Mismanagement of Disputation & Structural Weaponisation of “Unreasonable Complainant” Frameworks

6.1: Core Grievance

The City of Melville operational administration maintains an adversarial, decentralized approach to community grievance management. Rather than operating a transparent, unified system to log, track, and remediate administrative errors, the City utilizes highly confrontational instruments—specifically its operational policy titled the City of Melville Managing Unreasonable Customer Behaviour Policy (and associated administrative practices) — to suppress legitimate public scrutiny. This framework lacks independent internal or external review mechanisms, allowing operational staff to act as judge, jury and executioner, effectively utilizing “unreasonable” declarations to mask administrative inaction, bypass statutory record-keeping, and avoid accountability.

6.2: Statutory & Regulatory Triggers

Local Government Act 1995 (WA) – Section 5.41(b): Mandates that the CEO must ensure that advice and information are available to the council so that “informed decisions” can be made. Weaponising complainant policies restricts the flow of critical community feedback to Elected Members.

Local Government Act 1995 (WA) – Section 1.3(2)(b) & (c): Outlines the intent of the Act to provide for greater community participation and more accountability of local governments to their communities. Arbitrary communication bans directly violate this statutory intent.

State Records Act 2000 (WA): Requires comprehensive and accurate capturing of all correspondence. Fragmented complaint management and the silencing of specific individuals create structural deficits in the City’s official archives.

Public Sector Commission (PSC) Integrity Standards: Local governments are expected to align with State public sector principles regarding fairness, natural justice, and procedural transparency in administrative decision-making.

6.3: Evidence Base (Triangulated Data)

Customer Science Complaints Review (2020): Explicitly identified that the City lacked a centralized, uniform, and visible system for managing public complaints and tracking feedback, leading to fragmented information silos across different directorates. While progress and oversight gaps regarding this were documented in the City of Melville Response to Inquiry Recommendations, no structural remediation is identifiable.

Weir Legal Review (2021): The independent evaluation conducted by Lawyer Bronwyn Weir, detailed via the City of Melville Review of Complaints (Building and Planning), highlighted significant structural friction, lack of clear procedural mediation paths, a “toxic” operational culture, and a heavy-handed legal posture where the City acted unreasonably and made mistakes.

Financial Cost Imbalance: Internal assessment and shadow profiling of public council expenditures estimate the hidden resource drain (officer hours, legal retainers, and administrative filtering) used to suppress and manage complaints costs ratepayers an unbudgeted $6 to $10 per capita, which is buried under general operational overheads rather than being transparently reported as a line cost item.

6.4: Governance Impact

By operating without a centralized, auditable complaint database, the executive team and Elected Members have no reliable data metrics to identify systemic operational failures. When a department continually mismanages a planning or environmental issue, the resulting community complaints are treated as isolated instances of “unreasonable customer behaviour” rather than data points of an underperforming service. This creates an inward-looking corporate culture, shields incompetent administrative practices from council oversight, and drives up external legal expenses through a reliance on adversarial prosecutions instead of early-stage mediation.

6.5: Impact on Community, State System, & Regulatory Integrity

Community Impact: Citizens are stripped of their right to natural justice. When an administrative declaration is made against a ratepayer, they face immediate civic isolation, restricted access to public facilities or staff, and are denied any formal, transparent pathway to appeal or review the decision. This erodes psychological safety for residents challenging municipal errors.

Sector & State Systemic Impact: This case demonstrates how a local government can exploit gaps in State guidelines to create a “closed loop” of administrative power, effectively neutralizing the democratic oversight role of Elected Members by controlling what information and which people are allowed to access the council.

6.6: Institutional Performance Assessment:

WALGA: Has historically provided generic, risk-averse “Model Complainant Policies” to councils. These templates prioritize protecting administrative comfort over upholding strict procedural fairness or mandating independent review mechanisms. By designing frameworks that exclude community input and appeal paths, WALGA’s model policies actively undermine the community participation mandates of Section 1.3(2) of the Act.

DLGSC / Inspectorate: Despite repeated community notifications and clear red flags raised in the DLGSC Authorised Inquiry into the City of Melville, this State regulator has failed to audit the application of these restrictive policies sector-wide, completely ignoring how the absence of centralized complaint procedure registers and documented employee handling workflows enables arbitrary administrative blacklisting without formal right of appeal. By taking a passive stance and treating these as “internal operational matters,” the DLGSC fails its own statutory duty to enforce the Act’s intent. It reduces “good government” to mere administrative compliance, completely ignoring the community’s legislated right to democratic engagement and oversight.

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