Analysis
The resignation of Hepburn Shire Council Chief Executive Officer Bradley Thomas, announced on 29 June and taking effect on Friday 21 August, brings to a close a turbulent chapter in the Shire’s administration. It also confronts the Council with two decisions that will shape the organisation for years: who leads the Shire while a permanent replacement is found, and how the search for that replacement is conducted.
Mr Thomas joined the Council in 2019 and served as CEO from 2021. Whatever view one takes of his tenure — and views in this community are sharply divided — the circumstances of his departure underline the scale of the task facing his successor. The Shire’s finances are under significant pressure, with the Council itself acknowledging that a major change program is required to shift the organisation towards financial sustainability. Community satisfaction, as measured by the annual statewide survey, remains stubbornly low, with Hepburn trailing both the small rural council average and the statewide average across most measured services. And the organisation has been operating under the shadow of an ongoing private prosecution brought against Mr Thomas and Councillor Don Henderson, with matters still before the courts. The charges are allegations only, and both men are entitled to the presumption of innocence, but the proceedings have consumed attention and eroded public confidence at a time when the Council could afford neither.
The recruitment task ahead
Appointing a council CEO is not a quick process, nor should it be. Under the Local Government Act 2020, the Council must follow a formal, merit-based recruitment process and must obtain independent professional advice in relation to the appointment. Done properly — a national search, a credible field, probity oversight, due diligence on candidates who will themselves be doing due diligence on Hepburn — the process realistically takes three to six months. A rushed appointment would be a false economy. The next CEO will need to lead a difficult financial consolidation while rebuilding community trust, and the quality of the appointment matters far more than its speed.
That timeline means an interim CEO will be running the organisation for a substantial period, quite possibly through the adoption and early implementation of next year’s budget settings. This is not a caretaker role in any meaningful sense. It is a leadership role at a critical moment.
Internal or external?
The Council has three broad options for the interim role: promote a senior officer from within the organisation, second an experienced senior officer from another council, or appoint an external interim — typically a recently retired CEO or senior local government executive with a track record in organisational recovery.
The internal option is quick, cheap, and maintains continuity. In a stable organisation performing well, it would usually be the right call. But Hepburn is not that organisation right now. An internal appointee, however capable, carries the institutional history of the current administration. They will have been part of the decisions — on finances, on community engagement, on the handling of contested matters — that are precisely the subject of community criticism. That is not a comment on any individual’s competence or integrity. It is a structural problem: an insider cannot credibly conduct an independent stocktake of an organisation they helped run.
And an independent stocktake is exactly what the Council needs.
The case for an external interim with a diagnostic brief
The stronger option is an external interim CEO, appointed with a clear and public brief: stabilise the organisation, maintain service delivery, and — critically — provide the Council with a frank, independent assessment of the issues it faces and a plan for addressing them.
That assessment should cover the financial position and the realism of the current recovery settings; the state of community trust and what it will take to rebuild it; organisational culture and capability; and governance practices, including how the Council manages information flows between the administration and elected representatives. It should be delivered to the Council — and, in appropriate form, to the community — before the permanent appointment is made.
The logic is straightforward. The Council cannot write a sensible position description for the next CEO until it has an honest picture of the job. Recruiting a permanent CEO against a candid diagnosis of the organisation’s problems will attract better candidates, not worse ones: capable executives are drawn to a mandate for change that has been clearly defined and publicly owned by the Council. Recruiting against a sanitised picture risks either deterring strong candidates or setting the successful one up to fail when the real position becomes apparent.
An experienced external interim brings something else: freedom. With no long-term career stake in the organisation and no part in its recent history, an interim CEO can tell the Council things a permanent appointee, or an internal aspirant to the permanent role, might soften. Several recently retired Victorian council CEOs have performed exactly this role elsewhere, as have senior executives placed through sector bodies and specialist local government recruitment firms. The talent exists; the question is whether the Council will use it.
There is a cost, of course. External interims are not cheap, and a fixed-term contract of six months or so is a real outlay for a small rural council under financial pressure. But the cost of the alternative — six months of drift, followed by a permanent appointment made without a clear-eyed view of the organisation — would be far higher.
What the community should watch for
In the coming weeks, the Council will announce its interim arrangements. At the Special Meeting of Council held this week, Ms Rebecca Mckenzie was appointed temporary Independent Chair of the CEO Employment and Remuneration Committee for a period of six months, or until Council appoints a permanent CEO, which ever comes first. Ms McKenzie has previously been CEO of Glen Eira Council; she is the government appointed monitor on the Mornington Peninsula Shire and she has been an independent member of the Hepburn Shire Audit and Risk Committee. It also authorised the Mayor to make an interim CEO appointment.
In the immediate future the community should look for three things: an interim appointee who is genuinely independent of the current administration; a published brief for the interim appointee that includes an organisational assessment, not merely a holding pattern; and a commitment to share the substance of that assessment before the permanent CEO is appointed.
Mr Thomas’s departure gives Hepburn Shire something it has not had for some time: a genuine opportunity to reset. Whether the Council takes it will depend on the choices it makes in the next few weeks — starting with the interim appointment.
The private prosecution referred to in this article involves allegations only. The matters remain before the courts and no findings have been made.
