Breaking down: WCC staggers under the weight of old ways
Carol Altmann – The Terrier
It’s 12 months since the Warrnambool City Council started a new chapter under a new CEO, but still it staggers under the weight of the old regime that is pulling the place apart.
As I write, I have just heard from solid sources that two high-level staff have taken leave amid allegations of bullying.
Other senior staff have taken sick leave or unexplained leave, including the head of governance who has not been seen for months.
Over the past six months, staff have continued to resign, paying tribute to their workmates, but saying they can no longer deal with the workplace culture and a lack of leadership.
One senior staffer who left put it this way in a letter to colleagues: “I urge you to stick to your values, call out things that are not in line with the organisation’s values and most importantly, be kind to each other.”
The elected council, meanwhile, remains riven with deep rivalries that pit the Cr Gaston/Neoh faction against the Cr Hulin/Cassidy/sometimes Herbert faction, in a bitter struggle which is circular and exhausting.
To be frank, despite the polite smiles in the council chamber, most of the time they want to rip each other’s heads off.
Whistleblowers have been isolated and the CEO’s supposed “open-door” policy remains blocked by gatekeepers, so staff are reluctant or unable to step through.
Even the CEO is kept in the dark, having allegedly not been briefed about the looming credit card scandal until June last year, which is when the scandal broke publicly.
In that environment, faith is broken and people learn to just shut up and get on with it.
Or they resign.
I say all this being fully aware – and grateful – that the council is full of decent, solid, hard-working, loyal people who give their absolute best to Warrnambool as true servants of the public and they make up the vast majority of council staff.
But the fact is the new CEO, Peter Schneider, inherited a shite sandwich which he has been unable to turn around.
Just three months before Mr Schneider started, the results of an independent staff survey leaked into the public domain and it was not a pretty picture.
It found that since 2014, the council had gone backward on every key measure, including leadership, people, customer focus, and strategy and planning.
Most telling was that while 71 per cent of all staff said they felt proud to work at the council, only 51 per cent said they looked forward to coming to work each day.
In one department, only 39 per cent enjoyed coming to work each day.
That is not a sign of a happy place, but a place where good people keep hanging in there, hoping things will get better.
They haven’t – I have seen resignation letters and spoken to some of those who have left – and they won’t until three things happen:
a full, open and independent assessment of the workplace culture with a commitment to act on the results;
an end to the bunker mentality by being open and honest with the public;
a changing of the guard at the next council elections in October.
Without these, I fear that the WCC will continue to lumber along like a bus on broken wheels, wondering why it’s losing all of its passengers.
Blue-chip whistleblower goes public on WCC fraud inquiry
Those attempting to blow the whistle on alleged corruption, fraud and bullying within the Warrnambool City Council have found themselves targeted for investigation. Image: The Shift.
Carol Altmann – The Terrier
A blue-chip whistleblower on allegations of fraud, corruption and bullying within the Warrnambool City Council has gone public and, in so doing, exposed how broken the system has become.
Dr Bernadette Northeast, who has the sort of credentials and governance experience that most councils would grab with both hands, recently resigned as Volunteer Coordinator from the WCC, having been shafted by the very process meant to encourage people to speak up.
Boy, we live in dark times when this is considered acceptable.
Dr Northeast told me she had compiled a dossier of evidence with the input of six other people – each of whom initially approached her – detailing serious claims of fraud, corruption and bullying within certain sections of council. #notallstaff
The whistleblowers not only detailed claims of wrong doing, but alleged particular senior council staff were fully aware of the allegations and did nothing.
In other words, there was a deliberate cover up.
If you were an investigator looking into a council, this sort of stuff is red hot.
Dr Northeast and five of the six other whistleblowers all spoke to the independent investigator hired by the council CEO Peter Schneider to get to the bottom of the scandal, but despite this incredibly brave step, they have heard nothing since.
In the meantime, wait for it, Dr Northeast was put under investigation by the same independent investigator.
Her “crime” was accessing documents she used as part of her evidence gathering, for which she found herself accused of serious gross misconduct.
This is despite the documents apparently being accessible to any council staff member via the intranet.
Dr Northeast, who worked for the council for seven years, was put on paid leave during the investigation, after which she resigned for another job.
Mis-use of council corporate credit cards by some senior staff on dinners and drinks sparked an independent investigation by the WCC. Image: Winestock.
During the investigation of Dr Northeast’s conduct and in the months since, she says, there has been no significant action as a result of the whistleblowers coming forward.
