Funny business in Geelong

It may be that Australians in locales other than Victoria are paying little attention to the bizarre goings-on in the bayside City of Geelong, where the local council has been half-sacked and an administrator half-appointed by the Labor government of Premier Daniel Andrews. “Half” because a newly released report recommending such action has been endorsed by the lower house but remains stalled in the upper chamber, where Labor lacks a majority. According to the investigatory panel that looked into the way things are done in Geelong, the council and its flamboyant mayor, Darryn Lyons (above), presided over a culture of bullying and endemic dysfunction.

Lyons, it seems, regularly used a popular procreative vulgarity when dressing down council employees who had not done their jobs to his satisfaction. Another councillor threatened a worker with being hanged from a local bridge, which would surely have violated at least several zoning and environmental ordinances. These and other observations, including the gripe that the council had not done enough to encourage “diversity”, are contained in the 115-page report authored by three commissioners under the chairmanship of Terry Moran AC.

Lyons has complained that the investigation was a stitch-up intended to bring down a non-Labor mayor. His supporters have gone further, muttering darkly that the overall aim was to cruel Lyons’ chances of challenging local federal member Richard Marles, an alleged and oft-accused branch-stacker. Be that as it may, those who read Moran’s report and can bring themselves to recall the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years will find it difficult to suppress a wry smile. If anyone is qualified to know about bullying when he sees it, Moran would be that man. Some might even say he brings an experienced and highly nuanced eye to the topic.

From March, 2008, to September, 2011, Moran served as Secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister, appointed to that post by Rudd, who was himself often accused of dropping the F-bomb, not to mention bullying and abusing staff. By Moran’s reckoning, a PM who conducted himself like, well, the mayor of a down-at-heel regional city was not an issue.

“There were ministers in his cabinet who were far more ill-mannered and rude in their handling of public servants than Kevin. Kevin Rudd was not the rudest person in his cabinet by a long-shot,” he told the ABC’s Sarah Ferguson.

That would be the first smile in Moran’s findings, but there is also a bonus grin buried in the text. It comes on page 24, where Moran & Co., cite the social-media snipe of a councillor who slurred a local businessman as being no better than “a Greek property parasite”.

“This egregious, racist comment undermined Council’s reputation and community harmony,” the Moran report laments.

Moran really is an extraordinarily lucky man. Not only did he remain at his desk after Rudd’s replacement by Julia Gillard (and was still in situ through Rudd Redux), he could not have known at that stage about his new mistress’ low opinion of a certain Hellenic home-renovation volunteer. That would the infamous Vassilis Telikostoglou, a former union organiser and mate of her light-fingered then-boyfriend Bruce Wilson. According to Gillard, “Bill the Greek”  turned up unbidden one day and built her a front fence she regarded as being too heavily influenced by what might have been described in years gone by as an eye-wateringly New Australian aesthetic.

Telikostoglou’s fence was, as she put it, “hideous” and its builder “just a big Greek bullshit artist.’’

If only Moran had known about the then-PM’s racist critique, which did not come to light until later, he would surely have asked for his boss’s resignation and that of her government. Mayor Lyons and his councillors might not have agreed this was sufficient grounds to dismiss an entire administration, but the rest of Australia would have been heavily in his debt had he done so.

Moran’s report can be read in full via the link below.

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