Australia First Calls For The Sacking Of The Wagga City Council

Australia First Party calls for the  immediate sacking of the entire Wagga City Council, we do however acknowledge Cr Negline and Cr Funnell who have acted with honesty and integrity, but the council as a whole must be sacked and a new election held.

The integrity of the Wagga council is in ruins and it's starting to look like a Chinese money laundering service, with allegations of bribes and favours rife.

We reproduce below a letter to the Daily Advertiser and we note the writer has taken up many of our longstanding concerns.

It's time the ICAC got involved.


More Questions Than Answers ...

Daily Advertiser (24.7.13)

By Edwin Brooks.

My story begins a long time ago, 30 years ago in fact, and it sure seemed like 'Star Wars' at times. But it didn't take place in a far - off galaxy.
Instead it occurred right here in Wagga when the Ratepayers Association, of which I was secretary, took Wagga City Council to the NSW Ombudsman with serious complaints about "maladministration".
The Ombudsman found our complaints valid, with his final report in May 1983 describing council's behaviour as "wrong".
After all these years the specific details are unimportant. (they can be easily checked).
But what 1983 showed us more generally was democracy must never be taken for granted. Lincoln may have got it right about not fooling all the people all the time, but we can certainly get well and truly fooled if we get so bamboozled, confused or silenced that we give up.
Which brings me to Wuai, because something is going on in Wagga right now which revives memories of the early 80's when the council seemed incapable of giving straight answers. When secrecy prevailed. When letters went unanswered. When the public were treated like lepers and told to withdraw from the chamber while "key documents" were shown to the guardians of the secrets.
Perhaps most seriously of all, it was a time when rumours spread about the probity of those in high places. When rumours and scuttlebutt ran riot, and there were whispered allegations of mutual back scratching, bribery and corruption.
The first news about Wuai coming to Wagga came via a beaming Premier and local member. It sounded splendid, full of sound bites and hosannas. The only thing lacking was "Sunshine" Rudd telling us that the Millennium has arrived. If it sounded to good to be true, that's because it was.
Months have drifted by with few if any reliable facts and every sign that something is seriously wrong.
Maybe not, but council seems to be totally out of its depth in negotiating with a quasi-commercial outfit with obvious yet unspecified links to China's Communist Party.
Letters and blogs show that more and more of us are becoming worried and angry that such a giant venture - as expensive as a university - is seemingly being rammed through council at the behest of those I earlier described as the guardians of the secrets.
Had the Ratepayers Association still been around, decisive action would have been taken by now to uncover just what's going on.
In the absence of that something else must be done to get to the truth, including a public meeting where vital questions can be put and (hopefully) answered. Perhaps the Ombudsman and / or the ICAC should be approached too.
In the meantime, here are some of the questions crying out for answers. I'm sure there'll be many more in the weeks ahead.
1. What's the role of the NSW Government and the local MP in the genesis of the scheme ? What information did they possess about Wuai's existing operations, and did they provide such information to council ? Or were they too, like Wagga's ratepayers have done ever since, flying blind ?
2. Is the centre purely wholesale, as originally claimed, or also retail ? Did Mr O'Farrell and Mr Maquire themselves know when they launched the scheme six months ago in a blaze of positive but vacuous publicity ?
3. Why has the local MP, despite his many visits to China, been so slow to promote the project with hard evidence, and why has he been virtually mute when questioned by the media ?
4.Given the size, cost and strategic significance of this huge development for the wider Riverina - indeed for NSW and Australia as a whole - won't NSW rather the WWCC make the planning decision once the development application materialises ?
5. As council has yet to receive any documentation - other than possible confidential communications about which the public knows nothing - how can it be sure there will be no major adverse consequences for retailers, the housing market or local jobs ?
6. How does the council know there is to be a convention centre at the centre, and even if it appears on some sketch plan how can councillors know what it will eventually comprise and when, if ever, it will be completed ?
7. If such a convention centre does eventually materialise, at a currently undisclosed cost, who gave council (or at least the Mayor and GM) the authority to trade it off against immediate land costs ?
8. If the centre includes retail operations, how will these impact upon other retailers in Wagga ?
9. When can we expect to see the development application ?
10. Over what time scale will the project be completed ?
11. Will it be completed as a single project, or will it be built in distinct stages, each of which will be financed separately over an indeterminate time ?
12. What will its total cost be ? $400m ? $600m ?
13. Who gave the Mayor the authority to offer Wuai an additional block of land ?
14. When and why were the Mayor and the GM delegated the power to negotiate the land sale ? How was the valuation determined ? Was it envisaged that ACA - having insisted on the sale prior to the DA - would be able to walk away from the deal if the DA wasn't approved ?
15. What is the reason(s) for ASIC having twice in recent times threatened ACA with deregistration and why didn't council inform ratepayers this had happened ?
16. Why is it so difficult to discover details of ACA on the internet, such as its financial assets and its commercial record in Australia /
17. Who comprises the board and executive of ACA ? In particular, what are the official titles of Humphrey Xu and Lydia Zhang ?
18. Is Humphrey Xu the same person as the one called Harry Xu in an article published in The Age on April 20, 2013, which described "Harry Xu" as the boyfriend and business partner of Helen Liu ?
19. What due diligence has been conducted regarding the applicants ?
20. Why have most councillors yet to meet Xu and Zhang ?
21. What precisely is the relationship between Wuai and ACA and for how long has it existed ?
22. Why has so little information reached the public about the project ? For example, there is no documentation available at the civic centre desk, and no mention of it among the "projects" identified in council's glossy "Planning for our community" sent to ratepayers in May 2013 ?
23. Why hasn't council briefed the public about what is happening, and why has it seemed so keen to hasten the sale of the land prior to receiving and assessing a DA from the proposed developer?
24. What hard evidence exists about already existing and allegedly similar Wuai projects in China and other countries ?
25.Does council presume that the purchaser of the land is the same entity as the eventual owners and operators of the trade centre ?
26. What were the "key documents' that suddenly materialised at the July 15 council meeting ?
27. Why has councillors not been privy to these earlier, particularly if they were (belatedly) considered to be vital to informed debate ?
28. What was so secret about these documents that members of the public had to leave the chamber ?
29. When will ACA Capital Investments be required to make its in - depth presentation to council ?
A final thought.
In these days of internet shopping and video conferencing, why does Wuai feel it necessary to erect physical buildings at great expense in a remote part of the world ?
Why not simply put the existing facility in China on the web and let people all over the world view what's on display ? They could "walk around" electronically and place their orders without having to travel all the way to Wagga to do so.

http://ausidentity.blogspot.com.au/2013/07/introducing-humphrey-xu-director-of-aca.html

http://ausidentity.blogspot.com.au/2013/04/daryl-maquire-some-serious-questions.html