Carol Altmann – The Terrier

Hear that? Alarm bells are ringing and they are coming from inside Lyndoch Living.

What follows comes from talking to dozens of people who have all expressed the same fear: the Lyndoch culture is turning toxic.

Many of the staff at Lyndoch are under so much pressure from staff shortages or low morale that they are starting to crack under the strain, or have already left. Others have been allegedly pushed out.

The images posted here are just a slice of the ‘please help’ messages of the past nine months, desperately asking for nursing staff to fill roster gaps.

Note that these gaps include during the week of the May Racing Carnival, where Lyndoch had a corporate tent and sponsored the Grand Annual Steeplechase (and has signed on again for 2020).

I have to tread very carefully here, because I know each word will be read forensically, but I believe this issue goes far deeper than the staff shortages suffered by many aged care homes across Australia.

What I am hearing is that since CEO Doreen Power took over in 2015, there has been a complete change in workplace culture that has brought an upheaval way beyond what you expect with a new chief.

This upheaval also goes further than nursing staff and into areas like catering, kitchen, supplies, maintenance, finance and administration. I am told that, as a result, up to 80 people have left Lyndoch in the past two years – an extraordinary number by any measure.

For many people, Lyndoch is no longer a very happy place, despite the “good news stories”, #hashtag slogans and Facebook snaps that would have you think otherwise.

The brave people who talked to me took an enormous risk because of fears of reprisals, but they have done so because they care deeply about the residents and for each other.

Tonight I am giving them a voice, because it seems nobody within the Lyndoch executive or on the Lyndoch board is listening.

This is what we need to hear:

So many long-serving Lyndoch staff are no longer there, with some devoting 15, 20, 30 years of their lives to Lyndoch, only to find that they were no longer wanted.

This was not how they imagined Lyndoch would treat them after such service, but their careers ended in ways that left them feeling either disillusioned or, in some cases, devastated.

Many other staff, including experienced nursing staff, have left because they could no longer tolerate the stress and how it was starting to affect their personal lives.

I know the methods that can be used: the unreasonable workload, the nit-picking, the micro-managing, the criticism, the sudden outsourcing of your job, the constant fear of dismissal, the slow wearing down of confidence.

In that environment, people choose to leave, rather than tolerate one more day.

This is allegedly what happened to many long-serving staff at Lyndoch, and to others who thought they had a career path ahead of them, only to have it suddenly fall away.

The stories I have been listening to revealed the same management pattern over and over again and I believe them.

People talked of certain staff allegedly having “targets on their backs” and the fear of who would be next, which is exactly the sort of terror that is designed to keep people silenced.

Others told of distressed staff crying in the carpark as they left work, or as they prepared to enter it.

The old Lyndoch culture, with more warmth, empathy and understanding, appears to have become collateral damage toward a big corporate, pumped-up dream that someone decided was where Lyndoch needed to go.

From the hours of interviews I have now done, I can say the new Lyndoch culture appears to be one infused with bullying, intimidation, gaslighting and a poisonous game of divide-and-rule where some people are looked after at the expense of others.

In this world, not all staff suffer, only some: there are the insiders and the outsiders.

This is how a toxic culture works and it crushes people.

Worse, it can all filter down to the most vulnerable in this story: the residents.

So many people I talked to were wracked with a sense of guilt and “feeling that I let the residents down”, because even if they worked themselves to the point of exhaustion, they felt it was not enough.

It was always the residents they worried about most.

It was not that they wanted more pay, or that they wanted less hours: they just desperately wanted more help.

I have been told there is often just one Registered Nurse on night duty for the entire Lyndoch building – around 200 residents. This nurse is also phoned by staff at the Lyndoch May Noonan Hostel in Terang, when there is often no RN on night duty at all.

I understand that there are only two unit managers for all of Lyndoch: there used to be four.

This means each unit manager is overseeing the care of 100-120 residents – including those with high needs such as dementia, psychosis and schizophrenia – plus overseeing all of the nursing staff.

It’s an impossible task.

Things can get missed, or not followed up, and the leadership that used to be there to support the nurses and care workers – to allow proper shift handovers, guidance and so on – falls away.

To try and cover the gaps, some senior nursing staff in the past 12 months have worked shifts for no pay.

One senior Registered Nurse, who worked part-time, worked for free on weekends at least three times during her contract, because there was nobody else available and it became her problem to fix.

Lyndoch says it is trying to hire more RNs and it is advertising a range of jobs, but word is now spreading that Lyndoch is not the place it used to be.

Highly qualified or experienced aged care staff can choose where they want to work, such is the demand for their skills, and many are not choosing Lyndoch.

They are, instead, choosing Moyne Health, or Mercy, or Southwest Healthcare.

I understand that four RNs hired by Lyndoch over the past 12 months each lasted barely more than a week before before moving on.

