Carol Altmann – The Terrier

This past week has seen two extremely serious issues arise at Lyndoch Living aged care in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic and yet the response from the board is a wall of silence.

First, Lyndoch only issued masks to all of its staff yesterday: 12 days after the Federal health minister declared masks mandatory for staff in all aged care homes in Victoria.

Second, Lyndoch allowed two people from Melbourne into its facility last Thursday and Friday, despite that city being in full lockdown and a declaration from the Victorian Chief Health Officer that, as of last Wednesday night, tightened access to aged care homes even further.

Carol Altmann – The Terrier

Given Covid-19 is gaining a terrifying grip on aged care homes in Victoria, I sent an email this morning to Lyndoch Living to find out why masks are not yet compulsory for all staff and all visitors.

I also wanted to find out why two professionals from Melbourne were allowed into Lyndoch Living last week, for what appears to have been non-essential, non-medical purposes.

Lyndoch has a ban on visitors who are from or have been in Melbourne.

This is the email:

Dear Lyndoch Media Unit,

I am hoping you can assist with the following questions:

I have had a number of people contact me these past four days in regard to the mask-wearing policy for staff and visitors at Lyndoch Living and why masks are not mandatory.

Can you outline why Lyndoch Living has not yet introduced a compulsory mask wearing policy for all staff given the Federal Government directive on 17 July that all aged care workers across Victoria would be required to do so?

(https://www.health.gov.au/ministers/the-hon-greg-hunt-mp/media/two-million-more-face-masks-for-victorian-aged-care-and-disability-workers)

Is one of the issues that there are not enough masks available to provide to all staff?

Also, concerns have been raised with me about two visitors to Lyndoch Living last week who were apparently from Melbourne and who stayed in the Waterfront Living complex.

I understand these same people had access to Swinton Wing, while wearing hard hats, which suggests they were not visiting Lyndoch for medical or aged care service related purposes, but related to the construction works at Swinton Wing.

Those who contacted me were understandably concerned that it appears people travelling from Melbourne were permitted into Lyndoch and Waterfront Living complex for non-essential purposes and in contravention of the current ban on Melbourne visitors.

I am hoping you can clarify the situation to put these concerns to rest.

Regards,

Carol

I will let you know if I get a response.

In the meantime, as I write this, there are 764 active cases of Covid-19 in aged care homes across Victoria.

According to the Prime Minister Scott Morrison, just under one fifth of Victoria’s 430 aged care facilities had been affected by C19.

Given the increase in C19 cases in south-west Victoria, Cobden Health moved in to full lock down eight days ago.

Mercy Place, in Warrnambool, also moved into temporary lockdown this week until at least tomorrow, with no new visitors other than those who already have visitation plans in place.

Moyne Health, Gillin Park, and Opal aged care have made it compulsory for staff to wear masks.

As Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt says in his media release from 17 July above, the government has made another two million masks available to aged care and the disability sector.

The last Covid-19 update on the Lyndoch Living website was that same date, 17 July: 11 days ago.

As I said above, I will let you know if I get a response.

Carol Altmann – The Terrier

Sooo, as has been reported by the ABC and The Standard earlier today, our Mayor Tony Herbert will remain Mayor, having not offered his resignation, despite his recently breaking one, two, three…no, four, laws, and taking a hit for the biggest fine, which was breaching the C19 distancing rules.

Cr Herbert was also not officially challenged to step down by Cr Sue Cassidy despite some tub thumping at the weekend.

There are no real surprises here, because:

1. the Mayor was never going to step aside (having come up with a palatable reason for his brain fade);

2. he was never going to be asked to resign (as the majority of his fellow councillors were happy to let this one slide) and;

3. his only challenger – Cr Cassidy – had two votes at best in herself and maybe Cr Robert Anderson.

 

(Crs Gaston, Neoh and Owen were never on board and Cr Sycopoulis and Cr Herbert are politically close as a part of the same faction in the Liberal Party.)

The W’bool City Council also craves at least some modicum of stability, in what are unstable and uncertain times and not just because of the C19.

As was drawn to my attention today – by a reader who runs a forensic eye over such things – there are FIVE senior management positions on the council that are either vacant or have ‘acting’ staff in the role, starting with the Manager of Governance, that reports directly to the CEO.

The head of tourism – remember him? – has seemingly not been replaced since he resigned last July.

The Manager of Community Planning and Policy, who resigned last year, is still listed as being in that role.

So is the Manager of Economic Development and Investment, who resigned in January.

As the reader pointed out, how does this affect the council’s ability to do its day-to-day business?

Well one area, I can tell you, is updating its policies, some of which are years out of date.

One example, again offered by this astute reader, is the council’s whistleblower policy, you know, that little thing that should have protected people like Dr Bernadette Northeast from speaking up about bullying within council.

The document was supposed to be updated in 2016.

The anti-corruption guidelines from IBAC posted on the WCC website are from 2013.

Jeeps. As we know, it is the small stuff that affects the big stuff. You let one thing go, then the next thing falls over, and then the next.

It’s a bit like how one coffee on the council credit card morphs into eye fillet and bottles of cab sav.

Or stuffing up the way people have to pay their pet registrations, which I hear is still causing grief for pensioners who now have to go to great lengths involving forms and Centrelink (two things that are enough to make me want to take to the couch) to prove they’re eligible for a discount.

Let’s not forget that it’s only a couple of months since Cr Mike Neoh went rogue and declared to The Standard that he had “had a gutful of raising issues and not seeing any progress.”

What this means in plain speak is that certain councillors wanted the CEO gone.

Before the C19 descended, I doubt the CEO would have survived a no confidence vote.

So the Mayor will stay on as the figurehead, but the wheels were wobbling within the council itself well before this detour.

The real work starts once the virus lifts and we have to get back out onto the highway. Strap yourselves in.

Carol Altmann – The Terrier

It’s fascinating to see the conversations that go on behind the scenes between the powerful, like an exchange between the former CEO of the Warrnambool City Council, Bruce Anson, and the former CEO of the Warrnambool Racing Club, Peter Downs.

It is a brief exchange – and released only through Freedom of Information of course – but it says so much.

It reveals that Mr Downs met with Mr Anson on Thursday 8 February 2018 with a problem.

The problem was that racehorse training along a section of Port Fairy’s East Beach was no longer possible because, wait for it, those pesky Hooded Plovers had turned up and made it “unworkable” for the racehorses.

But Mr Downs had an idea, which he put to Mr Anson in writing after their catch up: what about giving permission for 50 racehorses to use Lady Bay from Monday 12 February, from dawn until 8am?

Under the council rules, racehorse training at Lady Bay did not normally start until 1 March.

There is a very good reason for this, as Mr Downs acknowledges:  “We understand that there are other beach users using this area at this season of the year”.

(That season of the year is called summer and funnily enough there are loads of “beach users” who like to use Warrnambool’s main beach in summer.)

Not only did Mr Downs think having 50 racehorses training on Lady Bay in summer was a great idea, he also hoped the council could make it happen with just four days’ turnaround from his meeting with Mr Anson.

How? Well, “a circular resolution via email” to councillors.

Excuse me?

No meeting of councillors? No discussion with the public? Not even a notice in the Saturday newspaper?

Was Mr Downs seriously suggesting the council could change the rules by flicking an email around to councillors for a “yes” or a “no”?

You would expect Mr Anson, as CEO, to have clutched his belly, laughed out loud and spluttered “Don’t be so bloody ridiculous Peter!”

But no.

Mr Anson got straight on to it, to see if it could be done.

Within 24 hours Mr Anson had replied to Mr Downs, having done something that the council should have done when the WRC also wanted to access Levy’s Beach for racehorse training – he checked the council laws.

Lo and behold, it is illegal under local laws to bend the rules around racehorse training at Lady Bay without consulting the public.

Who would have thought? Fancy not being able to change a local law via Snapchat or WhatsApp, how inconvenient.

“Sorry I cannot assist in this instance,” Mr Anson wrote in his reply to Mr Downs via his ipad.