Each person identified by the whistleblowers, apart from former tourism chief David McMahon, has remained in their job.
As Dr Northeast says, it appears the investigation has been less focussed on the claims of fraud, corruption and bullying that were allegedly reported to senior staff, and more intent on finding out “who dobbed on us?”
By the way, the allegations not only include the now infamous misuse and abuse of some council corporate credit cards, but also claims of misuse of council accommodation at Flagstaff Hill, misuse of council contracts, purchase of equipment (including air conditioning units) which cannot be traced, and large alcohol purchases via direct invoice.
The whistleblowers also raised concerns about a personal relationship between two council staff members that allegedly led to “tip offs” about the focus of some Freedom of Information applications.
Others expressed their concern at a “boozy” boys’ club culture, summed up by a toga party held at the house of a senior staff member, to which select staff were invited and attended, and talked about for days.
This cosy boys’ club culture is what the vast majority of hard-working and ethical staff at WCC have been struggling with for years.
It reminds me of the WCC Christmas party at the Warrnambool racecourse last year, where two employees dropped their pants and ran naked past the finish line in what was apparently some sort of weird WCC tradition. It wasn’t repeated this year.
Warrnambool City Council CEO Peter Schneider. Image: WCC.
This sense of entitlement among certain parts of council is what we believed Mr Schneider would blow right open and, to do so, Dr Northeast is exactly the sort of person he should be listening to.
Her CV includes 17 years as an SES volunteer, a Director of South West Healthcare, Chair of Australian Institute of Company Directors Great South Coast Committee, and Deputy Chair of the Victorian Fisheries Authority. Good governance is her bent.
Yet Mr Schneider has not spoken to Dr Northeast about any of these allegations.
Mayor Tony Herbert, who has previously urged staff with any allegations to contact Mr Schneider, apparently told Dr Northeast that he would arrange a meeting with the CEO. She didn’t hear another word. (I have asked Cr Herbert to confirm this).
Dr Northeast then attempted to set up a meeting with Mr Schneider herself, without success, and says even now she remains open to a frank conversation with the CEO.
But Dr Northeast is no longer with the council, having been effectively the target of a concerted push to find any leakers.
A couple of other staff are also on unexplained leave, for what I believe are similar misconduct allegations connected to them attempting to reveal what is going on, not to hide it.
Other experienced staff have resigned in sheer frustration while waiting for a cultural change that never seems to come.
If this is how it works at the WCC, something is terribly broken.
This gets to the nub of why Dr Northeast has gone public, because she says the vast majority of council staff who are hard-working, ethical and honest people, are being unfairly maligned by the alleged actions of a few.
“For the sake of the vast majority of all the good people working at the council, this needs to be addressed promptly and openly. Yet we have heard nothing more,” she says.
“How long does this have to go on without direct rectification?”
It is a very good question and here are three more:
Where is the independent investigation up to?
Has the information from Dr Northeast and the six whistleblowers all been passed to the Ombudsman for her separate investigation?
And does the council even still have 81 corporate credit cards in action?
I am putting all of this to Mr Schneider for a response which I will run in full.
I have set up a Foxy Fighting Fund. If you would like to be make a small contribution, you can do so below.
A REMINDER. Mayor Tony Herbert was on ABC radio yesterday (8/10/19) and pondered why the WCC whistleblowers didn’t just wander in and talk to CEO Peter Schneider about their concerns.
Let me answer that question by starting with this text message (pictured).
This message was sent to all Warrnambool City Council staff when former tourism chief David McMahon resigned in mid July.
It was sent by CEO Peter Schneider: the new guy, the one who brought great hopes of a clean slate, a fresh start, a new way of doing things.
In it, the CEO praises Mr McMahon, thanks him for his efforts and wishes him well.
Mr McMahon quit because his gross misuse of ratepayers’ money had been exposed publicly here.
Mr McMahon was also a foul-mouthed bully and his behaviour, for which he was never called to account by his superiors, broke a lot of people.
There were people within council who knew about both of these things.
Yet, until July 16, Mr McMahon kept his job; unscathed and intact.
And when he did quit, he was praised by the new man in charge – the boss.
For many council staff, this was gutting.
Perhaps Mr Schneider now regrets this message, but wait, there is more, there always is.
From the minute I published my stories about the credit card abuse, the council has been trying to uncover my sources. They want to flush out and punish anyone who told the truth.
This is happening under Mr Schneider’s watch.
