BAILEY, Ms Simone, Vice-President, Murraylands and Riverland Local Government Association; and Mayor, Mid Murray Council WINNALL, Ms Ella, President, Murraylands and Riverland Local Government Association; and Mayor, Berri Barmera Council CHAIR: Welcome. Although the committee does not require you to give evidence under oath, I should advise you that this hearing is a legal proceeding of the parliament and therefore has the same standing as proceedings of the respective houses. The giving of false or misleading evidence is a serious matter and may be regarded as a contempt of parliament. The evidence given today will be recorded by Hansard, attracts parliamentary privilege and is being broadcast live. I now invite you to make a brief opening statement before we proceed to discussion. Ms Winnall : Thank you, Chair and members of the committee, for the opportunity to appear today. Mayor Simone Bailey and I welcome the opportunity to speak on behalf of the eight councils that make up the Murraylands and Riverland Local Government Association, MRLGA. Between us, we have more than a decade of experience as elected members and many more as local government employees. We are now both in our fourth year as mayors, so we come before you with a very direct and lived experience of the local government funding system—not just the numbers but the people and the communities behind them. Since before 1927, councils across the Murraylands, Mallee and Riverland have worked collectively to represent our communities as part of the MRLGA. Today, our eight councils cover more than 53,900 square kilometres, with a population of more than 75,000 people, around 55,000 rateable properties, more than 12,500 kilometres of roads and over $1.75 billion in assets. Collectively, we raise more than $120 million a year in rates. Those numbers sound significant, but they tell only part of the story. Behind every kilometre of road is a community that needs to be connected, behind every asset is a ratepayer who ultimately helps pay for it, and behind every budget decision are real people. We've seen communities face the prospect of losing access to basic services, whether through government withdrawal at all levels or market failure through marginal economic scale; we've seen a council stop operating a swimming pool in one of the hottest, driest summers on record to save only $32,000; we've seen vulnerable ratepayers struggle to pay their rates, while councils simultaneously struggle to maintain essential services and infrastructure; and we've seen the consequences of a funding system that does not adequately recognise the circumstances of regional councils. Regional councils simply do not have the population base to generate the revenue necessary to maintain enormous infrastructure networks. In Berri Barmera, for example, last financial year, the grants commission assessed the council's need at around $8.5 million, while it received just over $3 million in financial assistance grants—without which we couldn't survive, but this is just over 36 per cent of assessed need. That gap is not an accounting exercise. It translates directly into services delayed, infrastructure deferred and difficult decisions about what communities can no longer afford. Ultimately, much of that gap falls back onto the ratepayer, which is why the information we provided to the committee today shows some of the councils with the greatest unmet assessed need also imposing substantially higher residential rates and charges, further driving inequity. Across our eight councils, four are now looking down the barrel of financial unsustainability, not necessarily through their financial mismanagement but through circumstance. And the pressure isn't coming from one place. It is the cumulative impact of declining federal financial assistance grant funding, cost shifting, competitive grant programs focused on new assets requiring councils to contribute money they often don't have, rising construction and operating costs, workforce pressures, huge disaster recovery burdens, and the increasing expectation that local government will step in when other levels of government withdraw. Regional local government is managing essential assets like wastewater that state water authorities manage in urban environments. We're managing expansive road networks used for so much more than local residential use—roads that enable supply of food to people across Australia, living mostly in the city. We're not trying to fund tomorrow's projects; we're simply trying to maintain yesterday's infrastructure. Every grant for new infrastructure that requires matched funding doesn't recognise the annual maintenance and renewal costs borne by the local government for the rest of time, often costing far more than the purchase price itself. On top of this, local government accounting standards require us to ratepayer-fund depreciation in a renewal in a way no other level of government is required to do. A council's debt is not fictional. We don't have the choice to continue accruing debt to fund asset renewal and basic operations while keeping rates low simply because it's politically convenient in the short term. We have a financial institution that can't simply keep lending while those costs continue to mount. But we aren't here to simply say, 'Give councils more money.' We're here to say, 'The funding system needs to be fairer and more equitable.' Regional, rural and metropolitan councils have fundamentally different revenue bases, geographic responsibilities and costs of assets and service delivery. A system that treats those differences as though they don't exist will inevitably produce inequitable outcomes. No-one living in the regions expects to have all of the services available in the city, but we see other councils able to fund non-essential projects that are