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
THE LIMIT OF SPEED LIMITS
Why the Council arguments to lower speed limits is a nonsense.
THE REX - WHAT HAPPENED?
This report reveals insights from Council public documents & witnesses accounts.
Staff Salaries by LGA 2023 - NEW
This report shows the average staff salary/cost per employee by Council
CRIME STATS by LGA 2023
Want to know the crime stats in your Council and how they have changed in 2023 vs 2022?
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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
Statewide 2024 Perceptions of Local Gov Survey
All Councils Statewide - what do Victorians think about councils?
Statewide 2024 Council Budget Survey
All Councils Statewide - what do Victorians want Council money spent on?
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:
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Governance Rules
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Public Interest Disclosures for Staff & Councillors
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Public Registers
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Community Satisfaction Results
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Budgets
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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?
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50 Councils only responded to our FOI (we are still challenging the remaining)
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There were 3104 hardship applications - almost all were dismissed.
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The TOTAL rates refunded was 0.01% or $363k from $3.6 Billion in rates bills
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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: