reputational risk to the Council if Committee operations are ineffectual and not considered to be representative or aligned to identified expectations as outlined in the Council’s adopted strategic plans.”

Council wrote down the risk. It has never once tested for it.

What should happen: sunset the lot

Not reform in place. Reform in place is what the annual review is supposed to be, and the annual review has now failed twice in a row while five committees rotted.

Council should resolve that every committee, panel, taskforce, working group, reference group and forum ceases to exist on 30 June 2027 unless it is re-established by a separate resolution on its own report.

One body per report. No bundles. No lists of fifteen. Each report must answer six questions, and Council should refuse to consider a report that does not:

1. What decision does this body make that Council cannot make itself? If the answer is none, it is a briefing, and Council already holds briefings.

2. Who sits on it that is not already in the chamber? If the answer is nobody, it is the Council under another name.

3. What did it cost last year — officer hours, councillor hours, volunteer hours, dollars?

4. What did it resolve in the last twelve months, and what happened to each resolution? Published as an action register: resolution, officer, due date, status, evidence of result.

5. Which Delivery Program objective does it serve? This is the regulator’s test from Circular 16-24, and it has been sitting there since 2016.

6. Who chairs it, and why is that person independent of the matter?

Then apply the standards that already exist. Every surviving body gets terms of reference adopted by resolution, with the AICD’s five minimum elements. Every body gets a three-year sunset, not a 2029 review date that nothing triggers. Every body reports its resolutions and their status to the Ordinary meeting, not just its minutes — the exact gap the Queensland Audit Office identified. Every body that is genuinely advisory gets a chair who is not a councillor, because a Council chairing the body that advises it is not advice.

And the twenty-eight s355 committees get the review OLG asked for ten years ago: a current policy, findable guidelines, a risk-based categorisation, and an honest published statement of what Council asks of those volunteers and what it gives them in return.

Some committees will survive this and should. The Aboriginal Advisory Committee, the Inclusion and Access Advisory Committee and the Youth Advisory Committee were all singled out in Council’s own September 2025 resolution for work to “enable [them] to effectively fulfill their purpose.” Eleven months on, no such report has come back. Those three bodies carry the voices this council hears least. They are the ones that deserve resourcing, not the ones that deserve the axe.

The mechanism that is missing: what the CEO should be required to bring back

This is the part nobody has proposed, and it is the part that would stop this recurring.

Under *section 335 of the Local Government Act 1993*, the general manager’s functions include “to advise the mayor and the governing body on the development and implementation” of the council’s plans, and “to ensure that the mayor and other councillors are given timely information and advice” — information and advice sufficient to let them do their job. Under section 223**, the governing body’s own duties include “to keep under review the performance of the council, including service delivery.”

Right now that duty is discharged, as to sixty-five bodies, by a single unquantified paragraph repeated verbatim year on year.

Shoalhaven should establish, by resolution, an annual Committee Effectiveness Report from the Chief Executive Officer to the Ordinary meeting. Not an administrative item. A standing accountability report, in the same class as the quarterly budget review. It should contain, for every committee, panel, taskforce, working group and forum:

• The register. Every body, its instrument of establishment, its terms of reference reference number, its date of last review, its expiry date. One table. Published. Reconciled against the website, so the Arts Advisory Committee problem cannot happen twice.

• The cost. Officer hours, councillor hours and community volunteer hours per body, and the dollar cost of the officer time. Councils cost their tenders and their fleet. They can cost their meetings.

• The output. Number of meetings held against meetings scheduled. Number of items requiring a decision against items received or noted. Number of resolutions made, and the status of every one — the action register, published as an attachment.

• The effectiveness statement. For each body, the CEO’s own written advice: is this committee delivering its terms of reference, and if not, why not. A recommendation to continue, amend or wind up — with reasons, and with the courage to say wind up.

• The independence and membership position. Who chairs, whether the chair is independent of the matter, vacancies unfilled, how long members have served, and whether a skills gap exists.

• The compliance position. Which committees are operating without current terms of reference, which policies have passed their review dates, which guidelines cannot be produced.

And one more thing, because it is the point of the whole exercise: the report should nominate at least one body for abolition every year, or explain why none warrants it. A review that never recommends removal is not a review.

None of this is exotic. It is what the ARIC regime already requires for one committee — report to the governing body after every meeting, assess performance before reappointment, adopt terms of reference by resolution. All that is being asked is that the standard NSW applies to Shoalhaven’s audit committee be applied to the other sixty-four.

The CEO is the only person positioned to write it. He has the officer time data, the meeting records and the directorate view. What he does not currently have is a resolution requiring him to hand it over. That is what Council should give him.

The burden is easy to discharge

We may have this wrong, and we would rather be corrected than right.

If Shoalhaven can produce an accurate register of its committees, a costing of the system, an action register showing committee resolutions tracked to completion, and evidence that any of these sixty-five bodies has generated advice that changed a decision — publish it. We will print it in full, unedited, at whatever length, and correct this article at the top, in Council’s wording, under our own name.

What we do not accept is a third year of the same paragraph.

Because here is where it lands. Around fourteen thousand hours a year of Shoalhaven residents’ unpaid time goes into this structure. People give up their Tuesday nights to run a hall in Greenwell Point, keep the tennis courts open at Currarong, manage a showground at Milton, sit on a forum in Kangaroo Valley. They are the largest contributor to the system by a distance, and they are contributing to something the Council that created it cannot describe, cannot count and has never costed.

They deserve to know their hours are buying something. At the moment, nobody at Shoalhaven City Council can tell them that they are.

What you can do

Email your ward councillors and the Mayor at council@shoalhaven.nsw.gov.au and ask five specific questions.

One. Why is Council’s website still calling for applications to join the Arts Advisory Committee, which Council resolved to abolish on 23 September 2025?

Two. What did the committee system cost Shoalhaven in 2025/26 — in officer hours, councillor hours and dollars — and why has the Financial Implications section of the annual committee report been the same unquantified paragraph two years running?

Three. Will Council resolve that every committee, panel, taskforce and working group ceases on 30 June 2027 unless re-established by a separate resolution on its own report?

Four. Will Council require an annual Committee Effectiveness Report from the Chief Executive Officer, containing a register, a costing, an action register and a recommendation to continue or wind up each body?

Five. POL22/72 — the policy governing twenty-eight volunteer management committees — passed its review date on 1 December 2024. When will it be reviewed, and where are the Management Committee Guidelines it requires those committees to follow?

The next Ordinary meeting is Tuesday 25 August 2026. The agenda is published roughly a week before on Council’s website. If the committee system is not on it, that absence is itself the story.

No adverse finding has been made against any councillor or officer named here, and none is implied. Council’s own reports record that the committee structure is reviewed annually and that six dormant bodies were wound up in September 2025 — that is a genuine improvement, and it is recorded here as one.

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Five Times in One Business Paper

There is a rectangle of grass on Bishop Drive at Mollymook that has been a public reserve since 21 April 1994. Three thousand one hundred and fifty square metres, zoned RE1 Public Recreation, classified Community Land — the strongest protection a council can put over a piece of ground.

On Tuesday night councillors will be asked to hand over every square metre of it to Transport for NSW for the Milton–Ulladulla bypass.

The report on that decision contains this line:

“Community engagement is not required.”

It is not the only one. Read the 25 August business paper front to back and five separate land items carry the same message.

• None of it is unlawful. That is exactly what makes it worth reading closely.

The five

CL26.184 is the bypass acquisition — three parcels. Two are small and unremarkable: 240 square metres of a disused sanitary depot on Slaughterhouse Road, Milton, and 45 square metres beside the Princes Highway at Ulladulla. The third is the whole of the Bishop Drive reserve. Section 45 of the Local Government Act means Council cannot simply sell community land, so Transport for NSW must compulsorily acquire it instead. Compensation will be negotiated. Nothing in the report commits Council to replacing the reserve with anything.

