Council Meetings

Council Meetings

MRI is committed to overseeing public meetings, including raising questions that help ratepayers clarify their understanding of Council’s decisions and issues solutions.

Current Procedures

Council have meeting procedures and protocols for public question time. There is no provision for interactive Q&A dialogue between Councillors and community members during Council meetings.

Community Governance Prototyping

We are prototyping “good governance” process model for evaluating behaviours, decision making quality and good governance oversee during Council meetings. This prototype will also include defining stakeholders collaboration procedures and different resolution escalation levels of government agencies.

Below is a compilation of MRI questions raised and responded; noted observations and community governance status reporting matters. MRI acknowledges that Council meetings cannot be recorded nor videoed. hence, professional quality and qualitative methods have been applied to collecting and analysing the observation information, which is verified by at least 2 or more MRI members who attended Council meetings and further validated by press articles and Council meeting documentation, etc.  There is also a process of consensus review and endorsement for the public release of the community reports.

Post Pilot Reports

25 Jun 2013:

  • Behaviors – weakened compliance to Code of Conduct as there were some incidents of mild personal criticism ;
  • Quality of Decision Making – not good governance quality –> requires improvement as still based on elaborating, emotional persuasive and often political driven arguments and lacks making clarity of key decision criteria to the audience.  The decision on the problem gambling issue is political driven – Councillors were more concerned about discrediting State Government over the removal of Differential Rate applications on EGM venues than the poor quality of the report, highlighted in blog entry

28 May 2013:

  • Behaviours – complying with Code of Conduct;
  • Quality of Decision Making – not good governance quality –> requires improvement as still based on elaborating, emotional persuasive and often political driven arguments and lacks making clarity of key decision criteria to the audience.
 30 April

30 April 2013 meeting:

  • Click  here  for the 30 April Community Governance Report.

Pilot Trial Reports:

The pilot period was for 3 months, commencing December 2012 to March 2013.

 26 Mar

26th Mar 2013 meeting:

  • Community Governance Report – interim overview -(a) Councillors are continuing to show compliance to the LGA’s code of behaviour. We are delighted personal attacks and defamations no longer prevail in debating language; (b) The quality of decision making aka debate arguments is gradually demonstrating incremental improvements since the Dec meeting; (c) Groupthink tactics are becoming less obvious or being avoided; (d) further improvements in Mayor control of meeting are needed. Full report will be available after committee review and verification.

References:
 26 Feb Calendar

26th Feb 2013 meeting:

  • Community Governance Report – click here for the Feb report.Community Governance Audit Checklist
    Overview – Behaviours have generally improved – everyone were focusing on debating the issues and refraining from defaming people outright. The quality of decision making (ie debate quality) on the differential rates matter needs future improvement attention.In regard to the Beddoe Ave Clayton issue, well done for Waverley Leader 19 Mar 2013 - Pg 3a Councillor who did improved his public communications and refrained from making defamatory statements that disrespect others – click here to see this improvement in the Monash Weekly article.

References:

29 Jan

29th Jan 2013 meeting:

  • Click  here  for the Community Governance Report

References:

18 Dec 2012 Meeting

 

18th Dec 2012 meeting:

  • No Community Governance Report Issued

References