In this instance.

Ah, the power of three little words.

Mr Anson is no longer CEO, but the councillors are due to vote again on large-scale racehorse training at Levy’s Beach/Spooky’s Beach which, you may recall, was also found to be illegal under council laws and saw the Planning Minister step in to make it legal.

A sunset clause on the whole mess lapsed on 30 November last year, so each councillor will once again have to decide where they stand on the issue which continues to divide the community.

The first council meeting of the year is next Monday…and the election is in October.

Stay tuned.

The story would not have been possible without a grant from the Walkley Foundation Public Fund which supports investigative journalism.

Carol Altmann – The Terrier

I always suspected it was the case, but now it’s been confirmed – for almost three years, the Warrnambool City Council did virtually nothing about racehorse trainers breaking the rules at Lady Bay.

Early last year I lodged a Freedom of Information application for all of the correspondence between the council and Warrnambool Racing Club about breaches and alleged breaches of the training rules at Lady Bay.

I asked for everything from 1 December 2016 – which is when the new rules began – right through to 14 March 2019: all letters, emails, the whole lot.

The application took nine months, with the council making me jump through multiple, mind-screwing hoops to narrow down such things as what I meant by “members” of the WRC, what email addresses they should search for, what names they should search for, what keywords they should search for….

On and on it went, at an eventual cost of $216.75 (funded, thankfully, by a grant from the Walkley Foundation Public Fund which supports investigative journalism).

And at the end of all that searching and all that money, the result was just two letters:

Two, brief letters from the WCC to the WRC in 27 months: one written in March last year and one from November 2018.

This was the total sum of all written correspondence between those in charge, despite the steady stream of complaints (and videos and photographs) from the public during this time showing near misses, a racehorse that had thrown its rider, trainers riding fast past walkers, and numerous other safety issues. (See footage below from 2017.)

Apparently none of this warranted even a single email from the WCC to the WRC.

Perhaps they rang or texted each other, leaving no paper trail, I don’t know.

What I do know, however, is that when it comes to cracking down on errant trainers, the council has been extraordinarily weak. 

Let’s be super clear here: asking for the rules to be enforced does not mean we are instantly “anti-horse racing” or that all trainers are running amok. #notalltrainers

Instead, it’s a reminder that a public beach is just that – public –  and members of the public have every right to be asking the council what happens when things go wrong, especially when it comes to racehorses on Warrnambool’s main swimming beach.

Until last November, not one trainer had been suspended or fined.

The council says it has since cancelled the permit of one trainer for breaches, although we don’t know who, or for how long, or why, or whether – to be frank – if this actually happened, as some within the industry are unaware of it.

Professional racehorse training at Lady Bay is now the new normal and despite claims that it has “always” been this way, it hasn’t.

A second FOI, which I will write more about soon, revealed there were regularly more than 1000 horse workouts a month at Lady Bay until disgraced trainer Darren Weir fell off his perch.

This is not how it used to be, but this is what our council happily signed up for: up to 96 horses running each morning until 10am, seven days a week, from the first day of Autumn to the first day of Summer, including public holidays.

And they did this with a promise that officers would keep an eye on things – the FOI results show that they didn’t.

In fact Mayor Tony Herbert has recently taken things one step further and suggested that people who are worried by the racehorses at Lady Bay should go to another beach.

Good grief.

This is an excerpt of what Cr Herbert recently wrote in an email to one resident:

“I have spoken to many people over the past few years and some of them avoid the said beach when training of horses is occurring.  Some find that unacceptable, others find that ok.  WCC approach is trying to achieve a balanced approach.

We are so lucky in our city and region that we have a number of alternatives, if sharing the beach with horses is unacceptable to you in the mornings. During the winter months if I’m walking my dog, I choose to use other beaches and there is a number of them.”

In other words, if push comes to shove with “sharing” our main beach, it is the general public that gets shoved.

More on the results of these FOIs soon.

The FOI would not have been possible without a grant from the Walkley Foundation Public Fund which supports investigative journalism.