COMMENT John Van Klaveren
I like Keith Fagg.
He’s a decent bloke, his heart is in the right place and he has a good business track record.
As a journalist, I’ve had some great conversations with him. I’ve always been straight with him and he with me.
That’s a good start for anyone embarking on public life but, as it has transpired, it’s not enough to handle the vagaries of the directly elected mayoral system we have been supplied.
Mr Fagg became the middleman in a tug of war between business and lobby groups and council itself. The consequent stress on him was too much.
Council’s ward priorities funding system has become a red herring in all of this. The bottom line is that the money is council’s and council can spend it as councillors see fit.
The system began as a means of internally redirecting council funds into wards and away from the city centre. The money was always aimed at council infrastructure, with ward councillor input.
Council’s mistake was to allow a purely internal funding protocol to be subject to increasing outside influence.
Council now has a choice: take the system public, complete with guidelines and application system, or take the funds back inside as they were originally.
The arguments about transparency and accountability only apply if the system becomes public. What we have at the moment is an evolved hybrid that is neither one nor the other.
Expectations have grown to the point where organisations with no claim to the funds are protesting they don’t get a look in.
That’s either greed or naivety because the money was never intended to fund their programs or projects, worthy as they might be.
It’s also a bit rich because some of them are sitting on substantial financial reserves, have money-making divisions and earn state and federal funding.
The real issue for our $500,000 mayoral by-election revolves around what we have learned from all this.
Will we make the same mistake? Or will we lower our expectations and understand that a directly elected mayor is not the prime minister of Geelong.
