MEMBER for Mildura Ali Cupper has set her sights on fixing the “massive” rates inequity between the city and country after previous state governments’ failure to remedy the imbalance.
On the heels of scoring $150 million in this week’s State Budget, Ms Cupper has updated her “to do” list before the 2022 state election and put the rates issue and a push for a new hospital in Mildura as her immediate priorities.
“The cost of rates is a major bugbear and source of huge frustration for ratepayers in the regions, as well as councils,” Ms Cupper told Sunraysia Daily on Friday.
“Everybody knows there is a massive inequity between the cities and regions when it comes to council rates. We pay too much in the country.
“It has been the subject of review after review and it’s a problem and needs to be fixed, but no one is fixing it.
“But we’ve just had a council election and it’s as good a time as ever to get this much-needed reform at a state level.”
The former Mildura deputy mayor said the city-country inequity stemmed from how the State Government distributed federal assistance grants to councils.
“With this process, there is a weighting attached to socioeconomic disadvantage and isolation,” Ms Cupper said. “But that weighting isn’t strong.
“So if you tweaked that setting, what you would find is that the increase to ratepayers in the city would be negligible – but it would have a huge impact (for ratepayer savings) in the regions.”
She said she had already been in talks with a government minister about fixing the problem.
“And I’ll be organising a meeting with the Local Government Minister (Shaun Leane) as soon as possible, either next week via Zoom or in the final sitting week of 2020,” Ms Cupper said.
“It’s difficult for an independent politician in the Lower House to influence statewide laws in this sense, because I can’t introduce Bills.
“But my job will be to persuade the government to want to do it.”
She said it was “no good just bashing councils” because “they are trying to do a lot with relatively bugger-all money”.
“So the answer is tweaking the settings of the federal assistance grants and how they are distributed to councils by the State Government,” she said.
“This is all about relieving the pressure on ratepayers to fund as much as they do in regional and remote communities.”
The other key focus for Ms Cupper is getting a new hospital for Mildura, which is estimated to cost about $500 million.
“There’s another State Budget in May, and in order to get the big dollars for a brand new hospital, or at least the building of a new campus, you’d need a business case first,” she said.
“I’ve made it clear to the government that we are ready to receive some money for a business case for a new hospital.”
