Councillor Don Palmer Providing Local Leadership & Working for You

The Advertiser says Councils are dragging their feet on Carbon Tax. They go on to say that the ACCC is telling Council to reduce their rates. This follows on from a similar line last week by Leon Byner of 5AA fame.

So what is the situation at Unley? Will the ACCC investigate us? Have we or are we dudding you?

Here is what I understand about the Carbon Tax and where Unley sits.

Last year the tax was introduced and we were faced with the prospect of working out ahead of time how much tax we would get caught with so we could include it in out budget. So complex is this tax that we grappled with what to do.

What we decided under the leadership of Deputy Mayor Bob Schnell from nearby Goodwood Ward was to ignore it. Rather than set a budget item that exceeded the tax we determined that once we could determine the impact of the tax we would have to implement a budget review and determine what program/s should be shelved or delayed to accommodate the tax.

This year the tax was mooted to be removed but once again we were not to know it would be. Once again we took a punt and opted to include a nominal and small allowance from memory of just $ 12,000.00. If the tax was not removed and it looked for a long time that this was possible we would have found ourselves again having to cancel or defer a project at a budget review in order to fund it.

Pity the press has not picked up on this Unley initiative. That would be a good news storey. Indeed they infer we are one of the culprits when they highlight incorrectly that we have budgeted $ 140,000 for the tax.

By the way if we had budgeted $ 140,000 that would equate to around $ 5.60 per rate payer assuming 25,000 ratepayers. And would they expect to have rates adjusted up in the reverse scenario.