Friday 29 February 2008

Shades of Woolongong

Just in case you missed this one, here's some happy campers from today's Cairns Post.

The pretty photo is of some fabuoulsy important people being wined and dined by Conics, a new property and infastructure development company that has arrived in town.

Mayor Kevin Byrne, Council CEO Noel Briggs, General Manager City Development Peter Tabuloa, along with Manager Planning Strategies Peter Boyd, all enjoyed a slap up bash. They just love getting cosy with developer folk. It's what they do best.

This remined me of Council's PR spin chief Robyn Holmes' recent breach of the code of conduct when she was editing Mayoral and other Unity candidate profiles at her Council desk, then emailing them to the Cairns Post.

Made me wonder: how many Council staff attended the Chamber/CBWC mayoral debate on Friday and who paid for them? It was not a standard Chamber/CBWC lunch for which there might have been justification for attendance, but a political event and as such the ratepayers of Cairns ought not to have been paying for staff to attend.

Even Val Schier wasn't even regarded as a guest and had to pay the $50 to attend.

If Robyn Holmes, Noel Briggs, Gary Schofield, and who knows who else was there, they ought to have paid for themselves.

However, I bet there'd be a dirty money trail, longer than the sediment run off at False Cape.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Who ever said, "when shit is thrown it, sticks" is correct.

Our once CEO David Farmer, has moved to a very cushy $225,000 per annum job with the Wollongong Council as their CEO. This particular Council is now embroiled in huge misconduct proceedings with the ICAC. Developers and Council staff have been doing favours for one another including huge monetary donations to electroral campaigns, sleeping with Council Planners,involvment with State ministers in return for approving developments that did not comply with the City's own planning scheme becauses zonings were overturned and dispensations given on height restrictions and site coverage ratios. How many times have we seen the latter occur (False Cape, Paradise Palms, Novotel Golf Course, Villa Romano, Clifton Waters, Clifton Beach Shopping Centre, Clifton Cottages)?

David Farmer was recently quoted as saying that "this sort of thing did not happen with Cairns City Council when he was there."

Who is he trying to kid. We have plenty of evidence of shady deals between this Council and developers and inappropriate behaviour by Councillors and even our Mayor. This is a scandal as big as the one in Wollongong!

The actions of our Council in these planning decisions and many others display a pattern of behaviour that is totally unacceptable to the residents of Cairns and under State Legislation, is supposedly illegal.

Anonymous said...

It's not only Robyn Holmes who breaches the code of conduct. Anne-marie Rodgers (AKA Anne-Marie Clarke) has been doing her PR work for Division candidate, Julia Leu, in Queensland Health time. Anne-Marie is the Business manager of DSMPHS (formerly Mossman Hospital) but do we hear anything on this site about that? NO!! If she had been working for KB's Unity team and doing this it would have been all over this site. Obviously a biased site!