We haven't lost our focus

• 

Details

Published: Tuesday, 13 October 2026 15:04

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 Reduced to two examples, the application was withdrawn because the member concerned had poor health.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.