David Penberthy: Onkaparinga Council’s payment to CEO Mark Dowd for his Kooyonga Golf Club fees is indefensible

ONKAPARINGA Council’s payment of its chief executive’s private golf club fees is indefensible, writes David Penberthy.

Mark Dowd, Mayor Lorraine Rosenberg and Magistrate Su Jingwen at the McLaren Vale Visitor Centre in 2013. Picture: Naomi Jellicoe

IT might not buy you that much in the way of advertising but, if you spend it the right way, $6800 can buy you a mountain of shocking publicity.

Onkaparinga Council learnt that the hard way this week, with its indefensible covert payment to local government’s very own Arnold Palmer, golf-mad chief executive officer Mark Dowd, for the cost of his start-up membership at the swanky Kooyonga Course at Lockleys.

Now it has emerged that the mayor, former Liberal MP Lorraine Rosenberg, has been attending the Australian Open with ratepayers covering her airfares and accommodation. The whole affair is starting to become a re-run of Caddyshack.

Ms Rosenberg’s soirees aside, the council’s judgment is being fairly questioned over the fact that it secretly blew ratepayers money so Mr Dowd could indulge his passion for golf. Extravagant it is, given Mr Dowd already pockets $328,000 a year for being in charge of lost dogs, bin night and the Christmas Carols, and could have painlessly shelled out for the membership himself.

All of it is proving the depressing adage for ratepayers and taxpayers, namely that the easiest kind of money to spend is other people’s money.

And the manner in which the council has handled this affair, revealed exclusively by The Advertiser on Wednesday, also provides a handy case study in crisis mis-management.

The obvious and only route for the council in light of the Ombudsman’s strong criticisms of this payment was to admit that it erred too far on the side of generosity, to concede that the payment should have always been made public, and to ensure the CEO returned the full amount of the fee to council coffers.

Australian golfer Greg Norman attracts a huge gallery of spectators while competing in the Ford South Australian Open at Kooyonga Golf Club in 1996.

Instead, the council not only argued that the payment was actually a pretty good idea, it also wasn’t sure whether the money should even be recouped and will discuss the matter at its next meeting.

This is a good story for two reasons. It is not only deeply suss, it is also quite funny, in terms of the laughable justifications the council is offering for this ludicrous perk. The best of these is the claim that it makes sense for Mr Dowd to be a member of Kooyonga because members of the public are “more than likely” to approach him at that golf course to discuss council business.

Why of course. If you live in Seaford Rise and are wondering about the upkeep of your local park, one of the first things you would do is drive 40km to a private golf course in Lockleys to see if the CEO was there. There is every chance I suppose that he would be at Kooyonga, as one of the other arguments he successfully put forward was that membership of an exclusive golf course in Lockleys would provide a promotional bonanza for the outer south.

This is more nonsense. It is actually a snub to the south, a snub to the area he claims to represent.

If playing golf with overseas visitors, especially all those cashed-up Chinese ones, is such an essential part of the job, there are plenty of golf courses in the Onkaparinga council area that could have benefitted from Mr Dowd’s patronage.

There’s one in particular, Willunga, which is currently locked in a battle for its own survival. Like many country courses, Willunga has been struggling financially, and last year came very close to being closed altogether.

To its credit, the Onkaparinga Council baulked at suggestions that it simply close the course in its entirety and sell the land for housing. It has been looking instead at an alternate plan whereby it would be cut in half and converted to a nine-hole course, with the rest being sold off.

This cash-strapped course could have benefitted from the patronage of the local council’s chief executive.

So could the entire southern region.

Willunga Golf Club is fighting for survival.

If golf is the doorway to overseas tourism, it would make more sense for the CEO to take his Chinese mates for a morning round at Willunga, then down to d’Arry’s Verandah or Coriole for a feed, then watch the sun go down with a cold one from the front bar of The Victory.

The comic value of Mr Dowd’s fatuous justifications would be lost if you were a working-class ratepayer in Hackham West with legitimate gripes about the quality of the local infrastructure. Not surprisingly, this story attracted dozens of angry comments on Advertiser.com.au, many of them going to the question of over-government.

If you were designing Australia from scratch in a methodical and frugal fashion, there is no way you would end up lumbered with three tiers of government, with all the duplication and red tape that inevitably entails.

You would not end up with the same number of political representatives, nor the same number of generously-paid bureaucrats such as Mr Dowd, or the fly-in fly-out head of the Jay Weatherill’s department, Don Russell, who has been watching the state’s economic and energy miracle unfold from his house in Sydney.

Average people know when they are being led up the garden path. If this deal was so virtuous and beneficial, the Onkaparinga Council wouldn’t have hushed it up in the first place. It was audacious that the CEO asked for the money, ridiculous the Council paid it, appalling that they hid it, laughable that they kept defending it. Readers of The Advertiser are divided as to which tier of government should go, with an impassioned debate over which tier is the least competent and which tier you would trust to absorb the functions of the one that is abolished.

But, to paraphrase that great political thinker, Meatloaf, when it comes to government, two out of three ain’t bad, or certainly preferable, to all these unwieldy and expensive layers of bureaucracy.