Bill, Tom and Dog Run the Footy Club

Tom had been elected president of the footy club in March.

By May he regretted it.

They had lost four games straight, and Tom spent most of the final quarter of the latest one standing behind the interchange bench offering advice.

“Put Kev at centre half-back.”

The coach ignored him.

“Kev. Centre half-back.”

Still nothing.

Tom moved closer.

“You’ve got bloody ears, haven’t you?”

The coach turned around.

“Yes.”

“And?”

“And you’re the president, Tom. You don’t pick the side.”

Tom glared at him.

“I’m responsible for this club.”

“You are,” said the coach. “But I’m responsible for coaching the team. If you want to talk about how I’m doing that, we can do it Monday. Right now I’ve got a game to finish.”

Bill, watching from beside the canteen with Dog, took a slow drink of tea.

“That went well,” he said.

Dog declined to comment.

On Monday Tom arrived at Bill’s place carrying a folder.

“I’ve checked.”

“On what?”

“What I’m allowed to do.”

“That sounds dangerous.”

“I can’t tell the coach who to put at centre half-back.”

“No.”

“So what exactly am I president of?”

Bill put his tea down.

“Good question.”

Dog emerged from under the table carrying a football.

It was almost flat.

Tom squeezed it.

“That’s useless.”

“Most of them are,” said Bill.

“Why haven’t they been replaced?”

“Dunno.”

Dog disappeared again and returned with the first-aid box.

Tom opened it.

Three sticking plasters, a triangular bandage and half a packet of jellybeans.

“Where’s the rest?”

“Trainer left.”

“When?”

“Three weeks ago.”

Tom stared at Bill.

“Why didn’t anybody tell us?”

Bill shrugged.

“Another good question.”

At the next committee meeting Tom brought the football and the first-aid box.

The coach was there too.

“How many usable training balls have we got?” Tom asked.

“Three,” said the coach.

“Are the lights working?”

“Mostly.”

“How are the juniors going?”

“Badly.”

“Who’s handling injuries?”

The coach hesitated.

“Whoever’s around.”

Tom looked at him.

“And when were you planning to tell us all this?”

The coach shifted in his chair.

“I thought you wanted me to run the football side.”

“I do.”

“Then I’ve been running it.”

Bill leaned forward.

“That’s not quite the same thing.”

The coach looked at him.

Bill pointed at the flat football.

“You decide how to train them. You decide who plays centre half-back. But you don’t get to decide whether the committee should know we’ve got no trainer, broken lights and three decent footballs.”

Tom nodded.

“And you don’t get to decide what sort of club we’re trying to build.”

That slowed things down.

The committee spent the next hour talking about something it had not discussed properly for years: what the members had actually elected them to run.

They wanted juniors coming through. They wanted a competitive senior side without bankrupting the club. They wanted players trained properly and injuries handled properly. They wanted a club people wanted to play for and families wanted to be part of.

And they wanted to know when any of those things were going wrong before they discovered it from the scoreboard.

Tom looked at the coach.

“That’s what we want the football program to deliver.”

The coach nodded.

“How I deliver it?”

“Your job.”

“How we know whether it’s being delivered?”

“Our job.”

“And if it isn’t?”

“Then we ask why.”

“And if I haven’t got a good answer?”

Bill smiled.

“Then you’ve got a problem.”

The coach thought about that for a moment.

“Fair enough.”

They agreed that every month the committee would get a short report. Nothing fancy: players, juniors, injuries, training, things broken, things needed and anything seriously off track.

“If something comes up that none of us understands?” Tom asked.

“Find somebody who does,” said Bill.

“And how do we know any of this is actually happening?”

Bill looked under the table.

“Dog.”

Dog lifted his head.

The coach frowned.

“What’s Dog got to do with it?”

“Same thing he does now.”

“What’s that?”

“Checks.”

Nobody formally appointed Dog.

But the job stuck.

A few months later the lights worked, the first-aid box contained actual first aid and there were enough inflated footballs to run training.

The team was even winning occasionally.

After one game Tom stood outside the sheds looking pleased with himself.

“See?” he said. “We fixed it.”

Bill looked through the door at the coach talking to the players.

“You didn’t pick the side.”

“No.”

“You didn’t run training.”

“No.”

“You didn’t kick a goal.”

“No.”

“And the coach didn’t decide what sort of club the members wanted.”

Tom looked at him.

“No.”

Dog wandered past carrying a football. He bit down experimentally.

The ball stayed firm.

He dropped it and kept walking.

Tom watched him go.

“So what exactly did we do?”

Bill picked up his tea.

“Ran the club.”

Who Actually Does What at Council?

