A surge in the number of local government councillor complaints has led to the Office of Independent Assessor (OIA) receiving a staffing boost to help keep up with demand.
Established in 2018 to assess and investigate councillor conduct complaints, the OIA was expected to deal with around 160 complaints a year but in 2019-20, received 1,030 complaints containing 1,097 allegations.
According to the Minister for Local Government, Steven Miles, the 1,000-plus workload justified the extra staff.
“We have allocated an additional $250,000 till the end of 2020-2021 to support an increase of three additional staff,” Mr Miles said.
He said that prior to OIA’s establishment, councillor-conduct complaints were managed by the Department of Local Government, Racing and Multicultural Affairs.
“We established the OIA as part of our government’s commitment to local government reform, to assess and investigate councillor conduct complaints,” Mr Miles said.
He said the continuing high number of complaints being received was likely to be due to the heightened focus on integrity in local government, previous under-reporting, and increased confidence in raising issues with an independent body.
“Despite this huge increase, in 2019-20 the OIA completed 75 per cent of assessments within 21 working days,” Mr Miles said.
“This is a credit to the hardworking team who dealt with this significant increase in assessments needing to be completed.”
The Minister commended the Office of the Independent Assessor for its outstanding work in managing such a high caseload.
“The additional funding will ensure the Office of the Independent Assessor continues to have the resourcing necessary to efficiently, effectively and transparently manage complaints about the conduct of Queensland councillors,” Mr Miles said.
