The entire June 23, 2021 edition of The Weekly Advertiser is available online. READ IT HERE!

Groan! If we were to need an example of a seemingly irreparably broken aspect of our taxation system we would surely underline how we deal with Victorian municipal rates.

Year after year. Decade after decade. Band-aid after band-aid – the issue, particularly in regional areas, is never far from the surface of most governance debates.

At the moment, in doggedly using a tried and failed system, our state continues to ask rural and regional councils to compare ‘oranges’ with ‘apples’ in assessing how municipal sectors should share a rates burden.

How on earth do you compare a low-income retiree who has spent a lifetime paying off a modest urban cottage in a struggling socio-economic neighbourhood with a farmer who might be sitting on a multi-million-dollar property but whose fortunes and the fortunes of many connections are subject to the unpredictability of seasons? Throw in commercial industry and business and it is as if peaches have suddenly joined the apples and oranges on the comparison scale.

Is the equation all about who can afford to pay, what landowners would receive if they sold their assets, what council services are readily available or how many people use services based on property location, or who generates the most socio-economic health and wealth of a municipality and so on? 

The system is based on taxing property owners to pay for local government services and asset maintenance. It relies on key elements of accountability but much of the assessment remains inherently subjective.

Rating decisions, regardless of how measured and in areas where there is profound crossover between rural and urban environments, can never tick all boxes relating to community satisfaction. There are community bills to pay and services to provide and it has to happen one way or another. Someone has to pay.

For some of us laypeople it has seemed curious that considering we have hefty federal and state taxes operating in the background, influencing our pay-packets and ultimately what we can afford to buy and sell, that we have a community tax operating in isolation.

Of course, who better to understand where locally generated tax money needs to go at a community level than local government, the closest level of government to the people.

Then again, local government is more or less an arm of and can only operate with State Government funding. And the State Government, which regardless of what some might think, is ultimately responsible to the Federal Government as per Federation.

Again – groan! It is easy to start breaking out in a sweat just thinking about it all.

As always, something broken will either stay broken until someone fixes it or throws it in the bin.

Anyone have any ideas?

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