All of the above I have put to Ms Power, who, despite winning an award for aged care CEO of the year, refuses to talk to me about what is allegedly happening in the aged care facility she runs.

I have also asked questions of the board chair, Kerry Nelson, which have been similarly ignored.

This on top of its increasing secrecy makes me think that Ms Power and the nine-member board have forgotten that Lyndoch is a public institution, not a private company – at least not yet.

What is unfolding at Lyndoch is unfolding on our watch and we, as a community, need to be asking questions and demanding answers from Ms Power and the board.

To look away and just leave Lyndoch to it is not an option, so I am ringing the bell loudly and I am going to keep ringing it.

More soon.

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Carol Altmann – The Terrier

Now for a letter of a different kind.

This letter is from one of Australia’s top journalists and writers, Jo Chandler (ex The Age), who is bringing 16 of the next generation of journalists to Warrnambool next week to take a close look at climate change – the biggest issue facing our planet.

Jo is now part of the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Advancing Journalism.

How fabulous that Jo and her team have chosen our neck of the woods for their intensive investigation, the fruits of which I plan to publish on The Terrier.

Read on to see how you can be a part of it:

Dear People of Warrnambool and Port Fairy districts,

I’m a lecturer in journalism at the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Advancing Journalism (CAJ), and editor of our digital publication, The Citizen.

Next Tuesday and Wednesday (September 3-4) we will be bringing a crew of 16 masters students from our journalism program for an intensive reporting field trip to Warrnambool and Port Fairy. Our ambition is to do some deep, useful reporting on important issues playing out in your region, and also to encourage the next generation of reporters to gain skills and experience telling the stories of regional and rural communities.

In this project, our reporters will be conducting research and interviews on stories that all one way or other connect with the issue of climate change, and the impacts it is having or will have across your region and community. We’re looking at the issue from all angles – what it means for agriculture and how farmers are adapting/planning; impacts on biodiversity; implications for disaster preparedness, particularly bushfires and extreme weather events; how it will affect jobs and the regional economy; the considerations for land use planning into the future; how the community is engaging and responding etc.

The project will be overseen and edited by an expert and highly experienced editorial team:

• Myself, Jo Chandler, lecturer and editor of the Centre for Advancing Journalism’s digital news site, The Citizen. I worked for many years at The Age and over the past several years as a freelance reporter including for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Monthly, ABC Radio National, BBC.com, New Scientist, The Atlantic, among others. You can find out more about me and my reporting archive here.
• Dr Andrew Dodd, Director of CAJ. Associate Professor Dodd has worked across radio, television, print and online platforms for more than 30 years.
• Jack Banister, a CAJ alumni and now cadet on The Citizen.
• And our local project liaison partner, co-ordinator and advisor, Carol Altmann of The Terrier.

The stories we collect will be published on our digital news site, The Citizen, and co-published on The Terrier. We are also planning to co-publish some of these with mainstream publications. We have a strong track record of co-publishing Citizen reports with The Guardian, The Age, ABC Regional and other publications. You can find links to a previous rural project we did in Gippsland, which was co-published in part by ABC Gippsland, here.

Over the next week, our reporters and editors will be reaching out to people across your communities who have some insight or expertise on the issues we will be exploring. And while we’ve done our best to locate the best characters, experts and storylines to explore, we’re sure to have missed something! So please feel free to get in touch with your ideas and suggestions. And if you would like to be part of this project, or have some contribution by someone else you would like us to consider highlighting, we would also love to hear from you:

• Jo Chandler jchandler@unimelb.edu.au, or 0408364387
• Jack Banister banister@unimelb.edu.au, 0423320743

If you have any questions, please contact us. We look forward to your thoughts and ideas, and to meeting you.

Best Regards,

Jo Chandler

Jo Chandler | Professional Expert & Lecturer

Centre for Advancing Journalism

Editor | The Citizen

Published Journalism| jochandler.com.au 

I acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land where I live and work, the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nations, and pay my respects to the Elders both past and present

Carol Altmann – The Terrier

It has taken a while, but I finally have an official response from Mayor Tony Herbert as to when councillors were told about thousands of dollars worth of unauthorised spending on a Warrnambool City Council corporate credit card.

And, thanks to a growing tribe of trusty terriers, I can also tell you more about thousands of dollars spent by the council for accommodation at Flemington, including a Saturday when the races were on.

First to the Mayor.

Cr Herbert’s statement is in full below, but the short answer is Cr Herbert was the only councillor told by former council CEO Bruce Anson about the credit card misuse.

The briefing happened in November, shortly after Cr Herbert was elected Mayor, and after the errant spending by a former senior manager, David McMahon, was apparently picked up by finance staff in September.

The council’s Audit and Risk Committee wasn’t told.

The then-mayor Cr Robert Anderson wasn’t told.

