On 24 March, the City of Albany voted 5–4 to reject the State Government’s proposed conduct package for councillors. The vote crossed party lines — a former Labor MLA and a former Greens MLC voted to adopt; the majority that defeated it ranged from the council’s most conservative to its most independent.
The issue was what the State’s Model Code of Conduct actually says.
Clause 8(1)(b) requires that a council member “must only publish material that is factually correct.” No qualification. No good-faith exception. No allowance for contested facts or incomplete information. An absolute obligation covering every social media post, newsletter, and public statement made in an elected capacity.
Clause 9 prohibits a council member from disparaging the character of another councillor or employee, or imputing dishonest or unethical motives, in connection with the performance of their official duties.
Read together, these provisions place political argument inside an administrative complaint process.
The problem with “factually correct”
A councillor who says a planning decision will raise housing costs is making a claim that is partly empirical and partly inferential. So is a councillor who says a contract award was poor value, or that a policy will damage farming productivity, or that an administrative recommendation was wrong. That is what political speech is.
Clause 8(1)(b) does not distinguish between deliberate dishonesty and contested judgment. It creates a behavioural breach whenever someone disputes the factual correctness of a published claim. Any person may lodge a written complaint within one month. It must be formally dealt with. The enforcement outcomes are trivial. But the process itself is the sanction. The chilling effect does not require a penalty. It requires a filing cabinet.
Accountability requires attribution of motive
Clause 9 is worse.
Democratic accountability routinely turns on motive.
Why was this contract awarded?
Why was this report withheld?
Why did administration recommend this pathway and not another?
Why was an item withdrawn from a council agenda?
These are motive questions. A councillor who cannot ask them publicly — who cannot suggest that a decision was made for convenience, or ideology, or bureaucratic self-protection — has been stripped of one of the principal tools of scrutiny.
The code does not prohibit false accusations of dishonesty. It prohibits imputing motives. One targets defamation. The other targets the act of questioning why.
What the vote revealed
Councillors who voted to adopt the conduct package offered revealing justifications.
The State Government would impose the model code regardless. The council should simply comply. The code is mandatory, therefore the code is acceptable.
One senior councillor had previously indicated he preferred a third party, not the council itself, to determine whether a breach had occurred. The preference tells you something. If the people elected to govern do not trust themselves to adjudicate the code fairly, that is not an argument for outsourcing the function. It is an argument against the code.
The City’s CEO confirmed in writing after the vote that the State’s Model Code now applies automatically. Albany’s councillors did not escape clauses 8 and 9 by defeating the motion. They lost only the ability to adopt local procedures around it. The State’s provisions apply regardless.
The majority knew this. They voted against anyway. That is worth understanding.
What the no vote meant
Cr Lionetti didn’t want councillors in a muzzle. Cr Sutton believed in the ability to have a difference of opinion. Cr McKinley opposed government-restricted speech. For myself, the new code penalises the job description.
Hardly sophisticated arguments. But they are the instincts of elected representatives who recognise that something in the code is profoundly dysfunctional.
Clause 8(1)(b) does not target dishonesty. It targets being “wrong”. Being disputed. Making a claim that someone else considers inaccurate.
The withdrawn framework
The agenda contained eight recommendations. Recommendation 7 — the Complaint Management Framework meant to hold the whole package together — was withdrawn by staff before the vote. No reason was given.
The pattern
This is not only an Albany story. The model code is a State instrument applied to every local government in Western Australia. Every council that adopted it by the 31 March 2026 deadline adopted clauses 8 and 9 with it. Those that did not, like Albany, have the model code imposed on them by operation of law.
The effect is the same either way. Political disagreement has been given a complaint pathway. Contested claims have been made actionable. The attribution of motive — the basic mechanism of democratic accountability — has been classified as a behavioural breach.