It cost $148,000 to find no one broke the rules at this Sydney council

It cost Sydney ratepayers more than $700,000 in a single year to deal with code of conduct complaints councillors made against their political opponents, and most resulted in no findings of misconduct.

But the days of using the process to score political points are numbered, with Local Government Minister Ron Hoenig vowing to upend the controversial code of conduct process.

With the September 14 council elections on the horizon, a spokesperson for Hoenig confirmed updates to the state’s model code of conduct would be released within weeks.

“The current code of conduct is not fit for purpose,” Hoenig told the Newcastle Herald last year. “I am working with the Office of Local Government to rewrite it so that democratically elected councils can get on with doing the job their communities expect them to do.”

At Cumberland City Council, the site of a debate over books about same-sex parents in public libraries, councillors raised 84 complaints against each other, making that local government the worst in metropolitan Sydney. It cost the council $148,000 to deal with them, despite no breaches being found.

The data, in the Office of Local Government’s annual Your Council report released this month, shows Hawkesbury City Council received the second-highest number of code of conduct complaints.

Of the 23 received by that council, only one complaint was investigated and finalised. It cost ratepayers $96,500, the report said. The City of Parramatta had 16 complaints against its councillors.

Of the 207 complaints made in the period surveyed, nine were found to be a breach of the code.

Councils across NSW are required to have a rule book that meets minimum standards set out in the state authority’s 62-page model code of conduct, which governs behaviour around bullying, disclosures and any conduct that risks bringing a council “into disrepute”. Local council leaders for years have been warning that the system is being “weaponised” for political gain.

Lisa Lake, Cumberland’s mayor who is seeking re-election at the upcoming vote, said she was not at liberty to discuss the complaints made at her council because the code of conduct says they are confidential. But dealing with code of conduct complaints was “a costly process, a time-consuming process”, she said. “Everyone agrees that the procedures need to be reviewed.”

Adam Leto, whose advocacy group Western Sydney Leadership Dialogue wrote a review of local government, said any changes to a council’s code of conduct should allow matters to be handled internally, rather than by paying consultants “tens of thousands of dollars to investigate often trivial or vexatious issues that don’t end up going anywhere”.

“It’s the sort of he-said, she-said, nonsense that would look out of place in a playground, much less a council chamber,” he said. “The chamber should be a place of pride but at times it becomes over-run with pettiness.”

If a councillor is found to have breached a code of conduct, they can be censured or referred to the Office of Local Government.

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