In the first five months of the 2025–26 financial year, the Shire of Serpentine Jarrahdale spent approximately $368,610 on “legal services”. That figure alone should prompt serious questions from anyone who pays rates in our community.
This is not the cost of a single court case or an extraordinary one-off event. It is the cumulative result of month-after-month of legal spending in an organisation funded entirely by us, the ratepayers, who have had to absorb 7–8% rate increases across the Shire’s past two budgets.
When a ratepayer asked Council at the December Ordinary Council Meeting for basic information about this spending, the request was deliberate and targeted. They did not ask for the substance of legal advice or strategic discussions; those are, after all, confidential. The ratepayer simply asked for administrative descriptors: the matter name or subject, the relevant work stream, and the stage of work.
Council’s response was to refuse. The explanation offered was that legal advice is confidential, coupled with an assertion that all disclosure obligations under the regulations had been met.
That answer tapdances around the question, failing to address it.
Legal privilege protects the content of advice, not the fact that advice is being sought, repeatedly, and at significant cost to the ratepayer. In any well-governed organisation, it would be unremarkable for decision-makers, and their funders, to know what types of matters are driving legal expenditure, even if the advice itself remains confidential.
When nearly $400,000 is spent in under half a financial year, the community is entitled to understand the scale and nature of what is occurring.
Which inevitably raises the next question: what is driving this level of sustained legal activity?
Is Council dealing with an unusually high number of disputes? Are internal governance failures requiring constant, specialised legal input? Or is the organisation spending heavily on managing Code of Conduct complaints, which now appear before Council with frightening regularity?
These are not speculative accusations. They are reasonable questions arising from the spending pattern evident in publicly available documents.
This situation also goes to the role of elected members. Councillors are not passive observers of the budget. They are responsible for setting and overseeing it, and they would do well to remember that the money they are spending is not Council’s. It belongs to the community.
If this level of legal expenditure is justified, elected members should be able to explain why, in plain terms. If it is not, they should be acting swiftly to rein it in. Either way, silence is not a neutral position, and the community is right to demand that they lift their game.
Strong councils do not normalise secrecy around spending. They do not hide behind confidentiality to avoid scrutiny. And they do not treat escalating legal costs as business as usual.
At nearly $369,000 in just five months, this is no longer a technical matter or an internal bookkeeping issue. It is a test of whether Council understands that it exists to serve the community, not manage around it. Ratepayers are being asked to pay more each year while being told less about where their money is going. If this level of legal spending is genuinely necessary, Council should say, in plain terms, what is driving it. And if it can’t — or won’t — then the real problem may not be the lawyers at all, but the culture within a Council that has forgotten who it answers to.
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