Mayor column: with Cr John Harvie

Published on 16 January 2025

Well, that’s Christmas done and dusted for another year and 2025 is already at full speed. I hope that you had a great Christmas and are all refreshed for the year ahead.

Councillors will enter budget deliberations later this month to put together a fiscally responsible and sustainable budget. This is a time-consuming task, particularly as it is the new council’s first budget, and will involve reviewing income and expenditure line by line to understand the cost of running council, where our revenues come from and effect savings where possible.

We have already identified that local government, across Australia, is being shortchanged by state and federal governments and this situation is putting undue pressure on local council finances and by extension, you the ratepayer.

One glaring example is local councils share of the $89 Billion raised through the goods and services tax (GST). When the tax was first introduced, on 1st July 2000, local councils received funding equal to 1% of the GST revenue. Today councils receive only 0.5% of the GST revenue and are being forced to consider significant, up to 60%, increases in rates to be able to continue to provide an ever-increasing range of services and to maintain and replace costly infrastructure.

Council will shortly consider an Advocacy Plan that will identify the most important issues facing our communities, constraints in addressing those issues and who council needs to lobby to have the matters rectified. Council is a member of various associations and organisations such as Local Government NSW (LGNSW) and The Australian Local Government Association (ALGA) and we will continue to advocate, through them, to achieve policy changes at state and federal level.

ALGA, for example, recently made a submission to the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Regional Development, Infrastructure and Transport inquiry into Local Government Sustainability and recommended, among other things, the following:

1. Increase untied Federal Government funding for local government to at least 1 percent of Commonwealth taxation revenue to provide long-term financial certainty and security for local government in Australia. 

2. The Federal Government should have greater ambition and confidence in funding local government directly through existing Constitutional heads of power and establish a process for constitutional change that recognises local government in the Constitution. 

ALGA does a great job, but instead of recommending these changes we should be demanding change and backing it up with an Australia-wide campaign before the federal election.