CL26.181 dedicates five unformed road reserves at Vincentia — parts of Duncan Street, The Wool Road, Argyle Street, Albion Street and Montague Street — to National Parks & Wildlife Service. The mechanism matters. Gazettal under the National Parks and Wildlife Act 1974 extinguishes a council road, in the report’s own words, “without the need for a separate road closure process under the Roads Act 1993.” The Roads Act route requires public notice. This one does not. The report is candid about it: “Community consultation has not been undertaken as part of this process, as the report is administrative in nature.” The decision it implements traces back to a masterplan adopted in December 2010.

CL26.183 transfers three Crown roads into Council ownership at Callala Beach, Cambewarra and Worrigee. “Community consultation is not required for operational matters.”

CL26.182 classifies three new drainage lots at Matron Porter Drive, Mollymook, as Operational rather than Community land. This one was exhibited, 23 June to 21 July. No submissions were received.

CL26.186 is a proposed planning agreement over a six-lot subdivision at The Links Road, Nowra Hill, currently before the Land and Environment Court. The public version of that report has no background, no risk assessment, no policy implications and no financial implications — every one of those headings points to the confidential report instead. “Community consultation is not required at the letter of offer stage.”

What the paper does not join up

Here is a connection the business paper leaves the reader to make.

CL26.183 asks Council to take a Crown road reserve off Tannery Road, Cambewarra, into Lot 1 DP1160346. Its own risk section explains why: to consolidate “surplus Crown road with adjoining Council Operational land for future sale.”

Turn to page 66. Tannery Road, Cambewarra — including Lot 1 DP1160346 — sits on the list of properties in the rescission motion over the July land sales. Council is being asked, in the one sitting, to enlarge a parcel and to argue about whether that parcel should be sold. Neither report mentions the other.

Two numbers that do not match

Two items carry identifiers that do not reconcile.

• In CL26.184, the recommendation asks councillors to agree to the acquisition of “Part Lot B DP 1207847”. The background, the figure and the land details all describe “Lot B DP160491”. Same road, different title reference.

• In CL26.186, the purpose describes DA2021/1374. The internal consultation section describes DA2024/1374.

These are most likely typographical. But it is the resolution that becomes the legal instrument, and it is the resolution carrying the odd number. Someone should ask before the vote, not after. The attention to detail in papers continues to fall, and I have raised the role of the CEO in getting these reports correct, it is a failing that falls to him.

The counter-example

It would be easy to write this up as a council that never listens. The same agenda disproves it.

• Anker Avenue Reserve at Mollymook was recommended for potential divestment in the draft Community Infrastructure Strategic Plan. Locals organised, the Ulladulla forum backed them, and a petition passed 500 signatures. The CEO’s note in CL26.194 confirms the recommendation “has been changed to maintain provision of the reserve”.

That is the whole argument in miniature. Consultation changed the outcome where it happened. In five other items on the same night, it was not required at all.

Why it matters

None of these five decisions is a scandal. Each has a defensible reason — administrative tidy-up, statutory acquisition, live court proceedings, stormwater drainage. Taken one at a time they are unremarkable, and most of them probably should proceed.

Taken together, they are how a council’s land holdings quietly change shape without anybody having to be asked. Roads extinguished by gazettal. A 1994 public reserve absorbed by a state agency. New land classified Operational before anyone thinks to argue for Community. An agreement settled inside a court file.

The test is not whether the law was followed. It is whether the Shoalhaven that exists in twenty years is one the public got a say in building.

Council meets at 5.30pm on Tuesday 25 August in the Council Chambers, Bridge Road, Nowra. The meeting is webcast.

Here is a link to the papers.

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The conversation then turns to voting blocs, the independence of individual councillors, the different interests of Shoalhaven’s wards and why well-argued positions do not necessarily win in a chamber controlled by a reliable majority.

We also examine community consultation: what Council has done well, why younger residents and Aboriginal advisory groups can struggle to be heard, and how consultation can reach beyond the same small group of regular participants. Cr Boyd discusses the Community Infrastructure Strategic Plan, engagement with local schools and the need for residents to act rather than wait for Council to approach them.

Other issues include:

• the proposed transfer of management responsibility for the Ulladulla lighthouse reserve to Council
• the site’s environmental, tourism and suicide-prevention importance
• the difficulty of attracting younger people to stand for Council
• the time demands placed on councillors
• the likely issues facing Ward 3 at the next election
• whether Cr Boyd intends to seek another term
• the role of online journalism in encouraging civic participation
• concern about councillors receiving hundreds of pages of business papers shortly before meetings.

Cr Boyd concludes by urging residents to email councillors, attend accredited community forums and take practical action when an issue matters to them.

On 26 May 2026, in debate on his motion on forest access and logging jobs, Cr Brett Steele was reported by About Regional as telling those campaigning for a Big Spotty Flora Reserve that their wish had already been granted:

“Your wish was granted 50 years ago by the Forestry Corporation.”

On 13 August 2026, on 2ST’s Mornings with Graeme, a caller discussing the same tree — the 72-metre spotted gum in North Brooman State Forest — told listeners:

“Big Spotty has been protected for 50 years by the forest industries.”

Eleven weeks apart. The same fifty years, attached to a slightly different actor: the Forestry Corporation the first time, “the forest industries” the second.

On neither occasion did anyone in the room ask where the number came from.

Here is what the record actually shows.

The Corporation’s own account

Forestry Corporation of NSW publishes a page about North Brooman State Forest. It says this:

“During the last harvesting operation in 2005, a 60-metre radius protection zone was established and ahead of any future operations protections will again be put in place.”

Note both halves. The Corporation dates the zone to 2005 — twenty-one years ago, not fifty — and its commitment for the future is prospective, not historical.

The same page lists the compartment’s harvesting history:

• 2005, and

• before that 1978, 1966, 1951,

• “as well as prior to the 1950s”.

The 1978 operation falls inside the fifty-year window the claim asserts.

And the Forestry Corporation of NSW did not exist fifty years ago.

It was constituted as a state-owned corporation on 1 January 2013 under the Forestry Act 2012. Its predecessors were the Forestry Commission of NSW and State Forests of NSW.

The Corporation’s own language is careful. Its spokespeople say the tree

“has for many years been recognised as an important tree”, that it is “well protected and will never be harvested”.

Its southern regional manager, Lee Blessington, said in 2023:

“I want to reassure the community that the tree known as Big Spotty is well protected within an area of forest that will never be harvested.”

Every one of those statements is defensible.

None of them says fifty years.

The protection that does exist is a 60-metre radius — about 1.1 hectares — inside a compartment of 266 hectares.

There is

• no flora reserve,

• no reservation,

• no heritage listing.

The zone sits inside Forestry Corporation’s own harvest planning.

Separately, the Coastal Integrated Forestry Operations Approval requires at condition 64.2(a) that all “giant trees” be permanently retained, and that is a condition of a statutory approval enforced by the EPA rather than an internal policy — so the tree is not defenceless.

But what the fifty-year claim asserts is a different and much older thing, and no document supports it.

And here is the part that cuts against this masthead’s own argument, so it goes in. The tree is still standing. It stood through four recorded harvesting operations and whatever came before them. Whatever the industry did or did not formally gazette, it did not cut down the biggest spotted gum anybody has found. A person who says “the industry looked after this tree” is saying something true and worth saying.

A person who says it has been formally protected for half a century by a body that has existed for thirteen years is saying something else.

One qualification on the quote itself, and it belongs up here. The Steele quote comes from About Regional’s report of the 26 May meeting. It does not appear in the Milton Ulladulla Times report of the same meeting, and this masthead has not checked it against the minutes or the webcast.

Cr Steele has been asked to confirm the wording, and if he says it is wrong, that correction will run in this position at this length.

The bigger claim, and what the state’s own numbers say

The fifty years is the small one. The load-bearing claim in the broadcast was about fire.

