You want an apology? Think again, Mr. Mayor

One suspects that Coffs Harbour City Mayor Cr Keith Rhoades may be regretting his insistence on an initial apology from Cr. Mark Graham (in the latest mayoral manoeuvre in a distinctly Byzantine local government saga) on 15 December 2011 - followed by an ineffectual demand for a second apology.

One local wag went so far as to post a transcript of this 'apology' in the online comments section of The Coffs Coast Advocate, which is appreciated as at the time of writing Council still had not published the minutes of this meeting on its website.

By pedrowe from Corindi Beach on 16/12/2011 at 2:25PM

For those who haven't read or heard the apology, here it is.... brilliant…………………………………………

1. I am sorry that Council has used two Conduct Review procedures that are not prescribed within the Code of Conduct. Specifically they are:

a. appointing a Sole Conduct Reviewer who is not independent or unbiased as she has received significant remuneration from Council to provide advice on corporate governance failures surrounding the Rigby House refit prior to her appointment as a Sole Conduct Reviewer. The Code of Conduct is very clear in requiring that Conduct reviewers are independent and unbiased. None of the three members of the Conduct review committee appointed by this Council have an existing pecuniary relationship with Council.

b. appointing a “peer reviewer”. The Code of Conduct does not contain a procedure for appointing a “peer reviewer”.

2. I am sorry that Council has allowed a Sole Conduct Reviewer with multiple conflicts of interest to continue to investigate me. I am sorry that the General Manager has decided to waste ratepayers funds engaging both a Sole Conduct reviewer with multiple conflicts of interest and a “peer reviewer”, given that there is no procedure for appointing a “peer reviewer” within our adopted Code of Conduct.

3. I am sorry that Council has failed to learn from the corporate governance failures that led to the sacking of the former General Manager.
4. I am sorry that Council has used improper and politically motivated conduct review procedures in an attempt to prevent public disclosure of the ongoing involvement of the Mayor and two other Councillors in the corporate governance failures that led to the sacking of the former General Manager.

5. I am sorry that Council has improperly used the Code of Conduct against my open, transparent and perfectly legal handling of the Rigby House refit and the sacking of the former General Manager.

6. I am sorry that the Sole Conduct Reviewer has consistently misrepresented my conduct and published material that defames me. The Sole Conduct Reviewer has implied that my conduct has been dishonest and unlawful. I demand an immediate retraction of these defamatory statements and an apology from her for defaming me.

7. I am sorry that the Public Officer, a subject of complaints against me, has been involved in investigations into my conduct on behalf of the General Manager. This is a clear conflict of interest that the Public Officer has failed to disclose.

8. I do not apologise for any of my conduct as I have not breached the Code of Conduct. Reading the following statement from correspondence between the Mayor and the General Manager “Finally, this matter is only known by the three Councillors and the several staff involved. The matter will and, I repeat, will stay with these people” does not constitute a breach of the Code of Conduct. This statement is not confidential. Nor are the statements “Mayor has been kept informed of the progress of this investigation from the commencement. How can the work done be less than $150000 and not have gone out to tender” or “Probably the most important part of this correspondence is that in another dot point related to building refurbishment costs were confirmed in February 2010 as being $1million”.

9. I do not apologise for sending Council’s Acting Public Officer a written request for legal advice relating to the dismissal of the former General Manager. She did not respond to my correspondence. Leaving two voicemail messages with the Acting Public Officer requesting to be provided with this legal advice does not constitute a breach of Code of Conduct. At no stage have I spoken with the officer or made any improper requests of her. I required the legal advice to enable me to meet my obligations under the Local Government Act. The failure to provide me with this advice prevented me from meeting my obligations under the Act.

How not to grow the worth of your .au domain name

Clarrie Rivers sent me at link to lcreview.com.au which in turn was the starting point for this post.

Originally people on the NSW North Coast knew lcreview.com.au as a digital address associated with the free weekly community newspaper The Lower Clarence Review, until it broadened its horizons to become the Clarence Valley Review accompanied by an online presence at www.cvreview.com.au.

This eventually left its original digital address an unclaimed orphan wandering out there in cyberspace.

