Complaints about the council to the state watchdog rose for the first time since administration began

Every council in New South Wales can be complained about to the Office of Local Government, the department that oversees them, and once a year the OLG publishes how many complaints each one drew. It is one of the few numbers that puts all 100-odd councils on the same page, and almost nobody reads it. We downloaded the annual spreadsheets and pulled out the Central Coast.

Nine years, in one column

The series starts at 2016-17 because Central Coast Council was created in the 2016 amalgamations, of Gosford City Council and Wyong Shire Council. The OLG file for 2015-16 records one complaint against the name, which is an artefact of the council barely existing that year rather than a measurement of it.

For four years the number sat still, between 32 and 33. Then in 2020-21 it was 256, against a state total of 1,543. On 30 October 2020, in the words of the public inquiry that followed, the then Minister for Local Government, the Hon Shelley Hancock MP, suspended the councillors of Central Coast Council (CCC) and appointed an Administrator, Mr Dick Persson. The complaints and the collapse belong to the same year.

Then it fell, every year: 92, then 71, then 48. And in 2024-25 it went back up to 83. Elected councillors returned at an election held on 14 September 2024, so 2024-25 is the first year in four that the Central Coast had councillors of its own again.

But the whole state went up, and by more

The state total went from 1,242 to 1,801 in the same year. The OLG says so plainly on its own page: There has been a substantial increase in complaints about councils this year compared to previous years, with 20% of complaints relating to financial management concerns. So a rise on the Central Coast in 2024-25 is a rise in a year when almost everything rose.

It does leave the Central Coast high in the order. Four councils drew more complaints than any other in 2024-25:

The part that is genuinely unlike everywhere else

The OLG tags each complaint with one or more keywords and groups them into categories, so a single complaint can appear in more than one. Across the state in 2024-25 the tags were dominated by money: financial management, 552 of 2,723 tags. On the Central Coast, money ranks third.

Smaller Central Coast categories are omitted for length: OLG governance 3, social policy and community services 3, environmental and public health services 2, structural reform 1. The Central Coast tags total 120 across 83 complaints, and the state tags total 2,723 across 1,801, because one complaint can carry several tags.

Twenty-six of the state's 88 natural-resource-management tags are the Central Coast's. No other category on the coast comes close to that share, and the categories that dominate everywhere else, enforcement (192 statewide, 2 here) and public land management (158 statewide, 1 here), barely register. Whatever is driving complaints on this coast, it is not the thing driving them in the rest of New South Wales.

We are not going to tell you what those 26 are about, because the published data does not say. The category covers a wide field, and the OLG publishes counts rather than subjects. It is a question worth putting to the council and to the OLG, and it is the one we would ask first.