The argument ran that once state forest becomes national park, management stops — that decisions are made by “somebody sitting in front of a computer that’s never even walked the ground”, by people “sitting in Sydney and doing spreadsheets and doing modelling”.

The NSW Government publishes the number that tests this.

“On average, NPWS undertakes around 75% of the total hazard reduction burning effort recorded in New South Wales, despite managing around 9% of the state.”

That is the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, on its Enhanced Bushfire Management Program page. The NSW State of the Environment report puts it higher over a longer run: between 2012–13 and 2020–21, national parks carried 79 per cent of all hazard reduction burning in the state.

The tenure table in that report runs from 2005–06. Its four most recent years read:

Set those against the estates — about 7.6 million hectares of national park and reserve, and about two million hectares of state forest. National parks ran at between 0.4 and 1.8 per cent of the estate treated per year. State forests ran at between 0.3 and 1.4 per cent. In every one of the four years, the national park rate was the higher of the two. The two lowest years for both tenures are 2019–20 and 2020–21, for the obvious reason.

In 2023–24, NPWS completed

• 170 hazard reduction burns covering about 90,000 hectares.

• The RFS reported over 139,000 hectares treated statewide by all agencies and land managers.

• The two figures are compiled differently and the ratio between them is indicative rather than exact — but it is not a small share.

On fire trails, section 62W of the Rural Fires Act 1997 imposes a duty on the owner or occupier of land carrying a designated or registered fire trail to construct and maintain it to the Fire Trail Standards. That duty runs across tenures, subject to a limited exception for some occupiers of public land. The 2020 NSW Bushfire Inquiry specifically recommended the state’s fire trail condition reporting be built on a “tenure-blind basis”.

And in 2019–20, the fires took what NPWS puts at 38 per cent of the NSW national park estate. Forestry Corporation reports around 830,000 hectares of native state forest burnt, which is about 44 per cent of the 1.9 million hectares it reports. Those are two agencies using different mapping, and the second percentage is this masthead’s arithmetic on the Corporation’s figures rather than a published number. It is not, on any reading, evidence that national parks burnt worse.

One concession, and it matters. The 2020 Bushfire Inquiry did not find that hazard reduction always works. Its words were: “Previous prescribed burning and hazard reduction activity appears to have reduced fire severity in some instances, but in others it appears to have had no effect on the severity and spread of the fires.” Anyone who says hazard reduction is a solved problem is overclaiming, in either direction.

The moment worth pausing on

The caller described reading a statement by an ecologist — “one of the ecologists that the Greens love to trot out” — to the effect that prescribed burning increases erosion. His response, on air:

“And as soon as I read that, I thought, ‘You have never been shown how to do it properly.’”

The statement he dismissed is supported in the published literature.

The NSW Office of Environment and Heritage’s own review, Fire and Soils, records that while low-severity fires generally have less impact than intense bushfires, “severe erosive events following low severity prescribed burns have been recorded in Australia”.

A 2014 study of ten prescribed burns across 505 field sites in the Southern Mount Lofty Ranges found visible sediment movement at 52 per cent of burnt sites against 4 per cent at unburnt controls.

The magnitude was minor — sediment generally moved less than 100 millimetres, and around five metres at most where it crossed a burn perimeter.

The finding is “widespread but small”, not “catastrophic”. One of that paper’s co-authors is Professor Ross Bradstock, a senior fire ecologist whose work is cited by fire agencies on both sides of this argument.

A 2012 review in the International Journal of Wildland Fire concluded that catchment-scale studies of prescribed burns “usually report minimal impacts”, but that measurements at smaller scales “suggest that large changes to hydrologic properties and processes do occur”, and that an Australian debris-flow case demonstrates “large catchment-scale impacts are possible”.

WaterNSW manages its Sydney catchment burns around exactly this risk. Its catchment assets manager, Mary Knowles, in 2023:

“We don’t want conditions too hot so that the burn consumes all the groundcover, and ash and sediment run into our lakes during the next rain event… We don’t light up along the lake edge or in our creek lines to protect water quality and these riparian ecosystems.”

So: the ecologist’s statement is directionally correct and needs qualification. The correct response to it is “yes, and the magnitude is usually minor”. The response given on air was that the person who said it had never been taught to burn properly.

That is the method in one exchange. Not a rebuttal — a remark about the standing of the person speaking. And it went to air without a follow-up question.

The consultation that did happen

The interviewer put the premise himself:

“Does it disappoint you… that there hasn’t been much consultation as far as the general public is concerned?”

The NSW Independent Forestry Panel — Peter Duncan AM, Professor Mary O’Kane AC and the Hon. Mick Veitch — was appointed on 26 August 2024 with terms of reference covering the sustainability of forestry operations, environmental and cultural forest values, timber demand, plantations, Private Native Forestry, carbon and climate. Public submissions ran from 12 September to 13 October 2024.

That is a large consultation, and the South Coast was squarely inside it.

Now the part that makes the grievance real, because it is real. The Government did not publish the Panel’s stakeholder consultation report until 7 May 2026 — roughly sixteen months after receiving it.

The Considerations Report the Government said in May 2026 the Panel “has been tasked to produce” has not appeared. The Forestry Industry Action Plan, on the Cabinet Office’s own account, was as at May 2026 yet to be drafted. No completion date has been announced.

So the honest position is not “there was no consultation”.

It is that people were consulted at length nearly two years ago and have been told almost nothing since. That is a legitimate complaint about a government. It is a different complaint from the one that was aired, and it points at a different address.

What is true, and should be said

A fact-check that only finds errors on one side is not a fact-check. Several things said on that broadcast hold up, and some of them matter more than the things that don’t.

The hectares are close to right. The caller said the existing national park estate in question is around 800,000 hectares and the proposal would increase it by about 50 per cent. The proposal’s figures, as reported, are 824,000 hectares of existing park plus 365,000 hectares of state forest — an increase of about 44 per cent. Near enough that nobody should be scoring a point off it.

The access losses are real, and proponents tend to skate over them. If state forest becomes national park in NSW, then on the published policies of the agencies involved:

• Recreational hunting under the R-Licence ends. It is not available in national parks.

• Firewood collection permits end. Collection in national parks attracts on-the-spot fines.

• Dogs are excluded. Forestry Corporation says “dogs are welcome in all state forests across NSW”. NPWS policy is that you cannot bring a pet into a national park, with narrow exceptions.

• Camping stops being free and unbooked. Around 10 per cent of NPWS campgrounds are proposed to sit in a free tier; the rest are fee-based and booked.

• Horse riding goes from default-permitted to permitted-where-designated.

• Beekeeping tightens sharply: existing licensed apiary sites can continue, new sites are permitted only where NPWS is satisfied they will “clearly benefit the conservation of nature in the park”, and a renewal “can only apply to the same (or lower) number of sites”.

Those are real changes to how real people use the bush, and a resident who is angry about them is not confused. They are also, notably, not fire management.

The description of cool burning is broadly sound. The caller’s account — flames no higher than the knee, fire that trickles rather than runs — matches how cultural burning practitioners describe the practice. Victor Steffensen, on SBS’s Insight in 2016, described “how you can burn where fire behaves like water and it trickles through the country and it doesn’t burn everything”. The “no faster than walking pace” formulation could not be sourced to any practitioner document, but the substance of the description is not in dispute.

And one claim that simply isn’t right. Native forestry, the caller said, is “the only 100% renewable resource we have”. Section 17 of the Renewable Energy (Electricity) Act 2000 lists hydro, wave, tide, ocean, wind, solar, geothermal-aquifer and hot dry rock among eligible renewable energy sources — along with energy crops and wood waste, which is the honest version of the point and should be conceded.

But in December 2022 the Commonwealth amended the regulations to remove biomass from native forest from the definition of eligible wood waste, with existing accredited power stations grandfathered.

Native forest is the one wood category deliberately excluded from new accreditation under the Renewable Energy Target.

And the proposal itself

One thing needs saying plainly, because the entire broadcast proceeded on the opposite assumption. The caller spoke of rights that “will be taken away once it’s all changed”.