beyond the wildest dreams of councils like ours while we struggle to afford the basics like a safe road network or a wastewater system. They are responding to genuine and real community needs and aspirations, but ours are existential. While our existential needs are under threat, we're also being asked to deliver services where other tiers of government and the market no longer will. The metropolitan councils don't have to consider whether the council needs to step in to provide the only childcare service or GP within 100 kilometres or have their community go without. This financial reality leads to difficulties in attracting and retaining high-calibre staff and elected members, the very things we need as a sector to meet the moment. This is not just because of remuneration rates but because of the environment itself. We also see councils who are not burdened by this level of existential need advocating for a no-worse-off outcome in funding reform. We do not want to see any council worse off through funding reform. The entire sector delivers incredible work with very little taxation. The pie does need to grow. But we believe that, unless the inequity in the system is recalibrated concurrently to funding increases, we will never stop the cycle of continuing to divide the haves and have-nots. You will see in our submission that there is no doubt that there are actions that the state government and the sector itself need to take to improve the way local government adapts. But, without the Commonwealth government addressing the underlying funding inequity, we simply can't reach an equitable model for all. There are practical solutions, including improved design of non-competitive funding, better understanding and recognition of regional infrastructure burdens, reform of grant and co-contribution arrangements, genuinely addressing cost shifting, including valuing where local government is required for Commonwealth project delivery and genuine partnerships between all three levels of government. Our message today is simple. Financial sustainability cannot mean asking councils to do more with less until there is nothing left to cut, sell or defer. We cannot hand an increasingly unsustainable model to the next generation. We're here because we believe that it can be fixed, and we hope that this inquiry provides the pathway to do exactly that. Thank you. CHAIR: Thank you very much. I think in your submission you propose a Commonwealth local government infrastructure investment plan. I'm just wondering how those infrastructure priorities should be identified and what metrics should be used to measure success in reducing the infrastructure gap. Ms Winnall : I believe that the sector needs to see an increase in non-competitive grant funding to enable the councils to invest in infrastructure specifically. At the moment the financial assistance grants are untied, and that enables councils to spend the money on operating expenditure as well as infrastructure. I believe that there is a better model in which we could increase the funding through loosely tying the funding to infrastructure needs and asset renewal in particular to enable councils to invest in keeping our assets going, and then ratepayer funding can supply the additional funding for operational needs. CHAIR: Would that be something similar to the Roads to Recovery model? Ms Winnall : No, I think slightly different in program design. CHAIR: What would you like to see? Ms Winnall : If there were an increase in the pie available from the federal government to fund essential infrastructure in local government, I think it is worth trusting the local government sector to invest in asset renewal. It can be done through a slight redesign of the current Financial Assistance Grant program. CHAIR: The Financial Assistance Grant program is untied. Ms Winnall : Currently. CHAIR: Roads to Recovery is a set amount for each council, depending on their circumstances, specific for roads. So are you saying that there should be some additional funding for infrastructure renewal separate to the financial assistance grants? Ms Winnall : We have such a significant asset burden that is bigger than roads. Roads to Renewal absolutely is a key part of our funding mix to fund the roads, but our asset burden is so much more substantial—critical housing infrastructure, wastewater. It's really, really significant in our community, and we need that infrastructure to be considered as well. CHAIR: Deputy Chair? Ms PENFOLD: Can I just say thank you to both of you. The submissions that you've provided both to this inquiry and the previous parliament's are excellent and very comprehensive. Thank you very much. I am interested in what you've seen. You put in a submission to the 2024 inquiry. Can you point to any specifics of how the situations got worse or where we're simply dealing with matters that remain unresolved? Ms Bailey : We put in a submission, and I did a fairly emotional speech at the hearing because we were hurting. I'd just been through a flood. We'd just closed our pool in the hottest, driest summer to save $32,000. Other councils were in the paper only last week, spending $194,000 on a book. For my community, that is six years of keeping the pool open. It's not our pool; it's the school pool, so it's not like the infrastructure is costing us. That was just a salary, which means there's one job loss in my community, which is a casual job over summer for Christmas. There are those sorts of things that impact our community. Although closing the pool was very, very difficult, it actually helped our elective member base and our community understand the dire need we were in. We've got ESCOSA coming back this year. I believe they will find us sustainable. But, in five more years, we're going to be in the same spot if these financial assistance