NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND 4 James Plumridge

Follow that bull!  And take a bucket with you… 

Over the last couple of days, I’ve been looking more closely at David Morris’s Briefing Note to the Minister (see the recent article Morris Dancing with the Mob).  I’m talking about the document that revealed Cr Pat Hooper’s role in persuading Mr Morris, and through him the Minister, that the only way to save democracy in the Shire of York would be to suspend the Council for at least six months. 

I say ‘at least’ because I have a sneaking suspicion that Minister Simpson has a mind to go on with the suspension for a bit longer—say, until all we ‘passionate extremists’ have gone to our reward and the shire is safe for a new generation of rustic despots and their departmental overlords.

Not that Cr Hooper was the only influence on Mr Morris, who seems to have entered more than once into secret conclave with a couple of former councillors and two disaffected former CEOs.   

Mr Morris may also have offered a receptive ear to the grizzles of members of Shire staff irritated by that interfering wretch Shire President Reid, who kept poking his nose into Shire business that didn’t concern him, which of course from their perspective was pretty much all of it.

I have found no evidence that Mr Morris or his colleagues offered a receptive ear to the complaints of President Reid about serious improprieties in the Shire administration.  President Reid was left languishing out in the cold, where he remains to this day, wandering like a weary ghost through the desolate streets of the town he loves.

Anyway, back to the Briefing Note, which is proving to be a treasure trove for ‘snappers up of unconsidered trifles’ (Autolycus in Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale, if you’re wondering). 

The note doesn’t tell the full story of the so-called ‘Probity Audit’ and its aftermath.  To find that out, we‘ll have to consult Briefing Notes E1437502 and E1437589, which in our case we have not got and if Brad Jolly, David Morris and their colleagues have their way we’ll never get to see.

What the note really does—all the nabobs from the Director-General down signed off on it— is demonstrate that in the opinion of the Department of Local Government and Communities honesty is far from being the best policy in dealing with the Shire of York.

The Department received the Shire’s response to the Minister’s show cause notice on 15 December 2015.  Mr Morris’s briefing note is dated 22 December 2014.  In effect, Mr Morris had at the most six working days to study and discuss the response, which given its complexity hardly seems adequate, and I’m fairly sure he would have had other important things to think about, like his Christmas shopping.  As he says, the response ‘contains a raft of information and commentary’ (hundreds of pages of it, as I recall).  

However, according to Mr Morris that information and commentary is ‘not specifically related to the areas of concern detailed in the original notice’.   To borrow from Commissioner Best’s lexicon, that is bullshit*, even more so than the show cause notice, which contained a raft of spiteful untruths and was as poorly drafted as the worst document I’ve ever seen issue from a lawyer’s office or government department.

I will go so far as to say that Mr Morris’s entire ‘analysis’, as he calls it, of the Shire’s response is bullshit.  All it does is reinforce the idea, shared by many, that the whole process of probity audit, show cause notice and suspension was a stitch-up from start to finish. 

The departmental nabobs had to find some way of protecting their own backsides, and those of their mates in York, from the reforming zeal of Shire President Reid.  Who knows what inconvenient truths the idiot** might have turned up, if left to his own devices?  ‘Good governance’ had bugger-all to do with it.  It was all about self-preservation.

Significantly, Mr Morris tells the Minister that despite the Shire’s request for an inquiry into past wrongs, ‘…the course of action undertaken to date has been to seek to rectify current concerns and deficiencies.  It is not intended to revisit historical issues’.  You bet it wasn’t. 

Casting my mind around for historical parallels, I’m reminded of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.  Admittedly, that took place on a much larger scale, with tanks, guns, soldiers in uniform, international protest and a student self-immolating in Wenceslas Square, but most other ingredients, including a nest of perfidious conspirators, were present in York. And we now have our own Gustav Husak, briefed by the Department to ‘normalise’ Shire Council actions and procedures.

To paraphrase Karl Marx: Historical events always occur twice, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.  (He had to be right about something.)

·         Bullshit:  At the ‘Council’ meeting on 23 March, Mr Best denied using this word, much to the amazement of a young woman present who had heard him thus describe the contents of the blog.  The word he actually used, he said, was ‘pathetic’.  Did he use that word in its primary sense of exciting sympathy, or in its modern vernacular sense of ‘miserably inadequate’?  You be the judge. (I still think he said ‘bullshit’.)

**    Idiot:  This is another word Mr Best has denied using, in his case to describe contributors to the blog. I’m beginning to worry about his memory. 

Priceless Historical Document Discovered in Shire Safe

Readers with a love of history will be stunned by the news that I have in my possession a rare copy of a priceless relic on a par with Magna Carta, the Grand Remonstrance of 1641 and the American Declaration of Independence.

The original is kept at the back of a locked safe, guarded by dragons, in the Shire’s main office.  My copy was made and smuggled out to me under cover of night by—no, I can’t tell you, sorry, I won’t put innocent lives at risk.

By now you may have guessed that what I’m talking about is Ray Hooper’s letter of resignation from the position of Shire of York CEO.  Dated 15 April 2014, its deathless prose has the power to stop traffic, move the bowels and bring a tear to the eye.  I find particularly affecting the reproachful tone of the third paragraph, in which he accuses the Council of failing to provide him ‘with a safe and secure workplace free of fear, intimidation and denigration’.  I’d never before thought of Mr Hooper as a friend of irony.

The veiled threat of legal action in his final paragraph is nothing short of a literary master-stroke.  Pure genius, to introduce just at that point a note of subtle humour.

You can see the letter below.  Respect it, read it with reverence and attention.  Tread softly, reader, because you tread on his dreams.