The Great Southern Forest is a proposal by a conservation organisation, the National Parks Association of NSW. It is not government policy.

• No bill has been introduced.

• No reservation process has commenced.

• No NSW Government assessment of it has been announced.

The Association is still running a supporter letter campaign asking local MPs to back assessment of these forests for protection — which would be a strange thing to campaign for if assessment had begun.

Compare the Great Koala National Park, which was announced, by the Premier, on 7 September 2025, with a harvesting moratorium from the following day, three advisory panels, a published boundary and a funded transition package. Nearly a year later it is still not formally reserved. That is what a government decision to create a national park looks like in NSW. The Great Southern Forest has none of it.

The pressure on the industry is real, but it is coming from somewhere else.

Forestry Corporation’s Hardwood Forests division recorded normalised losses of $15 million in 2022–23 and $29 million in 2023–24 on the segment figures in its own annual report.

Conservation groups have reported a further loss of about $32 million in 2024–25 from the most recent annual report; this masthead has not read that segment note directly and states the figure on that basis.

Whatever ends native forest harvesting on the South Coast, a proposal with no government sponsor is not currently the leading candidate.

Why this one is on the record at all

Mornings with Graeme runs weekdays from 9am to midday on 2ST.

It is one of three locally originated weekday programs on the station;

• from 4pm the weekday schedule carries Jonesy & Amanda and The Christian O’Connell Show, both ARN metropolitan programs.

This masthead checked, thoroughly, whether the program is archived. The station’s own website carries no podcast, catch-up or on-demand link for it — only a live stream.

The /podcasts/ and /podcast/ paths return 404. ARN operates a “2ST Coast” channel on Audioboom; the only content on it is breakfast material.

There is no feed for Mornings with Graeme on Apple Podcasts, Omny or Podbean.

What survives of these interviews generally survives because somebody else chose to keep it. The fullest archive of Graeme Day’s work sits, of all places, on Commonwealth ministerial transcript pages — Stephen Jones in July and November 2024, Bill Shorten in October 2024, Catherine King, Chris Bowen. Beyond that it is scattered Facebook posts by guests and bystanders.

This segment is the exception, and that is precisely why it is here:

• the station itself posted a transcript of it.

• There is no systematic archive, no feed, no standing catch-up — but on this occasion the text was published, which makes this one segment checkable when almost none of the others are.

This is normal for regional commercial talk radio and it is not a scandal. Say it clearly: no rule requires a station to archive its talkback, and most don’t. But it has a consequence, and the consequence is the point. A claim made on that program cannot ordinarily be checked by anyone who wasn’t listening. It cannot be quoted accurately, corrected, or held against what the speaker said the week before. It is broadcast into a room with no record.

That is why this segment is worth the trouble.

• It is a rare, checkable sample of what is actually said on air about these forests — and one of the things said on it was a number that had already been used in the council chamber eleven weeks earlier.

The method, not the label

It would be easy to reach for a label here, and this masthead is not going to. But one fact belongs on the record, and an earlier draft of this article had it wrong.

Graeme Day is a former Shoalhaven City councillor.

Council’s own published history of its elected representatives records him elected for First Ward at the election of 14 September 1991, carried through the terms that follow, and then an entry reading “Graeme Day (Resigned 1996)”, with “John Anderson (Elected 14/12/96)” recorded as the councillor who filled the vacancy. He does not appear in the 1997–98 listing. The published history gives no reason for the resignation.

The chronology fits the man. 2ST is a Nowra station and Day has been with it since about 1984 — so through those years he was broadcasting to the Shoalhaven and sitting on its council at the same time. The move to the Southern Highlands operation came later.

Two things this masthead cannot yet state. Whether he was re-elected at the 9 September 1995 election is unresolved: the council history’s ward columns are ambiguous on the point, and the NSW Electoral Commission’s online results do not reach back past 2008. And no reason for the resignation appears anywhere in the published record. Council has been asked for the minutes recording the casual vacancy and the December 1996 by-election, and Cr Day’s successor’s election date is the only hard marker available until they arrive.

It was thirty years ago, and nobody should be made to carry a 1996 resignation around for life. This masthead is not asking anyone to.

But thirty years or not, it is not nothing. The man conducting an unchallenged interview about a land-use fight that has twice been to the floor of Shoalhaven City Council is a former member of that council. That is a disclosure a listener is entitled to, and it was not made on air.

It also cuts the other way, and that should be said just as plainly. The line the segment closed on — that the people on the ground should be the ones telling the experts — comes from somebody who has been inside the building as well as outside it. He is not a man shouting at a process he has never seen. If anything it makes the failure to test a single claim harder to explain, not easier: he knows what an unexamined assertion does to a debate, because he has sat in a chamber where they are made.

On party alignment the record is genuinely thin, and this masthead is not going to fill the gap with inference. Council’s published history does not record ticket or party affiliation, and the Electoral Commission’s archive does not cover 1991 or 1995, so what he stood on is unknown. In the present day there is no public record of him holding party membership or endorsing a candidate, and his interview record cuts across the usual lines: he pressed Labor’s Stephen Jones and Catherine King hard on council development delays, and he was notably sympathetic to Chris Bowen on climate — “Do you get frustrated sometimes that you’re trying to get the message out about the planet and people just won’t accept it?” A reader who expects a talkback caricature will not find one in those transcripts.

What the transcript of this segment does show is a specific and describable practice.

• The interviewer supplied the premise of the first substantive question — that there had been little consultation — when there had been a formal state process with more than 1,700 submissions.

• No claim the caller made was tested.

• And the segment closed on the proposition that the people on the ground “should be telling the ecologists exactly what happens and when it happens”.

That last line is the one worth sitting with. Nobody should sneer at it. A man who spends weeks of every year burning his own country knows things no model contains, and any fire authority that does not want to hear from him is worse at its job for it. Local knowledge and published research are not opponents, and the best fire management in this country is happening where the two are in the same room.

But the segment ran the argument the other way — that the ground beats the study, so the study need not be answered. And on the one occasion in the whole broadcast where the two could be compared directly, the study had the better of it. Prescribed burning does measurably increase erosion, usually at small magnitude.

The NSW Government’s own review records severe erosive events after low-severity burns; the field studies find the movement widespread but minor.

That is a real finding, and the answer to it is a number, not a remark about who has been taught what.

This masthead has put to Cr Steele the question of what the “50 years” was based on and whether the words reported by About Regional are accurate; and to 2ST the question of whether it will archive, or provide on request, recordings of segments in which claims about public land are made. Any response will be published in full.

Where two agencies’ figures are not directly comparable, this article says so. Where a calculation is this masthead’s own rather than a published figure, this article says so. Where a claim made on air is accurate, this article says that too.

Sources

The broadcast

• 2ST, Mornings with Graeme, 13 August 2026. Transcript published by the station; copy held by this masthead.

