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Investigations

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 Pending
295

FOI's Completed
402

Employee Expenses and Profits

All Councils Statewide - Budgeted employee costs and Comprehensive Income (profit) by Council for 2023/24. See our report 

HERE (as seen on Channel 9)

LOCAL COUNCIL DATABASES

Here you can access 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.

Report due Oct 2023.

Community Satisfaction Surveys

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

COMMUNITY SATISFACTION

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