Make it a double
‘CEO resigns’ was the best Stawell Times-News headline of the year so far.
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Let’s see if you can make it a double.
Mayor Doolittle and the Donothings resign would be fantastic.
Now that the chief executive is resigning and breaking her contract, how about council sue for breach of contract, which it clearly is and take the costs associated with securing a new chief executive off her final payout.
If the chief executive had been sacked, I am sure she would have sued for wrongful dismissal, we wouldn’t want that to happen again. That amount is going to cost us, the ratepayers, a nice little sum of money so we are entitled to recover that impost, which is no fault of ours.
But, that will never happen with this weak ‘Fawlty Towers’ lot.
So, what great things have happened during this chief executive’s reign?
We have seen the North Park netball courts go from A grade condition to C grade and, sometimes, unplayable condition.
We have seen the closure of the local recycle plant and loss of 25 jobs.
There have been reductions in staff and services at Taylors Gully day care centre.
There was the million-dollar white elephant precinct building on the Western Highway.
Don’t forget the failed major roadhouse enterprise, a failed tyre shredding enterprise, a so far failed vegie growing enterprise and the dark matter experiment, which won’t reduce unemployment for Stawell.
Then there is the rundown of the leisure centre and contracting out of services, shops closing, families leaving the district and excessive high rates.
I could go on.
So when council decides on a replacement chief executive, please get someone with a bit of guts to make the hard decisions needed.
Don't appoint a local as the system wont change. Get away from the softly softly touch. Start by reducing staff.
No more jobs for the family and friends. Put in a decent coffee machine so staff don’t wander up the street at 9am each day or take a slow trip to Maccas.
Apparently there is to be three send offs for the chief executive, I would have thought one would have been too many but, what the hell, charge it all to the ratepayers.
One thing you can bet on and that is I won’t be there along with lots of others.
PETER GRAVESON
Stawell
Strength in numbers
IN an overwhelming display of strength and commitment, a volunteer firefighter motorcade of 421 Country Fire Authority vehicles hit the streets of Melbourne on Saturday to show support for the authority and Emergency Services Minister Jane Garrett.
The vehicles came from all over the state including Melbourne’s outer suburbs, regional centres and throughout country Victoria.
Not since the mid-1980s, when tens of thousands of fire authority volunteers protested in Melbourne against a proposed amalgamation of the authority and Metropolitan Fire Brigade, has there been anything approaching the size of Saturday’s protest.
The motorcade to Melbourne took less than 24 hours to organise.
Volunteers want an end to political and industrial interference in the authority and its ability to service the community.
The authority is a volunteer-based fire and emergency service operating a fully integrated system of paid staff working with volunteers at a small number of urban brigades (just over 30 integrated brigades out of 1200 brigades across Victoria).
Volunteers make up over 97 per cent of the authority’s workforce.
The authority’s integrated model of 60,000 volunteers working with 880 front line paid staff and a similar number of paid support staff results in one of the most effective fire and emergency services in the world.
We respond to local and major fires and emergencies from house fires and car accidents to multiple major bushfires like Black Saturday. We provide firecover for 60 per cent of greater Melbourne’s suburbs and all of regional and rural Victoria.
But the firefighter’s industrial union, based in Fitzroy, is intent on dividing paid and volunteer staff, marginalising volunteers and flooding the authority with unneeded extra paid staff to replace thousands of urban volunteers from the suburbs and regional centres without increasing public safety.
Their instrument to achieve this is the proposed enterprise bargaining agreement which is reported to be the subject of a secret deal between the premier and the union’s secretary Peter Marshall, a deal done behind the minister’s back.
The deal gives the union virtually all that it wants including a minimum of seven paid firefighters at incidents before any firefighting can start (trained and qualified volunteer firefighters are not to be counted) and a ‘consultation’ clause that requires union agreement before the authority can make operational and organisational changes.
In short, such a deal would progressively kill the authority’s integrated model of volunteers and paid staff working together and delivering consistently high levels of public safety.
This deal will come at an enormous cost to Victorians with large annual increases in the fire service levy on households and business year after year and a heavy draw on the state’s budget. The public safety implications are particularly troubling.
If you undermine, deactivate and progressively push out volunteers, who will provide Victoria with the surge capacity to respond to major fires and emergencies?
ANDREW FORD
Volunteer Fire Brigades Victoria