Perth Voice Interactive

FIRST, it’s important to note we’re not suggesting the lord mayor or the council have broken any laws with their handling of the Grand Central Hotel issue.

We’ve asked questions, but we’ve not made allegations.

That said, we do think the handling of the matter has been sub-par, and we are concerned that the council’s response has been to dig in and erect a wall of silence, rather than demonstrate a commitment to transparency.

The lord mayor co-owns a building that has, for many years, been the subject of numerous complaints relating to cleanliness and safety.

The difficulty for the lord mayor and the council has been in separating her public and private affairs, and ensuring council resources are spent on the former.

When the “semen and cockroaches” complaint lobbed in the email boxes of Ms Scaffidi and council staffer Cecilia Firth, we believe the most appropriate response would have been for Ms Scaffidi to alert both Ms Firth and the complainant to her personal interest in the property, and to explain that due to the conflict of interest she would not be responding as lord mayor.

Ms Scaffidi should then have alerted the then-CEO to the complaint and asked him to respond on behalf of the city and to take whatever further action he saw fit, such as reporting the allegations to council officials for possible investigation.

It would then have been open for Ms Scaffidi to respond to the complainant as the owner of the property in question and express whatever feelings she believed most appropriate.

Similarly, when the Sunday Times asked its questions of Ms Scaffidi’s interests in the property, the council should have made it clear it would respond only to questions relating to its actions and responsibilities and that questions regarding Ms Scaffidi’s interests should be put to her directly or to the company she owns with her husband Joe.

Ms Scaffidi should have had no role in formulating any council response regarding her private affairs: in our mind, her direction to council media staff about how to answer such questions were not appropriate: public resources were used, however inadvertently, to advance Ms Scaffidi’s private interests and that was a mistake.

It seems clear that Ms Scaffidi enjoys a close and constructive relationship with council staff. That’s a positive thing, but it should never be allowed to morph into council staff being used as private assistants.