And still the Mayor and CEO wonder why nobody is coming to them with their allegations, concerns and fears.
I can sum it up in a word: trust.
And, right now, there is none.
Restoring trust, as Ratepayers Victoria has made clear, is the challenge.
The next few months will be telling.
Boom! Whistleblowers drop a bomb on the WCC
Carol Altmann – The Terrier
Holy moly, I step away from Warrnambool for three weeks and return to find the place is on fire, with whistleblowers dropping an A-bomb right onto the Warrnambool City Council.
A string of red-hot allegations has been sent to Ratepayers Victoria after its president, Dean Hurlston, urged council staff to “whistle loudly” if they knew anything about the misuse of public money following the WCC credit card scandal.
Mr Hurlston has listed the allegations in a letter sent yesterday to WCC Mayor Tony Herbert and CEO Peter Schneider, and paints a damning picture of what was allegedly going on behind closed doors.
The allegations include cover-ups, mismanagement, fraudulent behaviour and a lack of action in response to staff concerns that stretched to the very top.
We even, allegedly, paid for private parties dressed up as “events”.
Here is the list:
Attempts over time to raise significant concerns of fraudulent spending and cover up of same;
Systematic abuse of internal controls of authorisation of spending by management;
Coercion and direction by senior management to subvert said controls and “help hide” spending;
Direction to suppliers to “alter” the contents of invoices to hide the true nature of expenditure;
The use of WCC resources for personal or family benefit;
The use of WCC assets for personal gain;
Inadequate reporting of expenditure (thousands of dollars’ worth of transactions reported as “supplies”);
“Parties” and “events” openly abusing the use of council funds (ratepayers’ monies); and
WCC not investigating or attempting to recover falsely procured items.
You might want to read that list twice, as I did, to digest it.
It sums up all of the issues that have been swirling around the WCC “credit card scandal” which, as I have said so many times, is just the tip of the iceberg.
Mr Hurlston has urged the whistleblowers to contact IBAC and the Local Government Inspectorate immediately and seek confidential and protected disclosure. (I am going to add to that and say they should also contact the Victorian Ombudsman straight away, where an inquiry is already underway. The number is 9613 6222.)
He has also urged the council to appoint an external investigator so all staff with any information about misconduct are able to speak freely and openly.
To be clear, at this stage these are allegations only, but the fact the whistleblowers have gone to RV in the first place speaks volumes.
Whistleblowers take an enormous risk and nobody throws themselves into that line of fire without weighing up the potential cost of being exposed and punished.
It comes as no surprise to me that RV says in its letter that some staff claim they have been intimidated and bullied “for trying to expose the truth”.
Yep, I know all about those tactics, and I can only imagine how dis-spiriting and terrifying it must be for those who depend on the council for their livelihood.
The WCC is still doing all it can to shut people up, including me, but it won’t work.
Why?
Because too many people want the truth.
You want the truth. The whistleblowers want the truth. Ratepayers Victoria want the truth. I want the truth.
So the council may continue to spend hours of energy trying to shut this all down, to limit the damage, to flush out the leakers, and to punish or discredit those who speak up, but it won’t work.
And our sole newspaper may prefer to write stories about desperate people stealing twiggy sticks or passion pop, but uncovering corporate crime and mismanagement is a slow, complicated and often boring process. Twiggy sticks get more clicks.
Yet the truth always rises to the top.
I call it a slow burn.
Even when a bombshell drops like today, it can take months or even years to peg out all the facts, but it will happen and it will be well worth it because that, dear terriers, is what accountability is all about.
It’s good to be back.
If you would like to support the work of The Terrier, please consider throwing something in the tip jar.
The truth laid bare: unravelling Warrnambool City Council’s spending and connections means entering a tangled, seemingly endless web.
Carol Altmann – The Terrier
Today is the final episode of Season One of House of Cards meets Warrnambool City Council meets Game of Thrones, where all the lines in the ever-thickening and outrageous plot come together and I lay it all out on the table.
The opening scene in this special, double episode is yet another corporate credit card – we are now up to number four – which has the same pattern of spending on the backs of ratepayers that has become so depressingly familiar: the dinners, the drinks, the endless coffees, the lunches, on and on and on.
I have been sitting on all of this information for a very, very long time, hoping the council would eventually throw open the windows, but it hasn’t and it won’t, so I am doing it for them.
I will start with credit card #4 and a snapshot:
Exhibit A is $98 worth of drinks at the Hairy Goat on a Friday night on 21 September last year, which is around the time when, supposedly, the council was cracking down on its credit card use after “discovering” the inappropriate and over-the-top spending of former tourism chief David McMahon.
