August 14th, 2026Just sayin’… By Donna Kelly

What a rollercoaster for councillors, council staff and ratepayers.
Last week five of Hepburn Shire’s councillors – Don Henderson, Tony Clark, Shirley Cornish, Pat Hockey and Lesley Hewitt – and former CEO Bradley Thomas were cleared of all criminal charges brought against them by shire resident David Penman.
Apparently, the Director of Public Prosecutions attended the hearing of private criminal matters against the six and the DPP then took the matters over and the charges were dismissed due to insufficient grounds to proceed with the prosecutions.
The councillors have now been reinstated which a council media release said was “a great outcome for democracy and our community”.
Wow. I have covered quite a few councils in my time, Frankston was memorable, but nothing like this. It was hard to keep up.
It all started back in March when Cr Don Henderson and former CEO Bradley Thomas had charges raised against them – to do with the improper handling of emails. So Cr Henderson was stood down while Mr Thomas was able to keep working.
Then a few months later, it was time for Mayor Cr Tony Clark to be stood down, shortly followed by the other four councillors after they voted for the 2026 Shire Budget.
Councillors Brian Hood and Tim Drylie were the last two standing, and were the two who voted against the budget going through.
So there was no longer a quorum and the July council meeting was cancelled – although council staff were still doing their best to keep the wheels turning.
And then Mr Thomas, who had resigned, moved on and Janet Dore was brought in as an interim CEO. There was talk of an administrator being appointed.
It was, quite literally, a shit show.
But now, it seems the council is back on track – and it will be business as usual. Although there are many questions. How much did all this cost ratepayers? Will Mr Penman be expected to pay legal fees? Can it happen again? Is there a loophole in the system that needs to be closed?
I don’t have the answers and I barely have the bandwidth to cover something like this. The Local is a small business and we have to be careful with our reporting – making sure we cross all our t’s and dot our i’s. (Grammar people, please don’t come at me over those apostrophes – they are wrong but it just looks better…)
I mean, who thought councillors could end up facing criminal charges for doing their jobs? Well, maybe not well all the time, but still, they are pretty much volunteers, doing their best to manage multi-million dollar businesses.
Maybe we need to realise councils are big business and perhaps need properly paid people to oversee them? I don’t know.
So because I don’t know I will go back to the column from the last edition re the missing perfume.
As I said, Kyle bought me a gift online, it never arrived, I went pitbull and got the money refunded. You would think end of story. But no.
Kyle is nothing if not determined. So he went back online, bought me a jewellery box for travelling, paid for it, and it has not yet arrived. Aghhh.
I was going to unleash myself again but I received an email from Daniel who said you could go to your bank and ask them to cancel the transaction because the item did not arrive.
I didn’t think about that so I reckon that might be a better way to go. And I am going to try and convince Kyle that I have a very nice life and all I need, probably more than I need, and not to buy me any more online presents. Just sayin’…