A year can be a long time but residents of the Moira Shire remember this time last year very clearly when the Moira Shire Council was dismissed by the minister.
On March 7 2023, the damning findings of a Commission of Inquiry into the Moira Shire Council were tabled in Victorian Parliament with council dismissed and an administrator appointed.
It has now been nearly 12 months since Chair Administrator John Tanner AM came in to control with the organisation seeing several changes in that short 12 months.
“Obviously there were some recommendations out of the Commission of Inquiry that I would say that 80% of those have been completed,” Mr Tanner said.
“There are some issues that I wouldn't say they're outstanding, but there are issues that have not been completed and we need to continue on.
“For instance, one is a review of the boundaries that is a further consideration of the local representation review, which is an electoral commission responsibility.
“A number of those have, like the asbestos issue, all been completed and then there's probably the most important thing, which has only just happened, but we had an acting CEO up until six weeks ago.
“Until certain matters were resolved, we were not able to appoint a permanent CEO. Now we have the permanent CEO in place and I think it provides stability going forward. It provides certainty for the staff and for the community.
“The other thing is that we have a restructure that is being implemented and this restructure started prior to the permanent CEO coming in.
“We also now have in place the senior management level underneath that. We now have permanent directors in director of community sustainability department, corporate performance, and, and infrastructure.”
When asked if there was a timeframe that the inquiries recommendations needed to be rectified by, Mr Tanner said that all of these matters will be addressed fairly quickly now.
“There's a couple that may be six months time, but they'll all be in place in various forms. For example, there's one which is to do with leadership and building community capacity and this is to go back to an elected council,” Mr Tanner said.
“One of the recommendations is that we develop leadership capabilities within community and support community to participate in civic life and the relationships between community and council.
“This is all about creating the right environment for people to come back in as councillors.
“One of the recommendations is that those leadership programs and development processes take place. That'll be, I would say by the middle of this year and then that will be ongoing and will continue throughout the next four and a half years.
“There is the ongoing maintenance of council that you have to address because you are replacing the council and the elected counsellors. You have to maintain that level of engagement, or a greater level of engagement in this case, and maintain all the operations that council would normally do.
“Part of that is our role to establish a really robust, comprehensive approach to managing the CEO's performance. That's something that is a number one priority of council and in our case as administrators, is to ensure that there's a proper process as far as managing and reviewing the performance of the CEO. That has now been implemented and is in place.
“The other thing that we've got in place is a customers experience strategy and this is to address the low levels of community satisfaction within the municipality. What we're trying to do is measure all of that and have a really good understanding of what/ how people are experiencing their dealings with council.”
A major issue that came to light through the inquiry focussed on the working conditions of the organisation as a whole with Mr Tanner saying that one of the number one priorities on the dismissal of the council was to implement a strategy to create a safe, respectful, inclusive workplace culture and an overhaul of the HR systems.
“Now that has happened and we have two new people in those roles who are working through a number of matters to do with HR. It's important that we first attract the right people to those positions and we're able to look after them going forward,” Mr Tanner said.
“We also have a community engagement process that we've been going through. We’ve been meeting with particularly smaller communities, and I think it's important that we look at them and not just be focused on the main four.
“Right from day one, our approach has been to look at the municipality from a strategic point of view and to ensure that fairness is attributed to not only the larger population centres, but also the smaller ones.
“If you can say what would we like to see that look like in the future, that is that there is a more strategic outcome for Moira as a whole and not just the individual pockets.”
While Mr Tanner’s tenure in the Chair Administrator role is up inJune this year, Mr Graeme Emonson and Suzanna Sheed OAM will remain as Administrators until the next council elections in 2028.
“The ultimate outcome is that we have community leaders that are willing and capable of putting their hands up for election going back into local government,” Mr Tanner said.
“There was a number of issues as far as the culture of the organization was concerned when council was dismissed but not because of individual counsellors, it was dismissed because the council was not operating as a council.
“It didn't have the ability to operate and come together as a council.
“When you take that factor out of the system, it certainly gives the opportunity to have more of a strategic approach with no politics in it at all. No parochialism at all. You've got none of that interference and enables us to then make decisions that is the best outcome for the whole municipality.
“I think there's some really good work taking place in regards to the coming together of various sectors. And I'll cite the memo of understanding which is just about finalized now between the health sector, the education sector, and local government.
“The coming together of those three sectors to look at the opportunities and the goals that they want to achieve.”
While the administration is in place to govern the entirety of the Moira Shire, there are Yarrawonga specific sectors that council has taken a keen interest in and have looked into the steps forward.
“We are working very closely with both New South Wales and Victoria in regards to having a really good understanding where the bridge project is currently sitting and anything we can do to assist that from an advocacy point of view, we need to do that,” Mr Tanner said.
“As far as advocacy is concerned, there’s a lot of work gone into the old primary school site in Yarrawonga with the state government and let's hope we can get a positive result out of that.
“The other one that we've spent a fair bit of time on, because the stats actually highlight the issue we have, is with road safety, road trauma and the cost of road trauma.
“We are developing and are well down the track of a road safety strategy and action plan which we hope to have involvement with organisations like the local football clubs. We are working very closely with TAC and which is a transport accident commission.
“There's, apart from just the normal functions and the issues that came out of the commission of inquiry, other things happening in the municipality that we need to be working on and we are doing that.
“This is to make the community a stronger community.”