grants aren't equitably shared. I've got a spreadsheet which has now been included. I've got a hard copy here if you want. There are councils where an $875,000 house has $1,000 in rates, and down the bottom it's $14,000 for the same value of house. So it is so inequitable right now. The longer we leave this, the harder it's going to get for councils like mine. We are selling off land. We said no to football club lights. That was one of the hardest decisions our council had to make. We were very fortunate that the community listened and understood, and they helped us have that infrastructure. But, again, it's now depreciating, and in 20 years time it's going to be another issue for our council. So we've done four years hard slog. I'm going to be really grateful if we get a good ESCOSA report, but I can't do this any longer. Ms PENFOLD: I would imagine one of the issues that might have shifted is renewables and renewable investment in your region. Could you just speak about your ability to rate renewable projects and whether you've modelled what sort of additional funding you could receive if you were able to. Ms Bailey : Yes. In South Australia, we can't rate renewables. In our regional areas, they're popping up more and more. My council would be able to raise $1 million worth of rates around now. We've got a wind farm going in and more solar farms and battery farms and literally zero rates coming off those. Actually, they decrease the rates because, if it was a productive farm and then it just becomes vacant land, we can't rate it as highly. Then we've got AI data centres coming. They're obviously going to have to have more renewables. Yes, we can rate the AI data centre, but we can't rate the renewables that go with it. It's definitely a blocker that the state government is providing. If councils in the city have a new food factory pop up, they can rate on it instantly. These things are taking over our farmland, and we can't even rate on them. Ms Winnall : It's not just the renewables. There are other mandatory rate rebates that I don't believe are currently contemporary or fit for purpose. For example, we are required to rebate residential properties in our community that are owned by universities or commercial properties that are run by large corporate not-for-profits that are running businesses from those premises to fund charitable services elsewhere. So the design of the mandatory rate rebates across the board is not helping. Ms PENFOLD: I don't want to put an onus on you, but, if you were able to give us a list of what you can't rate—because you said they were examples and there are others—it would be very helpful. Back on the renewables, though, have the companies that are operating offered you a kind of one-off community benefit fund, or have they been willing to enter into any long-term profit-sharing agreement? I'm not saying that's the equivalent of you being able to rate, but that would give you some ongoing dividend, whereas I'm going to put on the record that community benefit funds are not social licence. They do not demonstrate a project has social licence. But I'm just interested. Ms Bailey : They're working with us. They're trying hard. One of the renewable companies helped fund the football club lights for us. We are developing, or have developed, a policy on community benefit schemes within our council area so that we can have a little bit more say in where they go. The thing is that, if I got that $1 million of rates, council would get to choose where that goes. That goes on roads. A lot of these community benefit funds are trying to say, 'Well, we want it kept to that town where the windmills are going,' but we need to do the roads. We've got 3,383 kilometres of road, so, if you drove from here to Melbourne and then over to Perth, you'd be eight kilometres short of our road network, and we have only 10,000 ratepayers. So we need to be able to be in control of our rate funds. That takes it away. Ms PENFOLD: They're not offering you profit sharing. They're not offering you a long-term dividend. Okay. Ms Winnall : And that arrangement is also putting on the additional burden of the relationship and the advocacy. It's a new form of tied funding that we're having to chase and maintain, rather than being able to just receive the rate revenue and disburse it where it is needed most. Ms Bailey : Yes. In addition to that, if you put in a new playground where we were never going to put one in, we have to depreciate that. We have to put it back in in 20 years time, when the renewables may be gone, and that then becomes a council problem, so it can create more issues for a regional council over time. Ms PENFOLD: Okay. Thank you. CHAIR: Just to clarify—that is a state requirement? Ms Bailey : Yes, that's right. Ms PENFOLD: I think it's been an issue that others have raised, and I wanted to seek your views. Ms Winnall : And we have written to the Treasurer. Ms PENFOLD: The impact on your council—it sounds like there's a cost impost at this point from that project, because you're unable to rate it, and others as well. CHAIR: It doesn't make sense, really, if you've got the big business coming in and then you can't afford to keep open the pool. Ms Winnall : Yes. It also affects the long-term financial planning, in that it is hard to predict how much land over the next 10 years will be taken out of production and shifted into these other uses, and we are trying to forecast for asset renewal based on a certain assumption of rate base. Ms PENFOLD: It's an interesting topic for the ESCOSA review to dig further into. Anyway, thank you, Chair. CHAIR: Mr Burnell. Mr BURNELL: Thank you both for providing evidence today. I just wanted to get some clarification: the rate rebate, or the full rebate for the energy sector, is regardless of the type of energy provided, so it's