Carol Altmann – The Terrier

Lawyers for sacked Warrnambool City Council CEO Peter Schneider have issued defamation proceedings against four councillors.

Those four councillors are Cr Mike Neoh, Cr Kylie Gaston, Cr Sue Cassidy and Cr David Owen.

This partly explains the flurry of confidential business happening behind closed doors at the council meeting last night.

The second matter, according to sources, is believed to relate to lawyers for Mr Schneider arguing that he be reinstated as CEO: in other words, he gets his job back.

There is a precedent for such a thing, with a sacked CEO of Logan City Council, in Queensland, being given her job back after challenging the motives of the seven councillors who deposed her.

Wouldn’t that be a turn up for the books!

With the council elections just two months away and a new council to be elected, it may not be as unthinkable as it sounds.

And the third matter, twisted up in all of the above, is understood to be a heated, ding-dong, hair-pulling (except for Cr Sycopoulis, no offence to him), full-blooded barney over who should pay for the legal expenses racked up so far and those yet to come.

Should it be the individual councillors involved in the coup? Should it be ratepayers?

Discuss.

I emailed all seven councillors today to ask for comment on the legal action, whether ratepayers would be footing the bill, and how much had been spent so far on council lawyers.

Only three replied by deadline and no prizes for guessing who.

Here are their statements in full:

Mayor Tony Herbert:
“Thanks for your email.

As you are aware I am unfortunately unable to confirm most of your queries although some of the info might be able to be sought through channels of FOI. We lost the resolution on the night of the 13th July regarding confidentiality.

It is a very unfortunate situation the council has decided to thrust itself into especially in light of the further and greater impacts of the pandemic on council, staff, council budgets and our community ongoing.

I certainly would have preferred when such significant costs have been incurred, to have spent funds in a more productive and positive way…as a stimulus for our community post COVID for example.

I also implored councillors on a number of occasions to take alternative actions to manage our CEO  through discussion and negotiations rather than this drastic and expensive action as our only management tool!

As far as legal costs questions, I’m unable to comment at this time.

Hopefully things will become clearer.

One thing I will add further, is that personally,  I feel the community has a right to know what happened in the lead up to the sudden termination, reasons for  the termination and also the costs.”

Cr Robert Anderson: 

“Thank you for your email Carol, unfortunately because of the confidentiality on the above subject I am unable to make any comment.”

Cr Peter Sycopoulis:

“Thank you for your enquiry. Due to confidentiality requirements, I am not at liberty to provide an answer to your questions. What I can confirm however, is that I personally have not received correspondence from any law firm in relation to this matter.”

So the council is about to enter a legal shitestorm, to be frank, and – so far – we are officially being told nothing.

Please keep this in mind when we all vote in October.

Think about integrity, transparency, openness, honesty, accountability and the-right-to-know: these, to me, are now the key themes of election 2020.

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Carol Altmann – The Terrier

Your right to know: Two weeks ago, I received a letter from my union-appointed lawyers who informed me Lyndoch Living has been monitoring my two Facebook pages, one being my private page and one being this page.

They attached a number of screenshots provided by Melbourne lawyers K&L Gates on behalf of Lyndoch, showing comments by followers and readers of The Terrier.

Those commenting were Warrnambool people expressing their opinion on how every membership application lodged with Lyndoch Living had been rejected.

These comments related to stories I had published on February 16 and 23.

My lawyers also attached a number of quotes from those stories that were highlighted by K&L Gates on behalf of their client.

The recommendation in response to this legal letter from K&L Gates was that I remove the articles and the comments in the screenshots.

The past two weeks has been a time of enormous worry for so many of us because of a resurgence of Covid-19.

It has been so challenging for our aged care homes and their fabulous staff, including those working so hard on the ground at Lyndoch Living.

What I have also found enormously worrying these past two weeks, however, is the rapid erosion of our right to know. Our right to have a say. Of our right to speak up when we see our public institutions being hijacked by vested interests.

Lyndoch Living belongs to us. The Warrnambool City Council is answerable to us. We must never forget this.

And right now, while we are fighting a pandemic, we are being forced to also fight for our democratic rights which are being pulled out from under us one bit at a time.

