Council Rates Rise Again

In the past couple of weeks council rates have arrived in our letterboxes.

This is, in my extended family, always a source of annoyance. Local councillors are rarely seen except when kissing babies at election time – I only met my local councillor when, during the Federal Election, she was door knocking on behalf of the newly installed Labor candidate. Councillors often talk up what they will do, but rarely ever deliver.

Sadly, increasing council rates is one thing that they never promise, but which they always deliver on.

In my case, council rates are up 7.5% this financial year (as compared to the supposed average rise of 3% in the rates notice fact sheet) – that is for the City of Moonee Valley. On the other side of the river in the City of Maribyrnong, whence my mother and brother live, rates are up higher, much higher. A quick look at my mother’s rates bill last week indicates an increase of 19.7%.

Given that CPI, the most commonly used measure of inflation, went up by 2.8% during the 2024-25 financial year, Victorian councils are obviously not doing a good job of keeping their spending under control.

Without bothering to look at what they spend the council rates on, which is in a fact sheet enclosed with the demand for payment on the first notice, I can come up with two main reasons for rapid growth in council rates.

The first is that local government is run by comparative amateurs, some of whom are there because they have such dodgy backgrounds that the local party machine puts them into local government as a consolation prize for being unelectable to an actual parliament, and some others because they are enthusiastically supported by property developers with less than altruistic motives. The Victorian government, which is not exactly the doyen of integrity, has in recent times had to appoint monitors to moderate the behaviour of elected councils and otherwise strip them of planning powers. Sackings of councils, whilst not as commonplace as in the past, have usually been a sign of serious ethical malaise.

These councillors, in their amateurish performances, are going to sign off uncritically on the budgets which are put in front of them by the somewhat bloated local government bureaucracies which are run by professional managers. They do not know any better, and even if they had the political will or ideological determination to put a red line through several items such as community or small business grants or festivals, they would get flustered by the professional managers they supposedly oversight and then overruled by the local government minister.

The second reason is cost shifting by the state government. I have this mantra that the state government owes $30,000 for every man, woman and child in Victoria. The budget figure is actually getting worse every day. It is a very easy political sleight of hand to cost shift as much as you can into local government, such as the emergency services levy, and then to raise it as high as you can. It is also, when you are a technocratic government with socialist underpinnings, a very ideologically rewarding move to stiff home owners, even those who are elderly widows and pensioners. Cost shifting has been a major problem in Victoria since the early days of the Bracks government, which was very good at spending beyond its means, but which looks like the epitome of probity compared to the current bunch.

Which leaves me and other members of my family with large rates increases on our modest homes – far beyond what the councils and their masters in the state government promise.

Would or could it be any different? I somehow doubt it. This is a level of government where the lack of scrutiny, combined with the ruthless technocracy of its overseers in Spring Street, is not going to ever improve.