Fire management

• NSW DCCEEW, Enhanced Bushfire Management Program — https://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/topics/fire/managing-fire/bushfire-management-program

• NSW State of the Environment, Fire 2021 (Table 22.4, hazard reduction by tenure) — https://www.soe.epa.nsw.gov.au/all-themes/land/fire-2021

• NSW State of the Environment, Protected Areas and Conservation 2021 (reserve estate area) — https://www.soe.epa.nsw.gov.au/index.php/all-themes/land/protected-areas-and-conservation-2021

• NSW DCCEEW Annual Report 2023–24 — https://www.nsw.gov.au/sites/default/files/2024-11/dcceew-annual-report-2023-24-volume1-240302.pdf

• NSW RFS Annual Report 2023–24 — https://www.rfs.nsw.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/274645/RFS-Annual-Report-2023-24.pdf

• Rural Fires Act 1997 (NSW), ss 62W, 63 — https://legislation.nsw.gov.au/view/whole/html/inforce/current/act-1997-065

• Final Report of the NSW Bushfire Inquiry, 31 July 2020 — https://www.bluemountains.org.au/documents/bushfires/final-report-of-the-nsw-bushfire-inquiry-31jul20.pdf

• NPWS, understanding the impact of the 2019–20 fires — https://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/topics/fire/park-recovery-and-rehabilitation/recovering-from-2019-20-fires/understanding-the-impact-of-the-2019-20-fires

• Forestry Corporation NSW, fire impact of 2019–20 — https://www.forestrycorporation.com.au/operations/fire-management/fire-impact-of-2019-20

Erosion

• Tulau & McInnes-Clarke, Fire and Soils, OEH 2015 (2nd ed. 2016) — https://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/sites/default/files/2025-01/fire-and-soils-170691.pdf

• Morris, Bradstock, Dragovich, Henderson, Penman & Ostendorf (2014), International Journal of Wildland Fire23(1) 104–116 — https://connectsci.au/wf/article/23/1/104/23505/Environmental-assessment-of-erosion-following

• Cawson, Sheridan, Smith & Lane (2012), International Journal of Wildland Fire 21(7) 857–872 — https://connectsci.au/wf/article-abstract/21/7/857/23412/

• WaterNSW, “Burns protect Sydney’s drinking water catchment”, 3 May 2023 — https://www.waternsw.com.au/news/featured-stories/2023/burns-protect-sydneys-drinking-water-catchment

• Victor Steffensen, SBS Insight, 16 February 2016 — https://volunteerfirefighters.org.au/victor-steffensen-pretty-simple-really

Big Spotty and the motions

• Forestry Corporation NSW, North Brooman State Forest — https://www.forestrycorporation.com.au/operations/about-our-harvesting-operations/native-forestry/north-brooman-state-forest

• NSW EPA, Coastal Integrated Forestry Operations Approval conditions (cl 64.2) — https://www.epa.nsw.gov.au/sites/default/files/18p1177-coastal-ifoa-conditions.pdf

• About Regional, “Coastal council slams globalist ideologies, calls for protection of forest access”, 2 June 2026 — https://aboutregional.com.au/coastal-council-slams-globalist-ideologies-calls-for-protection-of-forest-access/507389/

• Milton Ulladulla Times, “Shoalhaven City Council backs local logging jobs, forest access”, 29 May 2026 — https://www.ulladullatimes.com.au/story/9256129/shoalhaven-city-council-backs-local-logging-jobs-forest-access/

• Milton Ulladulla Times, “The fight over the South Coast’s giant world record holder”, 17 May 2023 (compartment area) — https://www.ulladullatimes.com.au/story/8188886/the-fight-over-the-south-coasts-giant-world-record-holder/

• Region Illawarra, “Bid to set extra protection for iconic Big Spotty fails to win support”, 30 March 2026 — https://regionillawarra.com.au/bid-to-set-extra-protection-for-iconic-big-spotty-fails-to-win-support/89646/

• Beagle Weekly, Lee Blessington statement, May 2023 — https://www.beagleweekly.com.au/post/forestry-thinks-a-60m-exclusion-zone-around-the-world-s-biggest-spotted-gum-will-save-it

Consultation and the proposal

• NSW Government, “NSW to consult on Forestry Industry Action Plan”, 26 August 2024 — https://www.nsw.gov.au/media-releases/nsw-to-consult-on-forestry-industry-action-plan

• NSW Government, Independent Forestry Panel stakeholder report — https://www.nsw.gov.au/departments-and-agencies/cabinet-office/resources/independent-forestry-panel-stakeholder-report

• NSW Government, “Stakeholders have their say on the future of forestry in NSW”, 8 May 2026 — https://www.nsw.gov.au/ministerial-releases/stakeholders-have-their-say-on-future-of-forestry-nsw

• ARR News, Independent Forestry Panel process, 14 January 2025 — https://arr.news/2025/01/14/nsw-independent-forestry-panel-process/

• National Parks Association of NSW, The Great Southern Forest — https://npansw.org.au/the-great-southern-forest/

• NSW Government, Great Koala National Park — https://www.nsw.gov.au/environment-land-and-water/great-koala-national-park

Access

• Forestry Corporation NSW, activities in state forests — https://www.forestrycorporation.com.au/visit/activities

• NPWS, pets in parks policy — https://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/topics/parks-reserves-and-protected-areas/park-policies/pets-in-parks

• NPWS, beekeeping policy — https://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/topics/parks-reserves-and-protected-areas/park-policies/beekeeping

• NPWS, Improving camping in NSW national parks, April 2025 — https://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/sites/default/files/2025-04/improving-camping-new-south-wales-national-parks-250094_0.pdf

• DPIRD, where can I hunt — https://www.dpird.nsw.gov.au/hunting/where-can-i-hunt

Renewability and finances

• Renewable Energy (Electricity) Act 2000 (Cth), s 17 — https://classic.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/rea2000283/s17.html

• Clean Energy Regulator, wood waste and energy crops guidance — https://cer.gov.au/schemes/renewable-energy-target/eligibility-renewable-energy-target/wood-waste-and-energy-crops-guidance

• Forestry Corporation NSW Annual Report 2023–24 (Hardwood Forests segment) — https://www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/tp/files/190170/Forestry%20Corporation%20of%20NSW%202023-24%20Annual%20Report.pdf

• Nature Conservation Council, reporting on the 2024–25 result — https://www.nature.org.au/forestry_corporation_multi_million_dollar_loss

2ST

• 2ST, Mornings with Graeme — https://www.2st.com.au/show/mornings/

• ACMA, local content on regional commercial radio — https://www.acma.gov.au/local-content-regional-commercial-radio

• Chris Bowen, interview with Graeme Day, 2ST South Coast — https://minister.dcceew.gov.au/bowen/transcripts/interview-graeme-day-2st-south-coast

• Shoalhaven City Council, History of Shoalhaven Shire / City Council — Elected Representatives, TRIM record D11/114227 — https://doc.shoalhaven.nsw.gov.au/LinkRedirector/Link?Record=D11%2F114227

• RadioInfo, “Graeme Day marks 40 years in radio”, 8 July 2024 — https://radioinfo.com.au/news/unwavering-commitment-to-listeners-and-the-southern-highlands-graeme-day-marks-40-years-in-radio/

• Radio Today, “Celebrating 50 years of 2ST” — https://radiotoday.com.au/celebrating-50-years-of-2st/

Somewhere in a design office right now, engineers are sizing the upgrade to Berry’s sewage treatment plant. The capacity they settle on will decide how many houses that town can take for the next thirty or forty years. Get it wrong and Berry is stuck with it, and ratepayers pay twice to fix it.

On 9 June, Shoalhaven’s Land Use Planning & Development Advisory Committee noticed. Following a presentation on Berry’s future, it resolved to ask the Director – City Development for a report to the September or October Ordinary meeting on expediting Berry’s planning, so future township growth can be built into the current upgrade design.

It is the only properly constructed action on the committee’s recent record, and it is worth saying plainly: that is good work, and it could save ratepayers a great deal of money.

It is also the whole case against the committee.

Because look at what that resolution actually is.

• It could not do it itself.

• It has no power to.

Eleven elected members sat in a room and voted to write a note to the same thirteen people, sitting in the same chamber, three months later.

The question Cr Boyd asked out loud

She has now asked it twice.

On 28 April 2026, with the committee’s report in front of Council for adoption, Cr Gillian Boyd stopped before moving it:

“Before I move that, and I don’t wish to move it, I would like to question why we have this committee. We had a meeting two weeks ago, I think.”

Mayor Patricia White’s response was that the chamber was not the place for it:

“I’m not sure whether we can question whether we have this committee. I don’t think this is the right arena. We’re just voting on a report of the Land Use Planning and Development.”

Set aside the procedural point for a moment.

A councillor asked what one of Council’s own committees is for, during the item at which that committee’s work was being adopted, and was told that was the wrong arena. If that is not the arena, it is worth knowing which one is.

