Give Regions a Fair Go

Greens Northern Tablelands candidate Dorothy Robinson believes that residents of regional and rural areas deserve a fair go. 

The table below shows that compared to the Northern Beaches Council, Armidale Regional Residents have much lower weekly household incomes ($1044 per week vs $3008), poorer health (45.8% of residents reporting a long-term medical condition compared to 33.6% in the Northern Beaches) and shorter life expectancy (78.8 years for males vs 84.7).

The NSW Government should allocate funding for healthcare according to needs and ensure that rural and regional residents have the same quality of healthcare, educational and social services and the same access to rebates for energy efficiency as metropolitan areas.

Despite the above, even the local roads component of the Financial Assistance Grant (FAG), distributed to councils by the NSW Government, discriminates against regional and rural councils, which have many more km of roads to maintain.  With more frequent extreme weather events such as droughts and floods, road maintenance costs are increasing, so it's much harder for councils such as Armidale Regional Council (ARC) to meet community expectations, while receiving a much lower financial assistance rate for local roads of $1,461 per km, compared to $3,007 for Northern Beaches in 2022-2023 - compared to $3,008 per km for the Northern Beaches Council (NBC), 

This, and other cost shifting from other levels of government, persuaded ARC to apply for 58% special rate variation to be introduced over a 3 years period. Consequently, although ARC's average residential rate in 2021 was lower that NBC, the 58% increase will mean much higher residential rates by FY25-26, similar to NBC. 

Authorised by A. Croft for The Greens NSW, 19/1 Hordern Place, Camperdown, NSW 2050.