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Investigations & Reports

Our team of volunteers works hard to obtain information to form investigative reports.

Using Freedom of Information requests, General Requests, Public information, Scraping Council Websites, and using AI, we have begun a sector-wide expose on many topics. You will see our results here as each report is finalised.

FOI's Completed
601

Staff Salaries by LGA 2023 - NEW

This report shows the average staff salary/cost per employee by Council

CLICK HERE

CRIME STATS by LGA 2023 - NEW

Want to know the crime stats in your Council and how they have changed in 2023 vs 2022?

CLICK HERE

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Data from

https://www.crimestatistics.vic.gov.au/crime-statistics/latest-crime-data-by-area

IBAC - Corruption and Misconduct Risks

IBAC Summary of the risks

Corruption and Misconduct report

Statewide 2024 Perceptions of Local Gov Survey

All Councils Statewide - what do Victorians think about councils? 

PERCEPTIONS OF LOCAL GOV REPORT

Statewide 2024 Council Budget Survey 

All Councils Statewide - what do Victorians want Council money spent on?

COUNCIL BUDGET SURVEY REPORT

COUNCILLOR TRAINING

We lodged FOI requests for every Council in Vic to provide us a copy of all training that Councillors had completed.

See what we were given: HERE

More info to come.

LOCAL COUNCIL DATABASES

Here you can VIEW copies of public documents by Council.

This is a location we can save things like:

  • Governance Rules

  • Public Interest Disclosures for Staff & Councillors

  • Public Registers

  • Community Satisfaction Results

  • Budgets

  • Local Laws

THE DATABASE IS HERE

We know that Council CEOs are paid well. Here we will detail and update annually reported CEO salaries by Council for the sector.

Following the Ombudsman's Report into how Councils deal with Hardship in 2021, we have conducted an extensive FOI campaign to determine what Councils have done since. 

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You Can read the report HERE

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WHAT DID WE FIND?

  • 50 Councils only responded to our FOI (we are still challenging the remaining)

  • There were 3104 hardship applications - almost all were dismissed.

  • The TOTAL rates refunded was 0.01% or $363k from $3.6 Billion in rates bills

  • Some Councils have arrears of over 15% of their rates bills - these include Hume, Boroondara, Knox, Moonee Valley, Cardinia, Nillumbik, Macedon Ranges, Golden Plans Shire, Mansfield Shire, Central Goldfields Shire, Towong, and Yarriamback.

 

Councils continue to deny assistance to the most vulnerable members of our society.

We know that Councils spend considerable public money on legal expenses and lawyers. We have conducted and FOI campaign to uncover just how much each Council is spending on Legal Fees.

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Councils continue to spend enormous amounts on legal fees.

See our report HERE

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SPORTS PROJECTS AND INFRASTRUCTURE

Sports facilities cost councils hundreds of millions of public monies each year to build. We are investigating the "business cases" for large projects across the last decade by Council. We will show if the business case was EXCELLENT, AVERAGE OR POOR.

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Community Satisfaction Surveys

The annual results from the Community Satisfaction Surveys have started to be released. See the report here:

COMMUNITY SATISFACTION

 
THANKS FOR BEING HERE  
TO FIND OUT WHAT IS HAPPENING IN YOUR COUNCIL AND OTHERS JOIN TODAY
TOGETHER WE WILL FIGHT CORRUPTION AND DODGY BEHAVIOURS
 
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