Wednesday 14 July 1999
Cr. Parker was last night removed from the Council meeting. Cr. Richard McLaughlin (ALP) verbally attacked Cr. Parker on an issue that had nothing to do with the debate. It was a personal attack on Cr. Parker's character.
Cr. Parker reacted to this irrelevant discussion and asked the Mayor Ian Stromborg (ALP) to take a point of order. Mayor Stromborg asked Cr. McLaughlin to apologise. He refused this request, and then after a three minute adjournment, Cr. McLaughlin apologised and resumed debate.
Cr. McLaughlin then proceeded to continue the personal attacks, and Cr. Parker asked Mayor Stromborg, that he should be able to put forward an explanation as to what Cr. McLaughlin had discussed.
Mayor Stromborg, then asked Cr. Parker to apologise to the chair. Cr. Parker refused. A vote was taken to eject Cr. Parker, which incidentally, was not counted. There was no mention, or debate about ejecting the ALP colleague (the instigator of this dispute).
Cr. Parker claims "Local Government should not have Party Politics involved with it. Once a Party, such the ALP get into a position to control by numbers, the residents interests begin to falter into second place. In this instance, the ALP Mayor did everything to shelter his ALP mate."
"In policy decison making, quite often the ALP caucus makes decisions which appear to favour current or former ALP mates, such as the Paul Keating Park. Only Independents can judge all the issues on their merits - and put the residents interests first. A good example is this park costing $5.5 million, whilst we need urgent road works and other general repairs in our local areas."