It’s easy to misunderstand how local government works. I once thought about a career in politics — for about ten seconds, until my brain caught up with the rest of me. That was a long time ago, and deciding it wasn’t for me may have been one of the better decisions I’ve made.

In my opinion, being an elected councillor is a mug’s game and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. It is the sort of role that can quickly become a blame game because councillors get blamed for decisions people don’t like, even though different people can have completely different ideas about what the “right” decision should have been.

Before blaming anybody, though, it helps to understand how the system is supposed to work. One of the problems is that when we say “Council” we tend to think only about the Mayor, councillors, CEO and Council employees, when the system actually starts with the community.

The community elects a Mayor and councillors to represent it. Those elected representatives are given authority and responsibility to set direction, govern the organisation and make important decisions; the CEO and administration then manage and deliver within that framework, and the outcomes flow back to the community.

That is the democratic bargain. We agree to live under laws and to give elected people authority to make decisions on our behalf; in return, we expect that authority to be exercised lawfully, competently and broadly in the direction those representatives said they would pursue. The community does not get whatever it wants on every individual issue, and councillors are not free agents simply because they won an election, but ultimately the whole system exists to serve the people who live under its decisions.

Within that system there are two very different parts of what we casually call “Council”: the elected Council — the Mayor and councillors chosen by the community — and the administration — the CEO, managers, planners, engineers and other Council employees. The separation is deliberate, and the boundary works both ways.

Councillors should not run the administration or tell individual officers what professional conclusion they must reach. But nor should the administration gradually take over the governing role because councillors become passive, inexperienced or overly deferential to senior staff; both are failures of the same system.

That distinction matters particularly with something like the Glan Devon biosolids and waste-incinerator development application. The question is not simply whether councillors should tell planning officers what conclusion to reach — they should not — but whether the elected Council has established the direction, standards, information requirements and governance processes under which the administration is supposed to do that work.

A football club and a company

A sporting club provides a useful analogy. The committee of a professional football club does not stand on the sideline telling individual players where to run, run every training drill or tell the coach who should play at centre half-back.

But imagine the reverse. Suppose the coach decides what sort of club they are going to become, sets the budget, decides what information the committee is allowed to see, determines how his own performance will be judged and tells the committee that its job is basically to attend sponsors’ lunches and hand out trophies.

That would be equally absurd. The members elect the committee, the committee governs the club, and the coach runs the football team within the framework set by the committee.

A company works much the same way. Shareholders appoint a board, the board governs and the CEO manages; the board does not run the accounts department or tell individual engineers how to do their jobs, but neither does the CEO decide what the board’s role will be.

Local government has a similar division. The community elects the Council, the elected Council governs, and the CEO manages the administration. Each has a different role, and the system works best when each part actually performs it.

Three jobs of the elected Council

At its simplest, the elected Council has three closely related jobs: it sets the direction, it governs the organisation, and it makes the decisions that properly belong to the elected Council. There is an important boundary around all three because Council itself operates under law; councillors are elected representatives, but they are not free agents when exercising statutory powers.

1. Set the direction

Queensland law says councillors must represent the current and future interests of the residents of the whole local government area. The word future matters because Council governance cannot simply consist of waiting for things to happen and dealing with them one at a time.

Councillors should be thinking about where their district is going. What sort of industries should be encouraged? Where should they be located? What qualities of the district should be protected? What infrastructure will be needed? What forms of development might fundamentally change the character of an area? What environmental, financial or social risks are acceptable?

And, just as importantly, what does not fit?

That requires councillors to listen to their community, exercise judgement and make choices about the future. Those choices then need to appear in useful forms — planning schemes, corporate plans, infrastructure plans, economic-development strategies, environmental policies and other strategies and policies.

The point is not to predict every proposal that might ever arrive because nobody can do that. It is to have thought seriously enough about plausible futures — including futures the community may not want — that an unusual proposal does not arrive in a policy vacuum.

Suppose somebody proposes a very large data centre. It might bring investment and employment, but also require substantial electricity, water, land and network infrastructure and influence where future industrial development occurs; a Council thinking strategically might already have considered whether that type of development should be encouraged, where it would best fit, what infrastructure the region can support and what existing land uses need protecting.

The same broad question exists with Glan Devon. Does an energy-from-waste incinerator, biosolids-processing and fertiliser-manufacturing facility fit the intended future of rural land in this district? If that type of industry is desirable, where should it be located, should waste-processing industries generally be concentrated in industrial areas, and what characteristics of rural land and rural communities should be protected?

Those are strategic questions and they should not first arise when a planning officer opens an individual development application. Simply deciding later that a proposal is not the sort of thing councillors want is not enough when the statutory planning decision has to be made, which is exactly why long-term vision needs to find its way into the planning scheme and other lawful planning instruments.

