We haven't lost our focus

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Published: Tuesday, 13 October 2026 10:10

The last issue of depaNews was on 16 June, and not a peep from us in the meantime. It was not a bad issue, by the way, the good news on the Award to be made from the first pay period after 1 July, including the announcement of MyLeave, which is a qualitative change in how things operated in the industry, and then a report on the final day of depa V Thaler on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald, no less, under the heading “Serial pest Thaler’s bad day in court”.

Then finishing with an hilarious insight into this contemptuous human being with an SMS to the CEO at Snowy Monaro complaining about not having his Council business papers and blaming her, alleging it was “deliberate… You organised this to annoy and frustrate me… why would my profile not be recognised? Because you had it removed is my suspicion”. To which the CEO responded in her usual exhaustively calm and civil way when she dealt with him, “you’ve spelt your name as Adrew.thaler, can you try again with”, and then provided his proper email address. Brilliant.

Good old Adrew.

When the case concluded with final written submissions, we were ready to get the first Anti-Bullying Order in Local Government in the new jurisdiction. Unfortunately, another anti-bullying application had been made for another employee treated unreasonably by Thaler. Cr Adrew challenged the jurisdiction. He started to challenge ours at the beginning but realised he was on a loser and withdrew.

But the USU application did fail on the grounds that the legislation is restricted to unreasonable behaviour “at work”, and their application had only four examples, two of which were not “at work”. Reduced to two examples, the application was withdrawn because the member concerned had poor health.

Given this judgement by the same Commissioner, handling ours, Commissioner Muir, the parties to our application were invited to make submissions about the relevance of the jurisdictional finding to our case. We did, more than one each back and forward, so the case itself only fully concluded at the end of August. That’s why we’ve had little to report.

As an aside, while we await the conclusion of our case, depa will separately be pressing LGNSW and the other unions to have it acknowledged in the Act that in Local Government there are people working who can be bullied outside the workplace - not “at work”, but because of their work. The jurisdiction should recognise that.

What else has Cr Andrew been up to?

He had an AVO taken out against him only last week by a female Councillor and was mentioned in the Local Court. He used his social media to announce that police had served him with an interim AVO against a Victorian woman which won’t be heard until next year, and he has the outstanding police action and application for an AVO by his neighbour. This is an extraordinary story that we covered in the April issue, including a link to a broadcast by 2GB’s Ben Fordham which is worth watching twice, under the heading "EXCLUSIVE - Cooma pest Andrew Thaler charged by police".

Underpinning all of this is the continuing argument about a three-month suspension imposed by the Office of Local Government on 28 July 2025. It was Thaler’s second suspension. All this misconduct and these suspensions pre-date our member, the CEO working at Snowy-Monaro!

This was appealed by the OLG to the NSW Court of Appeal on three grounds: the tribunal misapprehended a statutory function, it misapplied a principal from criminal sentencing to the disciplinary proceedings before it, and that the orders as to disciplinary action “were manifestly inadequate”.

OLG won, the Court emphasised Thaler failed to see the seriousness of this misconduct allowed the appeal on the other two grounds sending the proceedings back to NCAT to be determined in accordance with the law. Take that NCAT, the penalty had better be “manifestly adequate” next time. Well done OLG.

When NCAT, after that rebuke, suspends him, it will be his third suspension... He is heading irretrievably to be disqualified as a councillor.

We are confident our case will conclude before that happens.