Exhibit B is a $163 dinner for two people at the Warrnambool Hotel on a Saturday night, 26 May last year, which included a dozen oysters au naturale and, wait for it, a plate of eye fillet. (Whoever gets to play the eye fillet in the eventual movie of this saga is going to become a star).
And then there is Exhibit C, a receipt from 10 December last year – after the council re-wrote its floppy credit card policy – where two people spent $105.30 on dinner at the Japanese cafe Gyoza Gyoza in Melbourne, of which $44.90 was soaked up by a bottle of pinot gris (with two glasses).
This outing was enjoyed just a week after the council decided to apply to break the rate cap and bump our rates up by 4.5% this year and the next.
What a ****** cheek.
Like you, I have had a gut full of the excuses and the ducking and weaving and hiding behind Utopia inspired spin that does nothing to comfort ratepayers that this long age of entitlement, slack governance and lack of accountability is well and truly over.
It needs to be rooted out and that’s why it’s time to name names.
Credit card #4 is held by the Manager of Economic Development and Investment Shaun Miller, he of the two jobs and who, after being named in relation to those two jobs, prompted an email from CEO Peter Schneider asking me not to name staff.
I tried that tack, but the council has done nothing since to convince me that it intends to get to the bottom of the rot which runs so deep. (#notAllstaff)
In fact all the signs point to yet another cover-up, so the gloves are coming off, because my only motivation through all of this is to expose the truth. So here are some truths.
The accommodation invoice from the WCC delegation to the 2017 Victorian Tourism Conference at Flemington Racecourse.
Mr Miller travels around a lot. I can now reveal he is the mystery man who, you may recall and according to an invoice paid for by his former colleague, Mr McMahon, arrived two days early, on a Saturday, for a conference in 2017 that was held at the Flemington Racecourse which, on that Saturday, was hosting a major racing event.
A coincidence? Maybe, because our council thrives on coincidence.
Certain people don’t like me naming Mr Miller. When I wrote about his two jobs, there was a barrage of abuse and behind-the-scenes threats, perhaps because these people suspected that I knew more than I was writing about publicly. They were right, I did. More about that shortly.
I have not had any direct response from Mr Miller about his credit card use, however I did get another polite email on his behalf from Mr Schneider last Friday night, but it said nothing new and provided no explanation for the receipts above.
Mr Miller’s spending is signed off by his superior, Director City Growth Andrew Paton.
This is the card that was used, among many other things, to pay for the $1476 dinner at Pippies, and the $700 dinner at the Myrtle Kitchen which included five bottles of wine at $79 a bottle.
Mr Paton was very polite in his response to my emailed questions last week, but he is gagged from answering me directly, such is the council’s tight grip around the throats of those who might wish to talk to journalists.
If he could have spoken to me, Mr Paton might have explained the purpose of the boozy Myrtle Dinner which was attended by four people, including himself and Cr Sue Cassidy.
Cr Cassidy is another name that is significant to this story because Cr Cassidy is one of two councillors on the council’s Audit and Risk Committee. This committee is important because, well, it is designed to keep an eye on audit and risk, ie. the use of public money.
So let’s paint the picture: Mr Paton is the boss of Mr Miller and was the boss of Mr McMahon and was the manager responsible for signing off on all the questionable spending on their credit cards, while at the same time using his own credit card to pay for a long, boozy dinner attended by Cr Cassidy who is a member of the council Audit and Risk Committee that will now oversee the investigation into those cards.
The House of Cards ain’t got nothing on this.
And rolling along behind the scene of this car wreck are three specific side stories that I also want you to know about.
(Intermission. Lights up. Toilet break. Grab a choc top. Right, away we go…)
An example of the redacted credit card statements provided by the WCC via a lengthy and costly Freedom of Information process.
Side story one: Freedom of Information. As you know, none of this – none of it – would have seen the light of day had it not been for a Freedom of Information application that I lodged almost a year ago, asking for Mr McMahon’s credit card receipts.
The council did everything it could to stop me getting that information fully and efficiently and the whole process took nine months and a lot of money (#thankyouTerrierTipJar).
Even after the nine-month wait and all that money, we would not have known about the secret repayments and behind-the-scenes deal between Mr McMahon and the then CEO Bruce Anson last November, had it not been for sources.
And who in the council was in charge of responding to my Freedom of Information applications about the credit cards?
