'Backroom decisions': Shellharbour widens CEO oversight

The record is short. On 25 March 2025, Shellharbour City Council voted 6 to 3 to widen the panel that reviews its most senior employee, the Chief Executive Officer, from four members to all nine elected councillors. The motion carried.

This is the safest ground a local paper can stand on: a recorded vote, taken in public, by named public officials, on a question about how the council governs itself. No leaked memo. No anonymous source. Just the minutes.

So this piece does one thing carefully. It reports what the vote was, who cast it, and what the arrangement it changed actually does. It draws no conclusion the record does not support.

01Three lines in the minutes

A council CEO review panel is a small committee of councillors that oversees the performance of the CEO, the single employee the councillors actually hire and manage. Everyone else at the council reports up through the CEO; the councillors, as the elected body, sit above only that one role. The panel is where that oversight is done: it sets the CEO's performance criteria, reviews progress against them, and advises the full council on the CEO's remuneration and, in time, succession.

Before the vote, four councillors sat on that panel. After it, all nine do. The practical difference is the number of elected representatives with a formal seat at the review of the council's most senior officer. That is the whole of the change, and it is worth stating plainly before any interpretation is laid over it.

02From four to nine

The distinction between four and nine is not cosmetic. A four-member panel is a minority of the nine-member council. Its deliberations, its access to the CEO's performance information, and its recommendations pass through fewer elected hands before the full council sees them. Widening the panel to all nine folds the review into the whole elected body, so that every councillor a resident voted for has a formal place in it.

Neither arrangement is unlawful, and neither is unusual across NSW local government. Councils structure this oversight in different ways, and a smaller panel can be defended on grounds of confidentiality and efficiency. The point here is narrower: on 25 March 2025 Shellharbour's elected body chose, by majority, to move from the smaller structure to the larger one.

A four-member panel is a minority of a nine-member council. That is a structural fact, not an accusation.

03Who voted to keep it narrower

Six councillors voted to widen the panel. Three voted against widening it. Because the question was a public governance motion decided on a recorded vote, the identities of those three are a matter of record, and reporting them imputes nothing beyond the vote itself.

To be precise about titles, because precision is the point: Kellie Marsh was the Deputy Mayor at the time of the vote, re-elected to the one-year role in October 2024 ³, and Craig Ridding is the councillor for Ward C. A vote against widening a panel is a vote about structure. It is not, on this record, evidence of anything else, and no finding of any kind attaches to it.

On the other side of the question, one of the supporters made the case for change in blunt terms. Cr Petreski, backing the governance change, characterised the arrangement being replaced as one of backroom decisions.

That phrase belongs to Cr Petreski, not to this paper. We report it as an argument advanced in the chamber, the way a supporter framed the status quo, and not as a finding about how the four-member panel in fact operated. The distinction matters. A councillor's rhetorical characterisation of a structure is fair to quote; it is not proof of what the structure did.

Update, 7 October 2026. Reference 2, Region Illawarra's report of the vote, previously gave no address. It now gives the article's title, date and address.

Update, 7 October 2026. Kellie Marsh's title is now sourced: she was re-elected Deputy Mayor for a one-year term on 22 October 2024 ³, so she held the role at the 25 March 2025 vote; Region Illawarra's report of the vote ² calls her a councillor, which a deputy mayor also is. The paragraph now says she was Deputy Mayor at the time of the vote.

04The interpretation, and where it stops

Here is the reading, offered as interpretation and labelled as such. A narrower review panel means fewer elected councillors with a direct, formal line of sight over the CEO's performance and, eventually, the question of who succeeds them. Widening the panel to all nine reverses that. Whichever way a resident weighs it, the trade is between confidentiality and the number of elected eyes on the top job.

That is where the interpretation stops. It does not follow that anyone who preferred the smaller panel intended to reduce scrutiny, and nothing in the record supports such a claim. Motive is not on the minutes. A vote is. This piece asserts no cover-up, imputes no improper purpose to any councillor, and rests entirely on the count and the titles above.

Motive is not on the minutes. A vote is.

The public interest that sits underneath all of this is simple: transparent oversight of the council's most senior employee. That interest is served by the vote being recorded, by the panel's composition being public, and by residents being able to see, without a leak or a tip, exactly who wanted oversight kept with a smaller group and who wanted it spread across the whole council they elected.

05Why the record is the story

THE PATCH is THE RORT's local desk, and it will spend most of its time on the machinery of NSW councils: land reclassification, voluntary planning agreements, a deemed refusal that sends a project to the Sydney Eastern City Planning Panel or the Land and Environment Court, a density decision under the Housing SEPP. Those stories are harder. They turn on documents that have to be read closely and framed carefully, and the gap between a structure and a person's intent is where local reporting gets sued.

A recorded vote is the exception. It is the cleanest evidence a council produces about itself. What happened at Shellharbour on 25 March 2025 needs no interpretation to be worth publishing: the elected body decided, in the open, to change who watches its CEO, and it did so on a divided count. Across the Illawarra and the eastern suburbs, from Shellharbour to Randwick and Waverley, the same discipline applies. We report the mechanism. We name the record. We let the vote speak.

That discipline has a name in these pages. The Democratic Bypass is the recurring pattern where a decision that belongs to the whole elected body drifts toward a smaller group or a narrower process. Shellharbour's councillors, by majority, moved the other way on this one, and did it on the record. Reversing a bypass is as newsworthy as building one, and a good deal easier to prove.

If it's a rort, we cover it.