Elizabeth O’Keeffe is a former senior public servant in the State Government of Victoria. She was executive director of Land Victoria from the early 1990s until 2002 and then the Chief Operating Officer of the National Gallery of Victoria until 2005. After leaving the public service she was a Director of Transparency International Australia until 2013.
Land Victoria
O'Keeffe was the executive director (i.e. Chief Executive Officer) of Land Victoria, under the Department of National Resources and Environment (DNRE) from 1996 to 2002. O'Keeffe reported to the then Secretary of DNRE Chloe Munro from 1999 to 2002. Prior to 1999, O'Keeffe reported to then Secretary Michael Taylor. Land Victoria (now called Land Use Victoria) is the land authority for the State Government of Victoria in Australia. Sherryl Garbutt was the responsible Minister.
O’Keeffe presented to an international conference in May 2001 on the establishment of Land Victoria in 1996. She described Land Victoria, as the agency within the state of Victoria with primary responsibility for land administration matters, and how it was intended to bring many of the State's core land administration functions into a single agency, specifically the functions of mapping, survey, valuation, Crown (or unalienated) land management and freehold title creation and registration. However, O’Keeffe has not provided any background to the relevant laws. Indeed, the ignoring of the relevant laws and the assignment of responsibilities to other units within Land Victoria, without authority of even an approved service level agreement saw significant impacts on the statutory responsibilities of both the Surveyor-General and the Valuer-General. The O’Keeffe approach draws heavily upon the advice of Steven Jacoby, Director of the Land Information Group, a unit within Land Victoria. Jacoby's responsibilities were largely transfers of responsibility from then Surveyor-General John Richard Parker, who stepped down in 1997. As was later to be reported by the acting Surveyors-General during the period 1997-99 and in the reports by Surveyor-General Keith Bell from 1999 to 2003, there was no authority. Further, the Victorian Government Solicitor, Auditor-General and Ombudsman delivered several findings which confirmed there was no authorization. Significantly, under Land Victoria, a contract was established with the joint venture between the firms Data Flow and Logica to develop the Victorian property mapping database, Vicmap property. The problems with this work, including lack of completeness and poor spatial accuracy were reported by both the Valuer-General and Surveyor-General, but were not rectified by O'Keeffe and Jacoby.
O’Keeffe's tenure as executive director of Land Victoria was one of controversy, disagreements and scandals, including: 1. Estate Agency Guarantee Fund scandal; 2. Threats and intimidation the Surveyor-General; 3. Reassign statutory responsibilities of Surveyor-General to other units of Land Victoria, breaching legislation - including the contracting for Vicmap property database, Measurement Calibration; Survey Control Network; GPS Base Station network (CORS); 4. Weakening the Office of the Valuer-General and downgrading the statutory position; 5. Blocking independent expert investigations concerning the Lindsay Fox Portsea land-grabbing complaints; 6. Interference with Victorian electoral boundary re-distribution process; 7. Threats of legal action to intimidate staff of Land Victoria.
Significantly, there were recurrent disagreements with key senior and statutory officers including Land Registry, Surveyor-General and Valuer General and serious governance issues were raised repeatedly. Throughout these, O'Keeffe seemed to have enjoyed the strong support of Minister Garbutt and Secretary Munro, despite the frequent concerns raised by the State opposition and the media.
Estate Agents Guarantee Fund Scandal
O’Keeffe's leadership of Land Victoria was raised in the Victorian Parliament by Opposition environment spokesman Victor Perton on 17 April 2002 for her leading role in the Estate Agents Guarantee Fund scandal. Specifically, Perton reported that Land Victoria and the Department of Justice (DoJ) had "conspired to invent a 'survey reform' project to extract $7.5 million from the fund. Land Victoria, a division of DNRE, under direction of O’Keeffe, and in collaboration with DoJ, was reported to have attempted to create “the survey project” to obtain extra government funding through EAGF, despite already having been funded. The administration of EAGF was under DoJ.