Bills

Local Government (Administration of Councils) Amendment Bill

Second Reading

Adjourned debate on second reading.

(Continued from 31 October 2019.)

The Hon. A. PICCOLO (Light) (15:36): I indicate that I am the lead speaker on this bill, and I rise to indicate that the opposition will be supporting this bill in the house and that there will be no need to go into committee.

Following troubling reports from both the Ombudsman and the Auditor-General last year, the Labor opposition was quick to demand that the minister act and place the District Council of Coober Pedy in administration. Belatedly, the minister did invoke section 273 of the Local Government Act 1999, declaring the council to be a defaulting council on 24 January this year, but unfortunately that was after the elections took place.

Since this period, I am advised that the administrator, Mr Tim Jackson, a highly respected, long-serving local government executive officer, has worked diligently to rectify the financial standing and the operations of the council. I am also aware that he has recently appointed a new CEO to the council of Coober Pedy. However, under the act a council may only be placed in administration for a maximum period of 12 months, which will end for the Coober Pedy council in January next year.

Appropriately, therefore, this bill makes specific provision for the period of administration of the Coober Pedy council to be extended until the end of the current council electoral term in November 2022. Given the significant financial mismanagement identified by the Auditor-General, as well as the complexities involved in the council providing both electricity and water utility services, this provision appears eminently sensible. The 70 per cent community support for this extension, as captured by an Electoral Commission poll, lends further weight to this clause.

This bill also eliminates an anomaly of the act whereby councillors retain their allowances in spite of a council being declared defaulting and placed in administration. On the bill's general extension of the maximum period a council can be in administration from 12 to 24 months, Labor reserves its right to consult with the local government sector further prior to the bill being debated in the Legislative Council.

Additionally, we also need to consider a circumstance where the end of an administration ends with an election year. While we appreciate that the serious matters for which a council can be declared defaulting may require a two-year period to rectify, we are also aware that democratic governance should be restored to councils as responsibly possible. With those few comments, I indicate that we will be supporting this bill through this chamber.

Mr HUGHES (Giles) (15:39): I also rise in fulsome support of the bill. I think it was back in 2016 or 2017, in an interview on ABC radio, that I called for the dismissal of the Coober Pedy council. I then had the great pleasure to be in Coober Pedy about a week later, and I had a very long meeting with the Coober Pedy council that went for 2½ hours. The council had been in trouble for an extended period of time, and clearly a minister cannot just dismiss a council; a process has to be gone through.

That council had faced a number of challenges over the years. There were revolving door CEOs, revolving door senior officers, revolving door mayors, with a small population base electing a council, and it was a very small rate base. There were issues around governance, both experience and knowledge, and other issues, and there is a high level of socio-economic disadvantage in Coober Pedy. As a result of that history, because prior to the Coober Pedy council there was the Opal Miners Progress Association that was essentially the body that ran Coober Pedy many years ago, there was a real culture in Coober Pedy.

I have to put on record that I love Coober Pedy. When people say that it is a unique community, it is a unique community and I like visiting there, and the people are great, but when it came to governance there were a few issues. I have a bit of sympathy, given some of the things I have already mentioned—that is, the small rate base and the difficulty in getting expertise there at times—as they were expected to run facilities that bigger councils in the rest of the state were not expected to run.

Their water was drawn from a saline aquifer, pumped to a desalination plant and then distributed to the community. When you see how spread out that community is, you can see that it is a bit of an undertaking, plus at one stage they directly operated the generator assets and the distribution and retail (and they still do distribution and retail), but the decisions made in relation to the generator assets when the council was directly running it were bizarre. Of course, it was then outsourced and we had the whole debate, the toing and froing, about the hybrid solar plant with backup diesel. It was clear that the council was out of its depth.

I look forward to the administrator continuing in the role he has undertaken because it will take more than a year to get things back on an even keel. Hopefully, we can get back to a fully elected council in Coober Pedy, but we have to address some of the outstanding issues. When we were in government, towards the tail end of government I wrote to the minister, indicating that I believed that the water assets in Coober Pedy should be outsourced to SA Water. I thought it was far too great a risk to leave them in the hands of the council. The distribution assets and the retail side of things were a mess as well. Often people on very low incomes ended up being cut off, running up bills of over $10,000, and it was often people in the Aboriginal community who were copping those massive bills.

A raft of issues need to be addressed in Coober Pedy, and I think this bill starts to move us in the right direction, at least as far as governance is concerned, but there are some hard, practical issues that need to be addressed.

The Hon. S.K. KNOLL (Schubert—Minister for Transport, Infrastructure and Local Government, Minister for Planning) (15:43): I would like to thank the members of the opposition who contributed to this debate. This is one of those things where we all need to work together to clean it up, and obviously the community in Coober Pedy has voted quite overwhelmingly in favour of wanting to keep it in administration for a time longer, and we are essentially trying to accede to their request.

Bill read a second time.

Third Reading

The Hon. S.K. KNOLL (Schubert—Minister for Transport, Infrastructure and Local Government, Minister for Planning) (15:44): I move:

That this bill be now read a third time.

Bill read a third time and passed.