not just on renewable energy? Ms Bailey : There's no rate rebate. The South Australian legislation prevents councils from rating electricity-producing infrastructure. My understanding was it came when the state's electricity assets were sold off. No-one thought about wind and solar back in that day, and I don't think the legislation has kept up with the times. Mr BURNELL: Okay. I want to pick up where we left off in that previous conversation around ESCOSA, and I'm keen to get your thoughts on the type of supports. Have they been welcomed? Have they led to productivity improvements? Are they something that would benefit other jurisdictions across the country? I'm just keen to get a bit of feedback. We're nearing the first four-year snapshot, and we heard from them earlier, but I'm keen to get the users' feedback on what their thoughts of the scheme are. Ms Bailey : I was the first-year review and Ella was fourth-year review, so this would be a good example. For me, I campaigned on, 'I'm an accountant, our council is going broke and, if we don't do something now, we're going to be in big trouble,' and nobody believed me. So being able to get the ESCOSA report a few months into it and being able to show people, 'See, this is what's going on'—it was great for me. The concern with ESCOSA is they don't even understand equity, so they charge us $40,000. We've got a council in our network, Karoonda council, with 1,000 people. They pay $40,000. So that's $40 a head for the ESCOSA report. And then you've got city councils who have 40,000 people—a dollar a head. So they don't even understand equity. The detail was good, it has put the sector on notice, and I think elected members are making better decisions because of it. But the equity, even in that system, is wrong. Ms Winnall : Both Simone and I got elected as the Murray River flood hit, so the first year of this term of council was really dominated by that. Immediately, once that emergency response lifted, we had already identified that improving council's financial position was a key priority for council. From, essentially, year 2 of this term, we had started taking dramatic steps to turn Berri Barmera's finances around. So we knew what was coming with our ESCOSA review, and we had to pay for the privilege of being told what we did already know and were already acting to initiate. We were very welcoming of ESCOSA coming in, however. We had a very constructive and positive working relationship with them while they were undertaking that review. But, ultimately, the review determined that Berri Barmera was one of the least financially sustainable councils in South Australia—one of the few that were deemed unsustainable in the past, currently and into the future. That has landed in the final year of our term with a community struggling to understand what that even means. What does it mean to be unsustainable, and does it mean financial mismanagement? What does it mean for my rates? Ultimately, what it means for their rates is that they're going up. It's a real conundrum for the council to respond strategically to our ESCOSA report as well because, on the one hand, our report says that we are unsustainable in the past, currently and in the future, indicating that, no matter what council is doing to turn it around, the issues are inherent. Then, the actual report provided by ESCOSA that came with it, indicated: It has developed a new strategic approach to its financial and asset management that, in the Commission's view, will support the Council's return to a sustainable operating performance and effective asset management— And: … The Commission commends the work that the Council is doing to improve its financial and asset management. You can see, if our chamber responds to the written report that ESCOSA provides, what that says is, 'You're doing the right thing, stay the course, and keep going,' but, if we respond to the indicators that they provided us, it says: 'These issues are structural and systemic, and it doesn't matter what you do, you're not going to get there.' That puts us in a really complicated situation in the final year of the term, trying to figure out how to navigate that going forward. Mr BURNELL: Can I switch slightly. You've both touched on the impact of the floods. Can you articulate what that has meant on the ground in the way of recovery and the long-term impact that's having on your financial viability moving forward? Ms Bailey : Again, we had the floods coming when I had an ESCOSA report and the premier visiting—we'd barely had a visit from a premier and had a really good relationship with the premier. I'm the kind of person who just tells you how it is, so I said, 'Premier, we can't do this flood without your support,' and he was so supportive. The whole government has been supportive. The flood hasn't actually stopped our return to financial sustainability. It has been hard, and there are still things that we haven't done and won't do. There were things like the Mary Ann Reserve, one of the most popular reserves on the Murray an hour from Adelaide, and we couldn't grass it until the government had agreed to pay for the grass because we couldn't afford it, and we weren't going to take ratepayer money from Truro, an hour away from the river, to grass Mary Ann Reserve. We stayed firm in saying, 'Hey, we've got this report,' and the government helped us. For us, we've still got a lot of work to do with flood recovery and all those things that we couldn't fund. We just will not do it. We have a rule, now, that we won't go for grants unless it's already in our long-term financial plan, so we're not doing fun stuff anymore. Ms Winnall : We are still doing asset recovery from the Murray River flood now. That shows the long-term physical recovery for our community as well as that our infrastructure teams, our