Call to show benefit of trips

HOBART ratepayers need to be able to see just how overseas and interstate trips made by aldermen will benefit the council and the city, former Lord Mayor Damon Thomas says.

The spending habits of the Hobart City Council’s elected members have again come under the microscope, three years after the Mercury conducted an analysis of them as part of our Your Right to Know campaign.

The previous analysis, for January 2012 to December 2014 — in which Alderman Thomas was Lord Mayor — revealed that aldermanic expenses were at $350,000.

This prompted reforms at the council, with a more stringent system put in place regarding expense claims and the previously largely unchecked spending of aldermen.

This was successful in slicing about $60,000 in general expenses from the council’s costs, but an increase in travel resulted in the overall costs swelling to $470,000 for January 2015 to December 2017.

The new analysis also found that Hobart aldermen spent more on travel than their counterparts at the City of Melbourne in the same period.

Ald Thomas said Hobart’s spend compared to Melbourne would be so big because of a unique period in the city’s history with two friendship city agreements with Xi’an and Fuzhou in China struck since 2015.

“Melbourne and Perth for example have had these relationships for a long time so they don’t have to go there more frequently,” he said. “So I don’t think there will be any way in which we will do the same amount of travel over a similar period into the future.”

But Ald Thomas said when aldermen took overseas trips in the future, ratepayers needed to have a clear idea of what were the quantitative and qualitative results from them.

Last year he had a proposal for the council to develop a way to measure the value of the council’s international relationships knocked back by his fellow aldermen.

“I don’t believe that the public should put up for any trip by the council unless they know in advance what the reasons are for any travel and the benefits it can bring,” he said.

“I believe it should be planned a year in advance ... we should put forward what we are trying to achieve. We have to have a much stronger set of criteria to base it on and how many people go on it.”

He said there might be situations like when Sue Hickey went to China as part of a bid to host an international conference, which was paid for by Business Events Tasmania and could be accounted for.