None of the other councillors were told, and I believe at least one found out about the rort when it was exposed by The Terrier two weeks ago.

Remember, councillors are there to represent us and the CEO answers to them, not the other way around.

 

As we know, the council holds briefings with councillors all the time. It’s where all the good stuff happens: the real discussion, debates and arm wrestles that used to happen in open council meetings that stretched on until midnight.

It’s also where confidential issues are raised.

But for some reason, our elected representatives –  other than one – were not told of a major financial breach by one of the council’s senior managers who, at that point, had been asked to pay back more than $4000 and I believe up to $6000.

If I had not lodged an FOI in October last year, none of us would know a thing about any of this and Mr McMahon would still be in his highly paid job.

And if we hadn’t, between us, blown this thing right open, the fresh investigation into Mr McMahon’s spending and the use of all 81 corporate credit cards would not be happening.

That is how things were allowed to operate within certain circles at council for years.

Even now, we are still not allowed to know who within council has a credit card, the spending limits, and the value to ratepayers, such as what tangible results or reports we see from the thousands of dollars spent on numerous conferences.

Thanks to the terriers out there, however, we can find out more than what the council officially tells us.

For example, through Freedom of Information I learned that more than $3500 was spent on sending up to six council staff to Flemington Quest for four days in July 2017.

Even though we paid for it, the council has refused to answer questions about this event, including why the accommodation included a Saturday and a Sunday night for at least one person, if not two.

It turns out – thankyou terriers – that the Flemington Quest is next to the Flemington racecourse which hosted the 2017 Victorian Tourism conference on the Monday and Tuesday, 24-25 July.

So perhaps the council sent six people, including two senior managers, to the conference. (It sent seven people to the same conference last year – site of the infamous Cape Schanck booze up.)

But wait, there’s more. There always is.

It also turns out – thankyou again tenacious terriers – that Flemington was also hosting a major racing event, Recognition Race Day, on Saturday 22 July 2017. Trainers Darren Weir and Jarrod McLean had horses running.

So, did some council staff arrive on the Saturday so they could go to the races?

I am a hopeless punter, but in the absence of any other explanation from the council spokesman, I bet they did. 

As we know, this whole issue is not just about unauthorised credit card use, but also spending which was considered – for years – to be perfectly okay. 

 

To get to the bottom of it, we will keep peeling back the layers. There is so much more to come.

In the meantime, here is Cr Herbert’s statement in full:

“I am responding to your question about the exact date of notification.

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Carol Altmann – The Terrier

Isn’t it astonishing that our elected councillors, while pushing for a rate hike, knew nothing about the thousands of dollars being racked up on Warrnambool City Council corporate credit cards for meals, alcohol, travel, accommodation and coffees?

They apparently had no idea. None.

I don’t think our councillors even knew that the council has 81 corporate credit cards floating around – one for every four, full-time equivalent staffers.

And worse, when it was discovered that at least one of these cards was being used to buy excessive amounts of booze, and car washes, and unauthorised dinners, they didn’t know about that either.

No idea. None. Nobody told them.

(I am still waiting for a formal statement on behalf of all councillors from Mayor Tony Herbert on the simple question of who was told what and when. Hopefully I can run it in full tomorrow.)

We now know that more than one card was being used in this way, thanks to my asking questions, sources who have a strong moral compass, and documents released through Freedom of Information that I lodged on 30 October last year.

And yet the very councillors who agreed to jack up our rates by 4.5% for the next two years didn’t know a thing about it, and nobody bothered to ask.

Even the Audit and Risk Committee, which includes Cr Sue Cassidy and Cr Michael Neoh, didn’t know.

According to a statement from Crs Neoh and Cassidy, the committee only gets notified if there is suspicion of fraud. Well, guess what…..

If this is what passes for scrutiny of ratepayers’ money at a time when every dollar counts, we are being ripped off and no wonder – no wonder – the big party going on behind the scenes in some quarters of council went unreported for so long.

Which brings me to a new feature in The Terrier – the Big Barry Boolshite detector.

Big Barry is a Bull Terrier and he can sniff out Boolshite at 100 paces, so tonight I am unleashing him for the first time and I am sure it will not be the last.

I gave Big Barry a sniff of the council’s claim that it, miraculously, discovered Mr McMahon’s over-the-top credit card spending in September, just a few weeks before I lodged my FOI on 30 October.

Big Barry’s meter went into the red zone! Bool-shite detected!

Because I have since sifted through my emails to council, and I discovered that I first asked about their credit cards on, wait for it, 20 September last year!

Why did I ask them? Because journalists in South Australia and Tasmania were exposing credit card rorts within councils.

Such was the flurry of excitement within council about my questions, it put a whole response on its website, buried where nobody would find it, a week later on 27 September last year.

