‘I was treated like a criminal’

By ROD WISE

“I WAS treated like a criminal.” With those explosive words, John Cowan, a former councillor on Shellharbour Council, told the Minister for Local Government, Paul Lynch MP, about his efforts to inspect the Shell Cove management agreement between the council and the developer, the then Walker Corp.

Mr Cowan, who was on the council between 1991 and 1999, told the minister how he was taken to a small room where there were 40-plus pages, 17 of which were blank and slabs of the rest blacked out, while watched over by a guard.

“I wasn’t allowed to have an adviser present or take the agreement away to study it, nor was I allowed to take any notes, and I was told that the blacked out sections were those that were commercially confidential,” Mr Cowan later told the Lake Times.

His version of the inspection procedures appears to be confirmed by Michael Smart who was a Shellharbour councillor in the next council term, holding office from 1999 to 2004.

“I was a bit naïve when I was first elected to council,” he said. “I had this idea that as an elected councillor I should be able to see the management agreement involving my own council rather than having such a key document hidden away,” he said. “When they did allow me to see it, I was taken to a small room . . .” and then the same restrictions applying to Cr Cowan were then applied to Cr Smart.

John Cowan remembers well the early years of the marina issue when the developer was the Delfin Group. “There was no agreement in place then (it was 1993) so, because they couldn’t see any financial sense in the project, Delfin quietly pulled out.

“Three companies were then in the running to replace Delfin. They were Miltonbrook, Mba Land Holdings of Canberra and the Walker Corp (later absorbed into Australand). The council officers favoured Mba but, late in the tender process, Walker was allowed to amend its offer without the same opportunity being given to the other two. Walker upped its proposal by $2 million, and the quid pro quo was that there would be an immediate start on the marina. This was accepted by the council,” he said, “on the principle of ‘no marina, no land sales’.

“The next thing that happened was that the promised immediate start on the marina was postponed until 380 residential lots had been sold, ‘to add robustness’ to the project, we were told.

“Now, 1000 lots later, there is still no marina and no sign of it starting. What I could never understand was that as the land was all supplied by the council, either directly or indirectly, and Walker put nothing in, why the management agreement was such a secret.

“And as Walker failed to meet its projected deadlines in stage after stage, why didn’t the council get out of the deal,” Mr Cowan said. “They could have then.”

Michael Smart said that he still feels cranky that when he left office in 2004, all the council’s borrowings had been retired so that the accounts were back in the black. He now wants to know: “Where has all the money gone?”

John Cowan’s view is that the whole affair has been “an outrageous scandal” with the council having “kowtowed” to the developer and gone along with whatever the developer wanted.