On 29 July 2026, Cr Boyd asked again, this time about sending a matter to the committee:

“I just have a question. I’m wondering why this is being referred to a committee that includes all of us here. Because we’re all here and able to put a contribution in now if we need to. And I’m just wondering why it’s going to that committee to which we all belong. It seems a bit repeating.”

That is the argument in a sentence, and no one has answered it.

In fairness, one councillor did put the case for the committee. At the same meeting, Cr Luciano Casmiri argued for using it:

“That’s why I am suggesting that we change the recommendation to the report to be referred to the Land Use Committee which was established exactly for that purpose.”

The committee has a defender, and he was arguing for more scrutiny of a technical document, not less. That is a legitimate position and it should be recorded as one.

But it does not answer Boyd. If the committee’s membership is the councillors — and Boyd’s description of it from the floor, unchallenged in the room, was “a committee that includes all of us here” — then referring a matter to it does not add a single mind to the problem. It adds a date.

What the referral actually did

This is not abstract. On 29 July 2026, Council had two floodplain risk management studies and plans in front of it — St Georges Basin (CL26.162) and the Lower Shoalhaven River (CL26.163). Staff recommended adoption of both.

Cr Casmiri and Cr Steele altered both recommendations so the plans go to the Land Use Planning & Development Advisory Committee first. CL26.162 carried six votes to five. CL26.163 carried eight to three.

So the committee’s most consequential function this year has not been advice. It has been delay — a place to send two documents the majority was not ready to adopt. Every councillor entitled to examine those plans in committee was already in the room, holding them, on the night.

There is nothing improper in that. Councils defer things; deferral is ordinary business and sometimes it is the right call. The question is why a standing committee with its own agenda, minutes, staff report cycle and officer attendance is the vehicle for it, when a workshop, a briefing, or simply deferring the item to the next Ordinary meeting would put the same people in front of the same documents at no additional cost.

The 9 June meeting, item by item

The meeting ran 44 minutes. Four substantive items. Three of them — the update on the new land use planning scheme, the Statewide Community Participation Plan submission, and the minutes of the Shoalhaven Development Industry Reference Group — were received, noted, or receipt acknowledged.

Every one of the three staff-authored reports arrived with a recommendation that required members to decide nothing.

The single decision of the night was generated from the floor, off the back of an external consultant’s presentation, not from the papers.

That is the definition of a briefing, held under committee formalities.

The quarter-million dollars nobody asked about

Buried in the financial implications of the planning scheme report is a fact Council deserves credit for disclosing: its $250,000 application to Round 4 of the Regional Housing Strategic Planning Fund was unsuccessful.

There is no record of a single question about it. Which technical studies are now unfunded? Which milestones move? Will Council substitute general revenue? Is Round 5 being pursued?

The report says the studies will be “managed within Strategic Planning’s budget for 2026/2027” — with no dollar figure, no list, no costing. The only number attached to the work program is the money Council didn’t get.

A submission that had already closed

The committee acknowledged Council’s staff submission on the NSW Statewide Community Participation Plan. Submissions closed on 3 June. The meeting was 9 June.

That submission carried a substantive position in Council’s name — a warning that the draft state plan “shifts too much engagement away from development assessment, which could leave communities feeling excluded and reduce trust in the planning system.”

Councillors had been given the draft in advance. The report records “no responses received.” A committee of elected members contributed nothing to a submission about community participation, then noted it after the door had shut.

The job description it didn’t do

The terms of reference are not vague. This committee is to advise Council on priorities between projects, on the need for additional projects, and on resourcing for development application processing.

No DA data of any kind was presented on 9 June — no determination times, no backlog, no staffing numbers — even though the committee’s own papers name the Minister’s Statement of Expectations and the monitoring of Council’s DA performance as an external driver.

Nor was there any progress reporting against the State’s target of 4,900 additional homes in the Shoalhaven by 30 June 2029. Two years into a five-year target, the papers cite the number as context and never return to it. The papers also forecast demand for at least 14,000 new dwellings over twenty years. Milestones were reported. Results were not.

No prioritisation question was put either, despite at least seven concurrent workstreams competing for one directorate’s budget.

Where do resolutions go?

In April, this committee recommended Council endorse the Nowra Precinct Renewal Strategy as an advocacy focus and present it to the three local MPs. By June it had vanished from the papers entirely — no report on whether Council adopted it, no word on whether any MP has been briefed.

Across the April and June meetings, six substantive items produced two directive outcomes and zero reports closing out a previous committee resolution. There is no action register in the agenda. Nothing tracks a commitment from decision to result.

The chamber already knows the argument

Six months ago, this same council debated exactly this question about a different body — and half the chamber made the case for us.

On 27 January 2026, Council voted to establish the Low-Cost Rental Initiative Working Group (MIN26.6). This is a different body and should not be confused with the Land Use Committee. But the debate is the point.

It carried seven votes to six.

FOR: White, Clancy, Kemp, Casmiri, Steele, Wilkins, Proudfoot

AGAINST: Dunn, Tribe, Norris, Boyd, Krikstolaitis, Killian

Cr Ben Krikstolaitis put the objection this way:

“So I think as a concept the idea of this as a sub-committee is great but I just can’t see it as an affordable committee when we’ve already got one doing this.”

Another speaker in the same debate — whose identification on the recording is not clear enough to attribute, so we do not — argued that “we have limited resources, and we’re diluting them by setting up multiple committees... we risk not really getting the diversity that we need and creating a bit of an echo chamber... duplication of resources.”

Duplication of resources. An echo chamber. Six councillors voted against creating a new committee on that reasoning. The reasoning applies with more force, not less, to a standing committee whose membership is the Council.

How it came to exist

Here is what we cannot find, and it matters.

There is no resolution on the accessible record establishing this committee on its own merits — no report making the case for it, no debate on whether Shoalhaven needed it, no division. By the time it appears in this term’s business it is simply there, tabling reports and being moved by councillors including Boyd herself.

Council’s committee structure for the 2024–2028 term was settled on 28 October 2024 in a single item, CL24.289, which continued thirteen committees at once. That is how most council committees survive: not because anyone re-argued the case, but because nobody removed them from a list.

The next time that list is reviewed is the moment to ask the question Cr Boyd has now asked twice.

What we think should happen

Wind it up.

Not because the committee has done harm. Because on the evidence of its own papers it does three things, and none of them needs it:

One — it receives and notes. Three of four items on 9 June required no decision. That is a briefing. Council already holds briefings and workshops, and they cost less.

Two — it holds matters. The floodplain referrals of 29 July put two staff-recommended plans into a queue. Deferral to the next Ordinary meeting achieves the same thing without a second meeting, a second agenda and a second set of minutes.

Three — very occasionally, it asks a good question. Berry. And the only thing it could do with that question was ask the Ordinary meeting to answer it — which any councillor could have done directly, by notice of motion, at any meeting of the year.

The meeting of 9 June cost an estimated $3,900 in staff and councillor time. That is an estimate only, built on standard local-government loaded-cost assumptions, not Shoalhaven salary data, and it is modest money.

The waste isn’t the dollars. It is eleven elected members in a room with a real mandate, being told things — and a directorate preparing reports for an audience that has no power to act on them.

If Council disagrees, the burden is easy to discharge. Show us the decisions this committee has made that Council could not have made itself. Show us the advice it generated that changed an outcome. Publish an action register — resolution, officer, due date, status, evidence of result — and let the next twelve months settle it. If a committee cannot demonstrate that in a year, it is not a committee. It is a habit.

What you can do

Email your ward councillors and the Mayor at council@shoalhaven.nsw.gov.au and ask four specific questions.

One. Will the Berry sewage treatment plant report be delivered to the September or October Ordinary meeting, and will it include capacity and growth figures?

Two. Which planning studies are now unfunded following the unsuccessful $250,000 Regional Housing Strategic Planning Fund application, and will Council fund them from general revenue?