project management and our finance teams are still doing that, which really dramatically increases their workload burden for the year. It also means that we've had to bring forward asset renewal that was not due—assets that might have been recently developed that were damaged and have had to be repaired. While that's going on, we've had to further defer assets that are desperately in need of maintenance and renewal. It's really affected our asset management plans in that way. It's also had other impacts that have not really been quantified around things like bringing forward the end of life for our landfill cells. The community has not yet had to feel that burden, but that landfill is going to need to be replaced years or decades earlier than it would have had it not been for the flood. There's also been a really significant impact on our staff. For us at Berri Barmera, the vast majority of contractors available to do the physical flood recovery were tied up at Renmark Paringa Council because they were the first hit. That meant that our staff team had to do the response, which hasn't been fully accounted for. We were leading flood recovery, as opposed to other disasters where it's clear that emergency services are delivering the actual emergency response. That's a year of staff time. We've had staff who've left afterwards because it was just too much. And continuity loss—there's just a whole heap of long-tail impacts of that disaster recovery. Ms Bailey : The LGA presented this morning, and they had some stats that they shared. South Australia has 7,500 kilometres of road, and Mid Murray Council is five per cent of that. Of 140 libraries, Mid Murray Council is four per cent. Of 175 wastewater management schemes, Mid Murray Council is 16.5 per cent. Yet of 9,500 employees, Mid Murray Council has less than one per cent. So we're trying to do five times more than any other council in the regions, and then we have all these extra things. So, yes, my last presentation was that our staff wear many hats, and they do, and it's hard work. CHAIR: Thank you. Mr Venning. Mr VENNING: I have a quick clarifying question on the back of Ms Penfold. Does the 330kV line from Bundey to the New South Wales border go through your councils, and do they pay rates? Ms Bailey : It goes through up near Morgan. No, I don't believe they pay rates. Mr VENNING: You talked about $1 million of lost revenue from not being able to rate renewables. Can you talk about the impact the collapse of the wine sector has had on your communities, both in general but also from an ability to draw rates from those businesses that are no longer there? Ms Winnall : For Berri Barmera Council, that 90 per cent of our primary production land is under vines. Most of those properties are small soldier settlement allotments that, through their sheer land use size, struggle to adapt or transition to another crop type. Most of them need to be irrigated horticultural or be abandoned. The last couple of decades has been really, really rough on the wine sector. When we think about vineyards in the Riverland, people consider them to be farms with a house on them. But the land size is such that it is the opposite; it's someone's home with a farm on it. Trying to grapple with a community that's going through the level of financial strain that they are—people talk about them exiting the industry. Well, that means they need to find somewhere to live, and there is a housing shortage in our community. We can't get investment or infrastructure built to enable housing elsewhere to enable those people to leave the farm and have that land turn into productive use. Wine and wine production will always be a really significant part of our community's economy, but there's no doubt that it's going through a lot of strain, so we have provided a rate rebate to grape growers in our community. It's $200. That doesn't touch the sides of what they're going through, but for us it's the most significant rate rebate we've ever offered anyone. The other thing that happens in our community is that, because the wine industry is struggling so much, the main streets are also struggling. All of those secondary impacts are also paying rates, and then they say, 'Where's our rate rebate for our financial hardship?' Trying to balance that is incredibly hard. Unpaid rates on properties in that hardship—council then carries that loss for a period of time until such time it can be paid back. Mr VENNING: Thank you. You're a small council that does a lot for the amount of FTE you have. Can you talk to the amount of effort that your council puts into grant writing that may not be awarded? And, secondly, just governance and compliance in general. Ms Bailey : We don't apply for grants, because we know that they're mostly fifty-fifty. We'll only apply if they're more near 80-100 or roads, for example, where we were going to renew it anyway—things like that. We buy in a grant writer. We don't have staff for that. We actually haven't had governance staff for about 12 months. We've only just got another one on board—again, really hard to get. We advertised a number of times and we're only an hour from Adelaide, so it is an issue. Ms Winnall : Further to that, grant writing is a big part of it but it's not the only burden of securing external funding and support. One of the challenges with grant writing for us are the time windows in which we have to respond. We have to drop everything that we're doing and try to get on top of renewal to be able to get the projects to a state where they're shovel ready. We couldn't even dream of having the kind of business cases and feasibility studies that metropolitan councils can afford, just through their sheer staffing model. The same goes for advocacy. For general advocacy for policy change or even for being here today, we don't