Without that forward thinking, development can become incremental. Each proposal may appear reasonable when considered by itself while the combined result gradually takes the community somewhere nobody consciously decided to go.

2. Govern the organisation

This is where I think much of the confusion lies, because governance is not another word for management. Management works inside the system; governance designs the system, sets its direction and holds management accountable for delivering within it.

A governance system determines who has authority, what standards are expected, what information must be provided, when matters are escalated, when specialist expertise is required, what independent checking occurs and how significant uncertainty or disagreement reaches the eventual decision-maker. For complicated matters, I think the objective can be put quite simply: good governance makes sure the right questions are asked, by the right people, at the right time, against the right framework — and that the important answers reach the people who have to make the decision.

Someone also has to make sure that system is actually being followed, and that is where governing the administration becomes important. That’s where the CEO’s role sits. The CEO role is the place where staff, organisational knowledge, professional resources and day-to-day control of the administration reside. This inevitably gives the position considerable practical influence.

But influence is not the same thing as governance authority. The CEO is the senior employee of the organisation, not an alternative elected government; the CEO’s job is to manage the administration, implement Council’s policies and priorities, provide sound and impartial advice and establish practices consistent with the direction set by the elected Council. The CEO does not set policy nor does the CEO set the rules their own role and that of their staff operate under.

The CEO can — and should — tell councillors when something they propose would be unlawful, when they are attempting to direct staff improperly, when a decision carries significant legal or financial risk or when professional advice points strongly in another direction. That is part of providing sound and impartial advice, but the CEO advises the elected Council; the CEO does not govern it.

An individual councillor generally cannot direct a Council employee in how that employee performs their duties, but it does not follow that elected Council collectively loses control of the governance framework within which those employees work. The elected Council can set the standards it expects, specify the information it requires, establish when independent assurance or external expertise is needed, scrutinise recommendations, review delegations, assess whether the organisation has the capability to do the work and hold the CEO accountable when the administration does not deliver what Council has required.

In doing those things, councillors are not telling an individual planner, engineer or other officer what professional conclusion to reach. They are governing the organisation.

The CEO’s employment contract and the performance standards within it are an obvious example. Those standards should not be comfortable targets designed such that difficult matters can be avoided while everyone can still claim success; they should reflect what the elected Council actually requires from its administration.

If those standards are poorly designed, all three parts of the system can be let down. The elected councillors may not receive the quality of administration they required, Council staff may be left working within weak or unclear expectations, and most importantly the community may receive outcomes that fall well short of what its elected representatives were supposed to secure on its behalf.

That is why CEO performance is not merely an employment matter; it is a governance matter. The elected Council appoints the CEO, sets expectations and performance standards and controls important delegations, while the Mayor has the additional statutory responsibility to lead, manage and provide strategic direction to the CEO in order to achieve high-quality administration.

This direction of accountability matters because a full-time CEO and senior administration will almost inevitably know more about the organisation, its procedures and its history than elected councillors. They prepare much of the information councillors see and control the day-to-day machinery, so if councillors stop governing that machinery does not stop — the vacuum simply gets filled.

Over time, elected councillors can become dependent upon the administration not just for professional advice, which is entirely appropriate, but for defining what questions are asked, what choices are presented and even what councillors understand their own role to be. At that point the democratic chain has begun to reverse: the community elected councillors to govern the organisation; it did not elect the administration to govern the councillors.

Attending community events, presenting awards, opening facilities and having photographs taken are legitimate parts of public representation, but they are not a substitute for governing. Councillors are also there to set policy, establish priorities, monitor performance, understand risk, scrutinise important matters, listen seriously to their community and make decisions because that is the job the community elected them to do.

3. Make decisions

The elected Council is not only there to establish direction and govern the organisation; it is also a decision-making body. Many routine matters are quite properly delegated to the CEO or other authorised officers because nobody wants every pothole, permit or ordinary development application debated at a Council meeting, but some decisions remain with the elected councillors.

When that happens, governance has an important purpose: to put councillors in a position where they can actually make that decision intelligently and lawfully. The word lawfully matters because when elected Council is deciding a development application, councillors do not suddenly become free to vote according to personal preference, political pressure or a simple show of hands in the community.

They are exercising a statutory decision-making power under planning law. For an impact-assessable application like the Glan Devon proposal, the Planning Act gives the assessment manager considerable scope, but that discretion still operates inside the planning law; councillors therefore have discretion, but it is statutory discretion, not unlimited discretion.

They cannot simply say “I don’t like it” or “my constituents don’t want it” and treat that as enough, but neither should they simply receive an officer recommendation and regard their role as endorsing whatever the administration has put in front of them. A recommendation is advice, while the decision belongs to whoever legally holds the decision-making power.

