Sunshine Coast Hinterland Times

Mayor Bob Abbot sees his role as the Chairman of the board in a corporation of 330,000 shareholders, 2,800 employees, a $600 million a year budget and $4.6 billion worth of assets. In this extended interview with the Hinterland Times editor, Michael Berry, the mayor reveals how others in Council are adjusting to this re-badging of the traditional local government.

HT: A feature article in last month’s Hinterland Times argued the case for local governments having more control over their social and financial progress, and questioning the future necessity for state governments. Is this a direction you support?

BA: That’s certainly something that has been talked about at a much higher level for a long time now and there really is no real need for three levels of government in this country. But if we were to go to two levels of government regional councils would have to work a lot better than they are at the moment. One of the things that I am really keen on is how we get the organisation to be more responsive, and we are certainly working on that now, trying to lift our game.

Secondly on the decision-making process, the CEO and I are getting good support from the Council to develop a much flatter structure so that we don’t have these silos of indecision, so to speak, where people aren’t game, or aren’t capable, or aren’t in any position to make a decision when they’re dealing with the customer.

HT: How do you achieve that when you’ve had people here so so long that their public service culture is entrenched. And surely it doesn’t help when your recent interviews for directors didn’t extend outside the existing bureaucracy?

BA: Yes, well we don’t have a choice on that under the Act. But the more I get around the organisation and talk to the people, particularly those people at the coalface, they are quite sick of being put in a position where they can’t give an answer or can’t respond positively to people they are dealing with say on the phone.  

HT: But whether it’s staff on the phone or compliance costs for traders that have gone absolutely crazy, or getting approvals for things like home offices, doesn’t this require a revolution in the way Council relates with residents? 

BA: I don’t know about it being a revolution, but look, I think it is important that we look at this stuff and I’m getting good support from staff in here to do it.  We are only really just starting on the journey. We’ve spent the last five or six months trying to get some sort of understanding of where it is we need to go and what we need to do, and now we’ve got to put the structure together to achieve that.

HT: Do you have a model in your own mind. I mean you are a huge corporation now and there are great expectations that this new Council will move away from the old public works model?

 BA: Yes we’ve developed a structure which I think will eventually eat into that old bureaucratic style culture.  One thing is a need to try and maintain some integrity in where people sit and how they operate with the people around them. I suppose we’ve got a fairly basic structure in that there are six directorates dealing with the traditional areas like infrastructure, community services, corporate services, business and organisational performance.
We’ve also developed the Office of Mayor and CEO and that office won’t just look at the day-to-day business. We will be planning future communication strategies; we will make sure things are on their way through the system and not getting bogged down, or we’ll find out the reasons if they are. So really this office is part of the organisation that will provide a bit of impetus and try and resolve someof the blockages in the future.

 One of the positions we’ve advertised in the last couple of weeks is a position which is a strategic communications officer, someone who has very good political smarts, good journalist contacts, understands journalism, understands how it works, understands how important it is strategically to develop a communications process and they will be working directly in the Office of Mayor and CEO
The other thing we are doing is introducing a Sustainability and Innovation Unit to develop a philosophy and policy that will create a sustainable Council and sustainable community in the future across our lifestyle, our environment and our economy. It will also look at innovative ways of getting the Council to do things that they may not have been happy to do in the past or understood.

HT: What sorts of things?

BA: Like getting into more business areas so we can find alternative forms of income rather than just relying on rates all the time. Things like our airport and our caravan parks; all sorts of things that could be making money for the community. What we need to do is make sure the community’s economy is not only diverse but fairly robust so that when we have the bad times in the tourism industry we can see it through; when we have the bad times in the construction industry like now we can see it through.

HT:  Do you see all this being mapped out in your first term or is it a longer term view?

 BA: I think the ground rules will be in place in the first term. I want to see this first term deliver a good solid base for future councils.I want a structure that is going to take us into the future, not just maintain the status quo but step us out in the future and Councillors are really keen to do that.We will know in the next couple of weeks who the new permanent directors are going to be and then we will start to work with them about building, or as the CEO calls it, populating that structure with the right people in the right places.

 HT:  I take it those directors will have completely different performance requirements than previously? Won’t they be required to think more like corporate directors?

 BA: Absolutely. They will have five year contracts, key performance indicators that they have to achieve and they will have annual assessments of those indicators. We will have the opportunity along the way to say look we’re not happy with this, what about doing that, can we do that better, so that you are not ending up with someone who comes to the end of their contract term and all of a sudden everyone didn’t like what they were doing for the last five years. That does no good for our business, it does no good for them either.

 HT: One of the suggestions on the Hinterland Times website was that local governments of this size need to be better and quicker communicators. The suggestion was made that referendums and electronic voting would assist this process. Do you think you need to get in touch with residents quicker on certain issues?

 BA: I don’t disagree with that. I don’t know that the web-based style is the way to do it.There are two things we need to do. Yes, we need to communicate with the community, and we also need to engage the community It’s that second one that is most important to me. If you get people engaged on issues rather than knee-jerk reactions you actually get more understanding in the community, and that’s the sort of thing I want to do. 
Already we’ve got two groups happening bringing people in from the community. We’ve got our Corporate Plan discussions just starting now with the Community Conference happening in November. We’ve selected some 60 people from the community with all different backgrounds and different areas to sit with us for a few days and actually build the corporation direction with us together. 
We are also establishing a Rating Reference Group which is a group of people from different parts of the community who will start to work with our senior financial officers to develop a rating structure that may well be more acceptable to the people of the Sunshine Coast and spread the load a bit.