Three. What has the Land Use Planning & Development Advisory Committee decided in the past twelve months that Council could not have decided itself — and will Council publish a standing action register so April’s Nowra Precinct Renewal Strategy resolution, and every future one, is tracked to completion?

Four. When is the committee structure adopted under CL24.289 next up for review, and will the case for this committee be re-argued on its merits?

If Berry’s future concerns you, the September and October Ordinary meeting agendas are the documents to watch. They are published roughly a week before each meeting on Council’s website. If the Berry report isn’t listed, that absence is itself the story — and worth an email the same day.

Committee meetings are livestreamed and the papers are public. The next Land Use Planning & Development Advisory Committee agenda is the place to look for one thing: a report that asks councillors to decide something, rather than to note it.

No adverse finding has been made against any councillor or officer named here, and none is implied. Cr Casmiri’s stated position in support of the committee is set out above in his own words.

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Next Thursday afternoon, at four o’clock, the Shoalhaven City Mayor’s Relief Fund Committee will meet to receive the annual accounts of a charitable fund holding $86,775.

The agenda gives the location as “Email Meeting.”

I am not sure what that means, what is the difference between an email and and email meeting?

• There will be no room,

• no gallery,

• no minute taker writing down what anyone said.

The committee — which by its own terms of reference includes the Mayor, all thirteen councillors, the Chief Executive Officer or nominee, the Director City Performance and three appointed members — will receive the financial statements of a public charitable fund by circulating them.

Last year there was at least a meeting. It ran from 4:00pm to 4:06pm.

• Four councillors attended out of thirteen entitled to.

• The accounts were received by consent, with no questions recorded and no vote split.

This year, six minutes was apparently more than the item required.

What the fund is

The Shoalhaven City Mayor’s Relief Fund is

• not a council program and it is not ratepayers’ money.

• That distinction matters, and it is the first thing to get right.

It is a public charitable fund held in trust, established, in council’s own words on the agenda’s front matter,

“as a public fund for the relief of persons in Australia who are in necessitous circumstances and it is intended that the public be invited to contribute to the fund.”

A person is in necessitous circumstances, the agenda continues,

“where his or her financial resources are insufficient to obtain all that is necessary, not only for a bare existence, but for a modest standard of living in the Australian community.”

Those circumstances

“may result from a disaster caused by flood, fire, drought, tempest or other calamity.”

It is also a deductible gift recipient.

The Australian Business Register lists “SHOALHAVEN CITY MAYORS RELIEF FUND” as an Item 1 DGR under Shoalhaven City Council’s ABN 59 855 182 344, endorsed and current since 1 July 2000. Donations to it are tax deductible. That is a Commonwealth endorsement, and it comes with Commonwealth conditions: the Australian Taxation Office requires such a fund to “exclusively, or at least chiefly, relieve persons who are in necessitous circumstances,” and says it “doesn’t provide other benefits.”

Money came into this fund from the

• Currowan fires,

• from the drought,

• from Rotary clubs and

• building companies and

• ordinary residents who gave because a mayor asked them to.

So the question this article asks is a narrow one, and it is not about ratepayers. It is about donors. Where did their money go?

The number that hasn’t moved

Note 2 of the financial statements breaks the $86,775 into four buckets:

Look at the top line. Funds from previous campaigns went from

• $70,064 to $75,188

• an increase of $5,124.

Interest earned in the previous year was $5,124.

The two figures are identical. The disaster-relief money grew by precisely the amount of interest the fund earned the year before, and by nothing else.

• No new money went into it.

• No money came out of it.

The same arithmetic holds for the rest of the fund, and it holds exactly.

Take the Mayor’s Giving Box balance at the start of the year, $3,231.

Add every dollar of donations received during the year, $10,499.

Subtract every dollar of donations paid, $5,597, and every dollar of “other” expenses, $1,018.

You get $7,115 — the closing Giving Box balance, to the dollar.

Which means that in 2025/26, every dollar that came into this fund and every dollar that left it passed through the Mayor’s Giving Box, the Christmas appeal.

Council staff told last year’s meeting that

“the Mayors Giving Box is reconciled separately to the rest of the Mayors Relief Fund, which accounts for the surplus remaining in the Mayors Giving Box.”

That is the reconciliation, and the accounts confirm it.

Nobody received relief

Note 1 to the statements is headed “Statement of donations paid.” It reads, in full:

Donations from the Mayor’s Giving Box were paid to the following organisations:

That is the entire expenditure of the fund on relief, across two financial years.

• Five organisations one year, three the next. Twelve thousand nine hundred and twenty-nine dollars in total.

• All of it from the Christmas appeal.

• All of it to organisations.

The statements record no payment to any individual in necessitous circumstances in either year.

Council’s own webpage for the fund still carries an application form. It tells residents they may qualify if they are

“a full-time resident in the Shoalhaven (including renters), and whose home, infrastructure or outbuildings have been damaged or destroyed,”

or

“a tradesperson, including apprentices, who have had vehicles, equipment, or tools damaged or destroyed.”

It says council

“has established a Committee to make sure the payments go to individuals and trades people who have been directly impacted and need it the most.”

Across the two years in these accounts, that committee made no such payment that appears in the financial statements.

We do not know whether that is

• because nobody applied,

• because everybody who applied was refused, or

• because the fund is simply no longer promoted.

• The accounts do not say, and nobody at the meeting asked.

Where the money came from

Now look at the income side.

Two things jump out, and the second is the story.

1. The first: in 2024/25, a public charitable fund in a disaster-prone region received one hundred dollars in donations for the entire financial year, and ran a deficit of $2,994. The published analysis circulating on this fund missed the deficit. It is there in the comparative column.

2. The second: the $10,499 received in 2025/26.

On 25 November 2025, council and the South Coast Register announced that the Manildra Group had donated $10,000 to the Mayor’s Giving Box appeal, covering 2025 and 2026.

Total donations received by the fund that financial year: $10,499.

Which leaves, at most,

$499 from everybody else in the Shoalhaven.

We put that as an inference rather than a finding, because the accounts do not itemise donors. But the arithmetic is not subtle.

In a local government area of more than 110,000 people, in a year that included a

• Christmas appeal promoted in the newspaper and on the radio,

• the general public appears to have given a tax-deductible disaster relief fund something in the order of five hundred dollars.

The purpose clause on the agenda says

“it is intended that the public be invited to contribute to the fund.”

They were invited. On this evidence, they did not come — and one company did the work of an entire community.

The $11,000 that isn’t in the accounts

Now the part that needs care, because it is the part most likely to be got wrong.

At the meeting of 21 August 2025, the minutes record:

The Mayor thanked staff for preparing the report and provided context around the money spent on Christmas gifts, advising that in 2024 Manildra donated $11,000 specifically towards Christmas celebrations for the community, around half of which was spent in 2024, with the remaining amount for 2025.

And:

The Mayor further advised that during the month of September she will be writing to Manildra and other organisations in regard to the Mayors Giving Box for Christmas.

An $11,000 donation in 2024, tied to a specific purpose, disclosed verbally, in passing, at a six-minute meeting.

Here is the difficulty. That $11,000 does not appear in either year shown in these financial statements.

• Donations received in 2024/25 — the financial year that runs from 1 July 2024 to 30 June 2025, and therefore contains Christmas 2024 — were $100.

• Donations received in 2025/26 were $10,499, and $10,000 of that is publicly attributed to a separate Manildra donation announced in November 2025.

Council’s own media release of 22 November 2024 records that the Manildra Group made a “substantial donation” to that year’s Giving Box appeal.

So either the $11,000

1. arrived before 30 June 2024 and sat in the Giving Box across two Christmases — which the balances are consistent with

2. or it is recorded somewhere these statements do not show.

For an organisation with deductible gift recipient status, that is not a small thing.

Manildra, stated plainly

The published analysis flagged the Manildra donation and marked the question of Manildra’s dealings with council as needing proof. It can now be answered, and it should be answered carefully, because the answer is easy to overstate.

