Mr Percy is determined to get things done and have the community place more faith in the council.

He has already cancelled the upcoming council meeting which was to be an open forum at Lightning Ridge, saying it was a waste of time.

"I couldn't see any point of having it, there's nothing on the agenda and nobody has put any issues in.

" It will give me a bit of extra time to put together a package of things that I want to be addressing," he said.

"I'm going to change it around so that people don't have to put issues in, they can just come along and talk about anything on the agenda they can, and I might even give them an opportunity to raise issues at the end of the meeting that weren't things we wanted to look at."

Mr Percy spent last week travelling the shire and talking to the people on the ground who know the real issues.

"I need to get out and about... I need to find out what's going on."

He talked to all the ex-councillors and said they still may have a role in the future of the council in the form of representatives on committees in the community.

One ex-councillor he spoke to expressed concern over the amount of time it took for the council to take action after an issue was raised.

"One of the things I'll do is, as resolutions are passed, we'll get them on paper and put actions beside them each month, and they're not going to get off there until such time it's finished satisfactorily."

"There will be performance assessment on the staff to see if they are getting these things done."

Mr Percy responded to claims he would be ineffective because he knows nothing about the area by saying this would be a positive thing for the shire because he had no bias.

"I'll assess everything, I'll listen to people and I'll make a decision.

"I'll upset some people and I'll make some people happy.

"But I won't just do it because I've got some vested interest in it, or some conflict of interests, I've got no vested or conflict of interest because I don't come from here.

"So it's based on the facts.

"If you don't give me the facts well it won't happen.

"If you give me the facts and you've got a good case then it might happen."

Mr Percy said one of the major issues he wanted to tackle was the organisational structure of the council.

"They're paying out nearly $1 million in managers fees, the cost of running the managers.

You've got to question what value you're getting out of that.

There are only 103 staff and 11 managers."