And then on 30 October I lodged my FOI on Mr McMahon’s spending, having received a tip off about a big booze up that went onto the corporate card and was paid for by you, me and Barry via his exorbitant dog rego fee.

And coincidentally, a few days later in early November, former CEO Bruce Anson sits down with Mr McMahon and sorts out how much Mr McMahon needs to repay.

(Barry, Barry, calm down…it’s okay, we all know its Boolshite).

A big slab of what Mr McMahon had to repay – $1600 worth – was for a big knees up at the Cape Schanck resort in July where Cr Tony Herbert and Cr David Owen were among the council representatives.

Despite being there, at Cape Schanck, Crs Herbert and Owen apparently saw nothing untoward that made them think, “hang on, who is paying for all this?”

And this is why we have lost faith and heart and trust in the very systems and people that should be protecting us from being exploited.

The new CEO Peter Schneider is holding his internal review, all of the 81 credit cards are now being checked – at long last – but, sorry, for those of us now paying higher rates and fees, it is all too little, too late.

Our local MP Roma Britnell is the only one in authority who, so far, has had the spine to take this straight to the top. Straight to the Local Government Minister, Adem Somyurek, who has been swift to act on the rubbish going on down in Gippsland at South Gippsland Shire.

The Minister put administrators in to clean out the joint.

I agree with Roma’s call for a full independent inquiry and so does Barry and I bet you do too.

Thankyou so very much to everyone who has supported The Terrier with a contribution to the Tip Jar: this investigation is the Tip Jar at work. You can be part of it by clicking below.

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Carol Altmann – The Terrier

Here we go again.

One of the big questions that hangs over the whole Warrnambool City Council credit card scandal is how many other cards were being used to eat, drink, and stay awake with endless coffees?

Tonight I can tell you that it does not stop with former tourism manager David McMahon.

In fact, my left rib tells me that we are just getting started.

While Mr McMahon ended up wandering down a crooked path, he was also – we must remember – spending thousands of dollars of ratepayers’ hard earned money on food, booze and takeaway coffees with the full approval of those in charge.

He was not the only one.

This is because the council’s secret credit card policy was so slack it allowed some council staff to spend up big on alcohol, food and their almost daily coffee run to Fishtales without fear of retribution.

And that is why we have a receipt like the one above.

It shows that in August last year, another WCC senior staff member attended a conference on the Mornington Peninsula and racked up $368 worth of drinks over two days.

This equals 40% of the total bill.

Toot, toot, all aboard! When there is a gravy train on the move, it is never short of passengers.

The person who racked up this receipt in August was, I believe, at the Cape Schanck conference held in July where more than $1600 was spent on Mr McMahon’s credit card on food and drinks.

This person was also part of a five-day trip to WA with Mr McMahon in October, where the infamous “tackle” was bought after 7pm on a Friday night.

And all of this travelling and boozing was going on behind the scenes while the council prepared its case to raise rates above the cap.

It is like the days of Versailles, with a select group of council insiders enjoying the party, while the majority of people in Warrnambool work their backsides off to make ends meet and are being belted with rate rises, fee rises and fine rises, because the council is going broke.

The credit card spending is just one part of the enormous waste that has gone on for a decade, but it is perhaps the most disgraceful, because it can’t be explained away as a mistake, or a misunderstanding, or from “circumstances beyond our control”.

It is pure greed, aided and abetted by a system that let us down.

Those council staff – and thankfully they are in the minority – who carved into eye fillet steaks, or who ordered another bottle of red, or another round of beers, or another glass of white wine, or a $4 coffee on their $120,000 salary – knew exactly what they were doing and they were allowed to do it, until last October when the shit hit the fan as a result of my FOI application that would eventually expose the whole rort.

It doesn’t matter if the money has since been repaid and I don’t know, in this particular case, if it has. (Once again, the council is not answering questions.)

And it doesn’t matter how the council now tries to spin it: it was just one rogue manager, discovered – miraculously – just a month before my FOI, all repaid, all tidied up, a mere blimp, just a “social media” storm…

None of that is true.

What matters it that we are exposing a culture that led us to the financial mess we are in today and for which we are paying dearly.

And all of those behind the rot have to be held accountable, wherever they may be today, including those who have since left Versailles and are now living in Coquenball mansion.

I am waiting to see what happens next with the council’s reporting to the authorities, its investigations and its reviews.

And I am waiting to see if South Coast MP Roma Britnell’s call today for an independent investigation is heeded by the Local Government Minister.

In the meantime, we press on with our own investigations and reporting and reviews.

Thanks to your contributions to the Tip Jar, I today lodged two more FOIs on credit card usage with the council.

The answers may take a long time to come, but it is worth the wait.

Thankyou so very much to those who have supported The Terrier with a contribution to the Tip Jar: this investigation is the Tip Jar at work. You can be part of it by clicking below.

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