What is true: Shoalhaven Starches Pty Ltd, part of the Manildra Group, operates the Bomaderry plant. It is one of the largest private employers in the Shoalhaven. On 4 June 2025, the NSW Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure accepted an enforceable undertaking from Shoalhaven Starches after it commenced construction of a rail line extension without development approval and not in accordance with the conditions of its project approval, in breach of the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act. Under that undertaking the company committed $154,756.86, including $25,000 to Shoalhaven City Council for a Bomaderry Creek project and $31,275 to Shoalhaven City Council for the Reid Park upgrade.

What is equally true, and must be said: the consent authority for the Shoalhaven Starches expansion is the State, not Shoalhaven City Council. Council did not approve the rail line, did not fail to enforce against it, and did not accept the undertaking. Manildra is a long-standing local donor to many causes and has supported the Giving Box for years. There is no evidence before us of any impropriety by the company, by the Mayor, or by any councillor or officer.

What follows from both: a company that gives money to a fund the Mayor chairs is also, in the same period, a company paying $56,275 to that council under a state enforcement instrument, and a major customer of council’s water and sewer utility. None of that is wrong. All of it is a reason for the gift to be documented in writing rather than mentioned in a verbal aside — a deed of gift, a stated purpose, a restricted-fund line in the accounts, an acquittal.

Who chooses?

The recipients are

• Salt Care,

• Lyrebird Pre-School and

• Cullunghutti Aboriginal Child and Family Centre.

They are good organisations doing real work; Salt Care runs homelessness services in Nowra and Bomaderry that this masthead has written about before with admiration.

The question is not whether they deserve it. The question is how they were chosen.

Council’s own media release announcing the Giving Box states that the then Mayor “selected these groups” because they “support our most vulnerable within the Shoalhaven.”

• There is no published policy for this fund’s grants.

• No application form for organisations.

• No published criteria.

• No assessment record.

Nothing in the accounts or the minutes explains why

• Salt Care received $5,332 in one year and

• $4,597 in the next, or why

• Early Childhood Education Services & Training and Schools Online received $500 each in 2024/25 and nothing in 2025/26. (Maybe it is because Council voted to, in essence, close them down?)

The Office of Local Government’s advice on financial assistance under section 356 of the Local Government Act 1993recommends councils adopt a policy covering

“application forms, assessment processes with supporting information requirements, public notice procedures, clear assessment criteria, and mechanisms to ensure funds are used as specified.”

Whether section 356 formally reaches a DGR trust fund administered by council is genuinely arguable — it is not council’s own money. But that is precisely the gap.

If section 356 does not apply, then nothing applies, and a fund holding $86,775 in donated money distributes it on no published basis at all.

Three smaller things

1. The $1,018. “Other” expenses were $1,018 in 2025/26 and $885 in 2024/25. Nothing itemises them. In 2025/26 that is 15.4 per cent of everything the fund spent. For a fund this size, unexplained administration is a meaningful share of the whole.

2. The fund is not growing. In February 2023, committee papers put the fund at $79,954.22, split across a Drought Relief account ($225.67), a 2019 Fires account ($25,036.09), a General account ($51,410.09) and the Giving Box ($3,282.37). Three and a half years later it stands at $86,775 — up $6,820.78. Interest alone in the last two years was $9,096. Excluding interest, the fund has gone backwards.

3. The homelessness appeal. On 30 January 2023 council launched “A Year to Thrive Together,” an appeal through this fund for people facing homelessness and cost-of-living pressure, with a tiered distribution plan that contemplated raising more than $40,000. Council’s own launch material cited 6,251 Shoalhaven households paying more than 30 per cent of income on housing. Judged against the fund’s balance before and after, that appeal raised very little. Nobody has reported back on it.

What we are not saying

This masthead has been wrong before and has corrected itself in print, so it is worth being explicit about the limits of this piece.

• We are not saying money is missing. Every figure reconciles.

• We are not saying ratepayers’ money has been misused. There is no ratepayer money in this fund, and the widely circulated framing of $86,775 as “public funds” that “ratepayers deserve answers about” is wrong. It is donors who deserve answers.

• We are not saying the recipient organisations are undeserving, or that the Mayor has done anything improper, or that Manildra has.

• We are saying that a tax-deductible public fund for people in necessitous circumstances is sitting on $75,188 it has not touched in two years, spending only its Christmas money, recording no payment to any individual, receiving $499 from the public it was established to serve, and having its accounts received without a meeting.

The questions

For the Mayor, as Chairperson of the committee:

1. Is there a written policy, with published criteria, governing how organisations are selected to receive money from the Mayor’s Giving Box? If not, will you adopt one?

2. In which financial year was Manildra’s $11,000 donation received, and where does it appear in the fund’s financial statements? Was there a deed of gift or written funding agreement?

3. How many individuals applied to the Mayor’s Relief Fund for assistance in 2024/25 and 2025/26, and how many were assisted?

4. What is the $1,018 in “Other” expenses?

5. What became of the “A Year to Thrive Together” appeal, and how much did it raise?

6. Why is $75,188 in disaster relief donations being held in term deposits rather than distributed, and what is the plan for it?

7. Why is the annual receipt of the accounts of a $86,775 charitable trust being conducted as an email meeting?

For the thirteen councillors who are all members of this committee: nine of you did not attend last year. The papers will land in your inbox this week. Someone should ask.

The meeting is at 4:00pm on Thursday 20 August 2026, by email. The business paper is publicly available on council’s InfoCouncil website, ref 18447.

Corrections welcome — this masthead publishes them.

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Donations to help keep the show afloat and pay for GIPA and legal costs
Donations to help keep Eye on Shoalhaven Council afloat If you get value from this work and would like to help, donations are still very welcome. At the moment, I am not seeking further donations for the GIPA account. We currently have enough in that fund to cover the information-access work already planned.However, there are still ongoing admin and software costs involved in keeping this work going, including more than $120 a month for AI tools that help with research, document analysis, writing and publishing. The posts will always remain free. But if you would like to help cover those running costs, you can donate here.

Want to understand how councilCode of Conductcomplaints really work?
I’ve released a plain-English PDF guide to help residents understand when a complaint is appropriate, who it should go to, what evidence is needed, and what mistakes to avoid.Buying the guide also helps fund Eye on Shoalhaven Council by contributing to the software, research and publishing costs behind the work.
Learn the process. Support independent local scrutiny. Available here:
https://4917955029345.gumroad.com/l/ycxrkd

Want to understandhow to use GIPA to request council information?
I’ve released a plain-English PDF guide to help residents understand when to make a GIPA application, how to ask for the right documents, what timeframes and fees apply, and what to do if access is refused.
Buying the guide also helps fund Eye on Shoalhaven Council by contributing to the software, research and publishing costs behind the work.
Learn the process. Support independent local scrutiny. Available here:https://4917955029345.gumroad.com/l/oaazmv

GIPA - information you have paid for or you are supporting me with
Here are the current applications to council, seeking documents. At the moment I have one matter before NCAT. I will fight for transparency.

Defamation
Disclaimer: This article provides analysis and commentary based on publicly available information and council transcripts. It does not make allegations of misconduct by any individual. Readers should verify details independently before drawing conclusions.

Use of AI
Here is a quick disclaimer, or explainer on the use of AI in the Eye.

Contact links for the Council
I encourage you to take up your democratic right and engage with councillors, here are the contact details - send them questions or comments, text is best as they tend to ignore emails.Here is the link to the contact information.

Questions you can ask the Mayor at meetings or if you see her!
Here are some questions community members have submitted that you can use if you’re at a public meeting with the Mayor. Please keep your question polite and to the point, and if you get an answer, follow up afterwards in writing to confirm what you heard and reduce any “misunderstanding” later. Then let the Eye community know what she said so we can keep a shared record. Here’s the link to the questions

Our Policies
Check out our policies herehttps://s.craft.me/07xnRagW9JJSad