Does this document actually level with the community, or is it mostly written to keep things looking tidy for the governing group?
CL25.399 - Annual Report 2024-2025 and Audited Financial Statements for Year Ended 30 June 2025
Ms K Buckman, Director City Performance at Shoalhaven City Council.
When you sit down with a covering report like this — the one attached to the Annual Report and the audited financial statements — you expect a bit of gloss. That comes with the territory. But as I read through it, the question that kept coming up was: does this document actually level with the community, or is it mostly written to keep things looking tidy for the governing group?
After going through it carefully, the overall feel is that it’s extremely polished and very safe. Not misleading — just selective.
It highlights every achievement, every positive number, every completed project, but it avoids discussing challenges or pressures. And that’s where the “spin” starts to show.
We get long lists of highlights — grants won, trails upgraded, events delivered, new pieces of infrastructure completed — all of which are fine and factual. The report tells us 88% of council’s deliverables were completed or on track, but it doesn’t explain the remaining 12%.
No context, no discussion about what that means for the people waiting for those services or projects. It’s almost like a brochure for Councillor inboxes rather than a performance story for the public.
The part that really stood out to me was how major issues are mentioned in passing with no explanation. The $278 million write-down of the road network — which is a very serious number — appears in a single bullet point, almost like housekeeping.
There’s no attempt to explain what that means for costs, for maintenance, or for ratepayers. No comment on how the network deteriorated to that point. No discussion of future funding implications. Just the number, and then on to the next item.
The same goes for the financial performance. Income is down significantly from the previous year. The operating result before capital grants is in the negative. Those are important signals. But the covering report doesn’t explore any of it.
Instead, the narrative leans heavily into the council’s preferred messaging: the Sustainable Financial Futures Plan is underway, ratios are improving, some reserves have been created, land sales brought in money. Those points may be true, but presented without the balancing context, they can give a misleading impression of stability.
And the line that “there are no additional risk implications” is, frankly, difficult to reconcile with the sheer scale of issues the underlying documents reveal.
That feels more like political safety language than a realistic reflection of the situation. It seems to me to be playing the public as fools.
Now — this is important, and I want to make it absolutely clear.
I do not encourage criticism of public-facing general staff.
These reports are usually prepared by teams who work incredibly hard under tight constraints, and they’re not the ones making political decisions or shaping the public narrative. General staff don’t deserve to be blamed or attacked; they often do their best in a difficult organisational culture.
But senior executives are different. They occupy positions that come with very real obligations to the public — obligations around transparency, accountability, and candour.
When a report reads as carefully curated as this one does, the responsibility for that tone sits squarely with the leadership level, not the rank-and-file. That’s why I’ve commented specifically on the style and framing of this document and what it chooses not to address.
To me, this covering report isn’t “frank and fearless” — far from it. It’s safe, selective, and very much aligned with the dominant political narrative.
It presents the good news, avoids the hard news, and does not speak plainly about the real pressures and structural challenges the organisation is facing.
A truly candid report would have put things on the table:
the deteriorating assets,
the funding pressures,
the risks in workforce capacity,
the missed deliverables, and what they mean for the community.
None of that appears here.
This doesn’t mean the numbers are wrong — the audited statements are accurate.
It’s the storytelling that is incomplete. And when leadership chooses not to tell the full story, the community is left without the information it needs to understand what is actually happening inside its own council.
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Disclaimer: This article provides analysis and commentary based on publicly available information and council transcripts. It does not make allegations of misconduct by any individual. Readers should verify details independently before drawing conclusions.
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