Secrecy and silence is becoming the new normal.

I’ll be honest, legal letters scare the shite out of me, but I became a journalist for a reason and I am not going to be scared into silence, and, I hope, neither are you.

So we will keep going. We have to, and I want to thank every single one of you who is helping me to make that happen.

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Carol Altmann – The Terrier

A lot of people have asked me lately whether I was sued for defamation by Lyndoch Living CEO Doreen Power and if it all ended up in court.

The answers are: yes and no. Let me explain.

After I wrote a series of four stories late last year about my concerns around Lyndoch, its direction, and its leadership, I received a letter from Melbourne law firm K&L Gates, who represent Lyndoch Living.

(The Gates part, by the way, relates to the firm’s founder, the father of US billionaire Bill Gates, so this was not some tin pot law joint with broken blinds and wonky lampshades, but a downtown Collins St law firm with city views and a serious letterhead.)

K&L Gates wrote that they were acting on behalf of the Lyndoch CEO who was:

“disturbed by a series of recent articles, written and published by you on (The Terrier), attacking our client’s reputation and character”.

Gulp.

Naturally, I felt slightly sick, but only slightly, because in 30 years’ of working as a journalist in search of the ever-elusive truth, I have received one or two of these letters before. The scary bit was that I now work alone.

The letter then set out the CEO’s particular grievances – or imputations.

You can download the whole letter here, it is not confidential, but here is the list:

• That in carrying out her functions as CEO of Lyndoch, our client bullies and intimidates staff and other third parties;
• That in carrying out her functions as CEO of Lyndoch, our client manipulates staff by psychological means into doubting their own sanity;
• That in carrying out her functions as CEO of Lyndoch, our client unfairly favours some people over others;
• That in carrying out her functions as CEO of Lyndoch, our client has caused a detrimental impact on the care of Lyndoch’s residents;
• That in carrying out her functions as CEO of Lyndoch, our client lacks transparency and endorses secrecy;
• That in carrying out leadership roles as CEO of Seymour and Plenty Valley Community Health, our client destroyed the culture and workplace environment of those places, and caused irreparable physical and/or psychological harm to their staff;
• That our client is a disinterested CEO who does not care about her staff or the residents of Lyndoch; and;
• That our client is unfit to be the CEO of Lyndoch or of any other organisation.

 

Defamation law is an important law and one that I take extremely seriously.

It is there to protect all of us from malicious untruths, but it can also be used by powerful people to “chill” journalists from investigating or writing about issues of public interest.

Back in the days when journalists worked in robust newsrooms with bottomless budgets, such legal battles could be fought with vigour.

Those days are almost gone.

Now, like many journos out on their own, I have no newsroom and no budget for legal battles, and I rely entirely on insurance via my union, the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance.

Like all journos, I also rely on thorough research and credible sources to get things right in the first place, but it is one thing to argue a fact like, “you have no money” compared to “why do you have no money?”

WHY is the very guts of investigative journalism, but it is time-consuming, expensive, and it attracts law suits. Many newsrooms have given up on it, but it is what I do.

So I got my legal letter, paid for by Lyndoch, which confirmed that the aged care home which once looked after my own Mum was now threatening to sue me.

This was serious and it’s precisely why I waited until my Mum passed away last April before I started to write this current series of stories: as feisty as Mum was, she would have been worried sick.

Over the holiday period K&L Gates talked to my lawyers and vice versa. Letters were exchanged.

And in the end, my insurers decided not to fight the imputations, because who knows if I would win or lose in trying to prove the “why?”

I agreed to pull the stories from the website and remove them from Facebook and I cannot publish them again. I also agreed to pay costs.

All of this cost me $2000 in an insurance excess, but, because of you wonderful beings, it actually cost me $200, because Foxy the Fighting Fund kicked in and helped me to cover that excess.

Did it go to court? No.

Did The Terrier win or lose? I will leave that up to you to decide.

Is it important that we keep going? More than ever.

Defamation can be designed to “chill”, and frighten journalists into tightening their buttocks, but you know what? I am being cautious, but also reaching for an extra coat.

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