have teams of people helping us write briefings to come to these things or to write letters to ministers to speak about change. It is a really heavy lift for a very small number of people in our teams. The same goes for Commonwealth-funded programs that are filtered through the state for local delivery. We have this really agonising decision sometimes about whether we apply for a grant. If we don't drop everything to apply for it then our community is missing out. The same goes for if, say, the federal government is wanting to deliver on-ground drought programs. Those programs are then delivered through the state, which then delivers them through partnership with local government, but don't flow down any of the administrative on costs for doing so. We are stuck in this agonising position of saying, 'Are we going to show up to provide our in-kind and our IP and deviate from our work plan to invest in this federal government priority?' If we don't do it, our community will miss out, or it won't be delivered in a way that's right for our community, but we're not being compensated for all of that work. Yes, it is grant writing, but engaging in this space as a whole is really challenging. CHAIR: Ms Jordan-Baird. Ms JORDAN-BAIRD: Thank you so much for coming and appearing before our committee today. It's great to have you here. I note your calls about increasing the size of the pie. My question is around how you collaborate with other council areas. Is that even possible with how remote your areas are? Are there any = shared services that you can both use and collaborate with? Ms Winnall : The Riverland and Murraylands councils have a really long and proud history of very proactively collaborating out of necessity. It's the only way that we can get things done. It's the only way that we can secure staff for functions that, as a single council, we just simply wouldn't be able to afford, or we don't have a full-time role for them, so we will work together often. The way in which we collaborate has lots of different collaboration vehicles. The Riverland councils, for example, have a Riverland local government forum and the G3, which is the CEO network of the three councils, and they are constantly working on shared services, collaboration, contract alignment. It takes time to collaborate and a lot of effort in relationships and trust to ensure that mutual benefit can be derived from that. We're talking about things like recently we went through the process of aligning the contracts for the contractor who manages our recreation facilities and swimming pools, to have a single contract to get economies of scale for the whole Riverland and have some service efficiencies. That took years to be implemented because we had to wait for contracts to align, have councils agree to one- to two-year extensions of current ones to then facilitate that collaboration. It works and it's effective, but it takes conscious effort and a lot of bandwidth to make it happen. Then we have other models like the MRLGA. There are things that, as individual councils, we just simply couldn't do without having that collaborative vehicle. But even that is just one very good employee. Mind you, that is an asset to our community. But to have one person be the carriage of all of that collaboration, all of that shared advocacy, because it's what we can afford, is tricky. There are formal and informal collaboration vehicles to make shared services happen. Ms Bailey : Just add to that, Carron McLeod, our very fabulous CEO over here, like Alice said, and I wrote this stuff last night because that's our capacity. We're already doing waste procurement. I think six out of eight of the councils are in on that. I think one of the other councils has tried to get in and they're too far away now, so they can't get in, which is really unfortunate. We've got our public health, where we're writing a plan together. We've got two new health positions through the MRLGA, with three councils doing a preventive health role. Again, it's not really a councils thing, is it? But they're the things we do because nobody else is doing them in our regions. Ms JORDAN-BAIRD: Is there anything like what you just mentioned, that public health initiative, that you feel your councils have picked up because other levels of government are no longer delivering these services? Ms Bailey : I'll speak for Coorong council, who are part of our eight councils. They just put $40,000 aside to try and source a GP. Again, that's not local government's role. There are things that we shouldn't be doing. Karoonda council and Southern Mallee have got their own childcare centres which are losing money, so the ratepayers are subsidising people's children. It's again not local government's role. We're filling these gaps and we are working together to fill these gaps. I think Southern Mallee and Karoonda is a joint childcare, on-the-go system. It's hard. Mr BURNELL: Chair, can I ask one quick question if that's alright? CHAIR: Sure. Mr BURNELL: Has illegal dumping of asbestos in the wake of the flood been on the rise, and, if so, what's the cost impost to respective councils? Ms Bailey : I don't believe it's been on the rise. The state government did a very good waste project with the flood, where they agreed to pay for 100 per cent of it. It was probably a deal with the federal government, so most of our flood waste got dumped appropriately. Council even made a little bit of income out of that. We probably should've raised our fees, but we didn't. CHAIR: Thank you very much for your attendance here today. If you have been asked to provide any additional information, would you please forward it to the secretariat by 18 September 2026? You will be sent a copy of the transcript of your evidence and will have an opportunity to request corrections to transcription errors..