VICTORIAN Farmers Federation president and Murra Warra farmer David Jochinke visited Parliament House on Wednesday to discuss rural issues with politicians.
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Mr Jochinke met with Nationals Leader Peter Walsh and Member for Lowan Emma Kealy to consider solutions to the disparity between farmland and residential council rates.
In its draft 2018-19 Budget, Horsham Rural City Council rose all average rates to the capped increase of 2.25 per cent.
However, residential rates were actually decreased by 0.6 per cent, while farmland rates increased by 11.8 per cent.
“There is a huge disparity between the burden paid by residential ratepayers and farmland ratepayers,” he said.
“The capped rate needs to be applied to every category so everyone shares the burden.”
He said farmers across the state deserved a fair go.
“We’ll be campaigning against councils that aren’t taking this seriously and that aren’t taking avenues to fix the disparity,” he said.
“The whole rate system needs to be seriously looked at.
“Councils have the ability to achieve a balance. There needs to be pressure put on council management to calculate the balance and apply it to the system.
“The bottom line is that councils can only make so much money off rates.”
When all Victorian councils release their finalised 2018-19 Budgets after June 30, the VFF will create a report card to call out the councils that haven’t balanced their rate bases.
“We’ve got some great data from last year and this year to show the difference of rates over the years,” he said.
“We’ll release that publicly to hold them to account and show them that it’s not good enough.”
Mr Jochinke said he personally paid $40,000 in rates a year, but that would increase by 11.8 per cent.
“I know fellow farmers who are paying over $100,000 in rates each year,” he said.
“We’re not saying that farmers shouldn’t contribute their share, we just simply can’t keep paying these increases anymore.
“It’s not fair that agriculture rates are going up while all other rates are going down.”
During his visit to Parliament House, Mr Jochinke also spoke to Member for South-West Coast Roma Britnell and Member for Polwarth Richard Riordan about the aftermath of the south-west fires earlier this year.
“There has been a lot of angst from those affected that it’s taken a long time to get a resolution to get reimbursed by Powercor for loss of assets and business,” he said.
“We discussed the possibility of creating a agency similar to TAC specifically for disasters and fires.”