It appears to have been snapped up by Publishing Australia Pty Ltd (formerly Netfleet Pty Ltd) - a buyer and seller of Australian domain names.

This company is reportedly owned by David Lye and his brother Mark.

Now the new owner of the domain name apparently decided to position it in such a way that it might take whatever advantage there maybe in developing site content to draw traffic numbers which in turn enhance the possibility of re-sale. The site collects as much information as possible about its visitors as well.

This is where the exercise becomes amusing for Northern Rivers residents.

Not only did the web designer not realise that Grafton is not in the Lower Clarence Valley and so is not a direct match for the domain name; the very generalised desciptions of this regional city and the Clarence River area (along with the links) leave one wondering if the website is speaking about Clarence Valley in New South Wales or some other valley in an alternate universe.

The air of unreality is made worse by two of the photographs used on the homepage as seen here:

These are clearly not images of Grafton, NSW Australia, but of Upper Grafton Street in Dublin, Ireland (pictured below) in the Northern Hemisphere.

This is one of the many images of the real NSW North Coast City of Grafton's main shopping street which can be easily found on the world wide web:

Is it any wonder that Alexa: The Web Information Company gives the site a global three-month traffic rank of 8,788,387 - a number which probably hasn't altered all that much since it was owned by local media.

Being kind, I personally rate the value of lcreview.com.au at $1.

Finally, the light begins to dawn.......

The New York Times 16 December 2011:

The National Institutes of Health on Thursday suspended all new grants for biomedical and behavioral research on chimpanzees and accepted the first uniform criteria for assessing the necessity of such research. Those guidelines require that the research be necessary for human health, and that there be no other way to accomplish it.

In making the announcement, Dr. Francis S. Collins, the director of the N.I.H., said that chimps, as the closest human relatives, deserve “special consideration and respect” and that the agency was accepting the recommendations released earlier in the day by an expert committee of the Institute of Medicine, which concluded that most research on chimpanzees was unnecessary.

One of the reasons why Japan thumbs its nose at Australia and continues to slaughter whales in the Southern Ocean?

A Japanese ship injures a whale with its first harpoon.

 It took three harpoon attempts to kill the mammal.

Photograph: Kate Davidson/EPA/Corbis,

The Guardian UK December 14, 2011

Perhaps this is the answer to the puzzle of why, in the face of ongoing Australian opposition, the Government of Japan (under the guise of research) continues to needlessly kill whales in Antarctica for a dwindling domestic whale meat market – it thinks it owns us.

According to the Australian Parliament’s About the House Magazine in December 2011:

Japan [is] ranked as Australia’s third largest source of merchandise imports in 2010 (after China and the United States), worth $18.2 billion. The automotive sector dominates this trade, with Australia constituting the third-biggest market for new passenger motor vehicles manufactured in Japan.

The economic relationship between Australia and Japan is not only about trade. Japan has been Australia’s third largest foreign investor for many years (after the United States and the United Kingdom). The total stock of Japanese investment in Australia at the end of 2010 was $117.6 billion, almost twice as large as that of China (including Hong Kong). When both trade and investment are included – and taking account of both the depth and breadth of that investment, which has been critical to the development of Australia’s most important industries – Japan could still be considered to be Australia’s most important economic partner overall.

Japanese demand for Australia’s resources – and the accompanying investment – has contributed enormously to the development of Australia’s mining industry. In the area of agriculture, over 40 per cent of ‘Aussie beef’ imported into Japan comes from Japanese-owned farms in Australia. Kirin Holdings now owns Australia’s largest dairy company, as well as some of Australia’s largest beer producers. In the field of manufacturing, Toyota not only exports passenger vehicles to Australia, but – through its in-country production facilities – is also the largest producer of these vehicles in Australia. Furthermore, Japanese investment is increasingly targeted at using Australia as a springboard into the emerging economies of Asia. Japanese investment has been remarkable for its breadth, continuity and steady expansion over time, regardless of fluctuations in the global economic situation.

Australians can noticeably alter this scenario if enough individuals refuse to purchase goods imported from Japan or goods produced by Japanese–owned companies operating in this country, for as long as Japan acts as an inhumane environmental vandal in the Southern Ocean.