Councillors need clear, reliable and appropriately tested information that allows them to understand the evidence, the applicable planning framework, the important uncertainties and the consequences of the lawful choices available to them. Then they have to exercise judgement.

That is the point at which the whole democratic chain comes together. The community elected them, they have helped determine where the community is trying to go, they have governed the system by which important matters are examined, and where the decision belongs to them they use the information produced by that system to exercise the authority entrusted to them.

So what should the administration be doing?

The administration has a substantial role, but a different one. Council employees implement the policies and priorities of the local government, carry out its work, comply with the law and provide sound and impartial advice, while the CEO manages that organisation and its employees.

In a development application, planners, engineers and other specialists undertake the assessment. They examine evidence, identify deficiencies, seek additional information where necessary, obtain specialist advice and eventually provide a properly supported assessment and recommendation. Importantly, this assessment is framed by the strategic direction set by the elected Councillors as defined in its planning schemes, corporate plans, infrastructure plans, economic-development strategies, environmental policies and other strategies and policies.

That professional independence matters, which is why councillors should not tell an officer, “I want this refused, so write me a report recommending refusal.” But the opposite proposition matters just as much: the administration should not effectively tell councillors, “We have made our recommendation, therefore your role is simply to accept it.”

Nor should the CEO determine for elected Council what level of technical assurance, independent advice or information Council is entitled to require before making its own decision. Those are governance choices for the elected body, within the law; a capable CEO should help elected councillors govern well, not replace the need for them to govern.

What does a good governance system look like?

For complicated matters, elected Council might establish a framework that includes:

1. Clear strategic direction. Council’s vision for the district is translated into planning, corporate, infrastructure, environmental and economic-development frameworks wherever appropriate.

2. Defined information and assessment standards. Significant decisions are supported by coherent, evidence-based analysis, not merely proof that the required administrative steps have occurred.

3. Access to appropriate expertise. The system identifies when a matter is outside Council’s normal technical capability and requires external specialist input.

4. Escalation and delegation rules. Council decides what can safely be delegated and what types of unusual, high-consequence or technically difficult matters require greater scrutiny.

5. Independent assurance. Important technical work can be peer reviewed or independently checked where the risk and complexity justify it.

6. Clear treatment of uncertainty. Important assumptions, unresolved questions, conflicting expert views and limitations in the evidence reach the decision-maker rather than disappearing inside a large report.

7. CEO performance and accountability. Council checks whether the administration is actually delivering the standards, information, expertise and processes the elected body has required.

8. Audit of the system. Independent audit and assurance test whether the governance controls are functioning as intended rather than merely assuming they are.

None of this requires a councillor to become a planner or engineer, nor does it require political interference in professional advice. It requires elected officials to govern.

To me, this is the measure of how well our elected officials are performing: have they designed and governed the system such that it allows good and informed decisions? The ultimate test is not whether the Mayor, councillors or CEO are comfortable with the arrangement, but what the system delivers for the community.

Why this matters for Glan Devon

That brings me back to Glan Devon. From outside Council I cannot know exactly how the internal relationship between the elected Council, CEO and officers operates, and I don’t intend to pretend otherwise, but the governance questions are visible from outside.

The useful question is not “Why didn’t the councillors tell the planning officers not to recommend this?” because that would confuse governance with management. Nor is it “Why don’t councillors just vote it down if people don’t want it?” because that ignores the statutory limits on their decision-making power.

There is another mistake we should avoid: assuming that because the CEO and officers manage Council, councillors should simply defer to them. The administration is there to assess the application professionally and provide advice, while the elected Council is there because the community elected it to govern the system under which that work occurs and, where the decision has been retained by Council, to make the decision.

For Glan Devon I think that produces three important questions. First: direction. Had the elected Council thought seriously enough about the future of the district to understand how a proposal like this fits — or does not fit — within that future, and has that thinking been reflected in the relevant planning framework?

Second: governance and accountability. Had the elected Council established a system capable of recognising that this was an unusually complex proposal, requiring the appropriate expertise and independent scrutiny, and has the administration actually delivered that system? Third: decision-making. When the application eventually comes before the elected Council, will councillors actively exercise their own statutory responsibility using clear and appropriately tested information, or will an officer recommendation effectively become the decision?

Those questions bring the community back to where it belongs: at the centre of the system. The CEO and staff are not there for their own benefit, and neither are the Mayor and councillors; they have different roles, powers and responsibilities, but the reason those roles exist is the same — to provide lawful, competent government for the community they serve.

The CEO should manage the administration well and the officers should provide sound and impartial professional advice. The Mayor and councillors should govern, and the community should be able to judge the whole system by the outcomes it delivers.

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