The CEO’s executive assistant, Wendy Clark.
So, to try and find out information that ultimately involved the actions and decisions of the former CEO, I had to go through the former CEO’s executive assistant.
And if I wanted to dive deeper and detail the tens of thousands of dollars of credit card spending on behalf of Mr Anson – he didn’t use his own corporate card to buy, for example, the cases of wine enjoyed after council meetings – I would need to go through the same executive assistant.
Does that pass the pub test?
And just to tangle that web a little more, Ms Clark, the CEO executive assistant, is the senior staff member who has lived in a council-owned CBD apartment for more than 30 years and for most of that time has leased it on nothing more than a handshake deal.
That suspect arrangement existed until I started asking questions and learned, wait for it, a written lease had been miraculously signed just a few weeks before my probing.
This is the rotten culture I am talking about.
It stinks and it has to end.
Side story two: former tourism chief Mr McMahon was a bully and made life hell for a lot of people, especially women. He came to the council with a reputation as a bully that somehow escaped the attention of those who hired him, but which I have since substantiated.
This is how this whole story started, not from people contacting me to talk about his credit card abuse – although that was raised too – but because of Mr McMahon’s foul-mouthed bullying and a desperation to be heard, because nobody in council was listening.
I told Cr Tony Herbert about this bullying when we met last August in the meeting that he now fails to remember much about at all. Cr Herbert did nothing. The council did nothing. #goodbloke #heLikesAdrink
Nothing happened to Mr McMahon – he stayed in his top job while so many around him fell away, distressed and exhausted, and he stayed there right up until his dishonesty around his credit card expenditure finally caught up with him last July.
How was Mr McMahon hired in the first place? Why was he allowed to get away with all that he did? And why on earth – why on earth – did current CEO Mr Schneider praise him upon his departure?
This is how the council boys’ club works and it is part of the rotten culture that I am talking about.
It stinks and it has to end.
Mayor Tony Herbert signs an MOU with the Mayor of Mariestad Johan Abrahamsson after a delegation from Mariestad and Nilsson Energy visited Warrnambool last April. Image: WCC
Side story three: Mr Miller has two jobs. One is full-time with the council and the other, as I reported recently, is with a start-up called Acusensus, which Mr Miller joined in March this year as International Business Development Manager and for whom he works 7.6 hours a week.
The chairman of Acusensus is a smart, charismatic guy called Ravin Mirchandani.
Before Mr Miller joined the WCC in 2016, he and Mr Mirchandani were in upper level management at a company called Mack Valves, which makes valves for things like hydrogen pumps.
Mr Mirchandani is still the director/chairman of Mack Valves and is now also the Australian representative of a group called Nilsson Energy, based near the regional city of Mariestad, Sweden.
Mr Mirchandani became the Australian rep of Nilsson Energy after going to see its work in Mariestad in June last year and, it seems, came away very impressed.
Ten months later, in April 2019, Mr Mirchandani was part of a delegation from the city of Mariestad and Nilsson Energy that was invited to visit Warrnambool and talk about using hydrogen electricity, which is the next big thing and has companies jostling for a slice of the action.
As a result of that April trip, Warrnambool CC and the city of Mariestad signed an MOU to share ideas and information and keep the momentum moving.
Tomorrow night’s council meeting (2/9) will decide whether to send our Mayor, CEO and a council staff member – I wonder who that might be? – to Sweden to visit Mariestad before the end of the year. The public will help pay for the cost of that trip.
And this is the nub: nowhere, at no time, has there been a public declaration by the council of Mr Miller’s active business links to Mr Mirchandani and any potential conflict of interest that may arise from the Mack Valves/Nilsson Energy Australia/Acusensus connection.
In fact Mr Mirchandani’s name is missing from the list of names in tomorrow night’s council agenda of those who visited Warrnambool with the Mariestad delegation in April.
Zero transparency.
This is the rotten culture that I am talking about.
It stinks and, despite hundreds of hours of investigation into all of the issues above, I am still only just touching the surface.
Curtain falls. Lights up. Credits roll.
Credits: all of the brave people who have trusted me to tell the truth, I see you and I want to thank you. And Dad, as I write this on this Father’s Day, I see you too, even though you are long dead. My Dad was a bricklayer who got up at 5am every morning to make the money to pay his rates. I have done the best I can to get the fresh start in Warrnambool that we all deserve; it is now up to our elected officials, and our leaders, to press the reset button. On we go.
Carol Altmann – The Terrier
