Manningham News

At the June 3, 2014 council meeting, the council published responses (or submissions) from the public to their Budget and Strategic Resource Plan 2014 - 2018.

There was one submission that I found very interesting.

This submission came from a former councillor. It can be seen on pages 60 to 62 of the submissions.

It shows what many of us have suspected for a long time.

Here we have explained, quite clearly, how Manningham Council has been misleading residents for years regarding the large increases in council rates. (This discussion was included as part of a larger article on this web site. However, the points raised by this former councillor are so important for all Manningham residents that  I thought I best to highlight  them in a separate article.)

Many residents have compared Manningham council's rate increases with the increase in CPI and asked why do our council rates increase at around twice the CPI.

Manningham council consistently replied along these lines:

"that council costs have little to do with consumer items. And that wages and salaries form a large part of councils expenses."

And they leave it precisely there without saying any more. However this explanation really does not explain anything. For example, why should a large wages and salary bill give rise to such large increases in our rates?

This former councillor spells it out for us.

"The main reason for cost increases is the wages and salaries increments applied to the current $44.5 million wages bill under enterprise agreements"

The reason why our rates increase at such an alarming rate is because the salaries and wages bill of the council is increasing at an alarming rate. We can see from the budget and other council documents that it is not the number of council employees that are increasing dramatically, but instead it is their pay.

This ex-councillor  explains to us that the pay increases for council staff are large because of their enterprise bargaining agreement.

If you read the budget documents you will see that the council has an EBA 'model' that is used to calculate pay increases each year.

The important thing to note is that pay increases are not performance based, but are simply derived from calculations.

Manningham council's enterprise bargaining agreement is excessively generous and unreasonable. I have gone into detail about the councils increases in wages and salaries elsewhere on this website. However I will repeat the essential information here.

The Australian Bureau tells us that private sector salaries increase at around 2.1% per year. Public service salaries increase on average at 3.1% per year.

Manningham Council wages and salaries billl increases at 3.4% per year. This is well above the national average for public servants. And far above the average for people employed in private enterprise.

What this ex-councillor spells out, and what Manningham council themselves admit - if you can now see what they are getting at in their reply to this issue - is that the majority of our rate increase goes to pay for the excessive pay increases of council staff.

Manningham council likes to present themselves to us as servants of the public. However, I think we can see now that they also serve themselves to a large and unreasonable extent.