CMB Watch
Watching - City of Moreton Bay, QLD
Our goal here is to set up a site to monitor and watch the City of Moreton Bay, Queensland and to call out bad practices and deviations from proper decision making and stated management policy. They have recently shown a tendency to embrace a "Normalisation of Deviance" by decisions that conflict with their adopted policy.
What We Do
We scan the City of Moreton Bay web pages and publications for recent reports and approvals. We then investigate how decisions and approvals they make are non compliant with their published adopted policies.
Policy
We ask why does the Planning Department of the City of Moreton Bay consider that it does not have to abide by the Council's adopted planning policy?
Adopted Policy
Policy is Policy is Policy.
If the full Council adopts a Policy, then it should also be adopted by all departments within Council.
Meaning
From the Cambridge Dictionary:-
Policy: a set of ideas or a plan of what to do in particular situations that has been agreed to officially by a group of people, a business organisation, a government, or a political party
There is firm evidence that the Planning Department officers within the City of Moreton Bay Council have embraced the concept of the "Normalisation of Deviance" (see this link). The use of terms such as "generally complies with..." and " is generally compliant with .." they justify that deviance from Adopted Policy.
A tactic Planning Department officers employ as part of their normalisation of deviance is to completely and deliberately exclude metrics of an assessment that are not in accordance with Adopted Policy. If there is a non-compliant component of a Development Application (DA), then to re-affirm their desire to approve that DA they have been shown to exclude any mention of the non-compliance in their reasoning.
No more out-of-control Planners
No more free reign Delegated Authority without oversight