The table presented below tells a sorry, sorry tale about the gulf between words and actions by Glen Eira City Council, especially in these difficult financial times when residents are experiencing continuing rate and charges increases.
Council would like us to believe that they care; that they support to the hilt our most vulnerable such as pensioners. Year after year in the budget papers we find this sentence:
As pensioners are often asset rich but income poor, the adoption of rate increases has a real impact on the disposable income of a significant proportion of our community. (page 20 of current budget).
How is it then possible that Glen Eira is the only council that keeps reducing its monetary contribution to the pensioner rebate whilst other councils either maintain their funding or increase it year after year? The State Government provides a rebate that is indexed to the CPI – thus it increases each year. Glen Eira sees fit to REDUCE its contribution each year despite the fact that rates keep going up as well as charges.
What we present below is a comparison of what other councils contribute in terms of pensioner rebates. Glen Eira introduced the arbitrary $270 maximum in 2001 and has never revisited this decision in any formal way. Thus in 2006 pensioners were entitled to over a $100 rebate on top of the state government rebate. This has now dwindled to a meagre $29!
The blanks in the table are a result of not all of these councils providing online access to their past budgets. Most simply list the previous 4 or 5 years and none go as far back as 2006. Some have also not finalised their 2020/21 budgets. However, the trend is evident even from the last 5 years. Glen Eira sticks religiously to a total maximum of $270 per household. Thus whilst the government is this year providing a rebate of $241, council only needs to cough up a miserly $29 to make it a total of $270. In contrast Maribyrnong goes up to $438 and most of the other councils listed are well and truly above this magical figure of $270.
This council should hang its head in shame!
Glen Eira Debates 
May 28, 2020 at 5:56 PM
Thank you for bringing this up. My aunt is a pensioner and each year dreads what the new rates will be. She has often said to me that the discount she gets from council is enough to buy half a dozen cartons of milk. What gets me is how this kind of information is buried in budgets and never ever explained completely. When I think of all the money Glen Eira wastes it is unforgiveable that they screw pensioners every single year.
May 28, 2020 at 6:45 PM
Great. Hit those who can least afford it and don’t have a voice. Like trying to sell of aged care. We sure have a council with a heart.
May 29, 2020 at 9:26 AM
Anecdotal reports swear that its harder to get home help like cleaning and carers. Cost cutting there but big spending on more and more staff and fancy brochures. How about some decent priority setting?
May 29, 2020 at 9:46 AM
With a liberal party dominated council all issues concerning residents welfare will only deteriorate. Their only concern is to see their developer mate get rich through overdevelopment and trashing out neighboourhoods.
May 29, 2020 at 10:23 AM
I think that Council needs to ensure that fundamentals are in place and this, helping our vulnerable, is a fundamental. Pensioner rebates are in turn at the mercy of other council decisions such as the type, placement and degree of development, which in turn changes affordability. Thank you for the time it must have taken to source the detail to put Glen Eira’s pensioner rebate in relation to that of other municipalities. Perhaps someone in council will read your information and up the rebate ASAP! Particularly in the time of COVID where pensioner supplementary incomes (if they have any) may well be lower than before COVID-19…………
May 29, 2020 at 12:17 PM
Hyams just cannot help himself! Here is a comment he put up on another social media site:
“This is just so typical of the misleading spin put out by Glen Eira “debates”. They cherry pick a few councils while ignoring those that provide no pensioner rebate. They of course don’t mention that our rates are lower than any of the other carefully selected councils in their table, to the extent that pensioners in Glen Eira would still be paying less overall on average than in at least some of them, and if anyone can find a time that they praised us when our rebate was so much higher than others, I’d be very surprised. That’s what you get when people are interested in point-scoring, not accuracy, and so disinterested in being accountable for what they say that they won’t even say who they are. Anyone who spreads their bile around Facebook is just discrediting themselves.”
Referring continually to “averages” is meaningless. Budgets are set according to the funding that a council believes it needs to fulfill its future plans. Rates are then decided on this basis. Furthermore resorting to “averages” is no defense for the rate in the dollar that each council then decides to implement. We have not had the time to go through all the councils we listed, but here is the rate in the dollar for several of them
DAREBIN: A general rate of 0.1987500% (0.1987500 cents in the dollar of CIV) for all rateable residential land. (71,000 properties)
MARIBYRNONG: 0.00281799 cents in the dollar and 42,000 properties
GLEN EIRA: 2.7673 cents in the dollar and 68,000 properties
May 29, 2020 at 1:40 PM
Hyams would be advised to keep his gob firmly closed. He has been a councillor for about thirteen or fourteen years and presided over one of the highest rate increases year after year. Responsible for the introduction of the disastrous zoning and now does nothing about all the other issues plaguing the municipality.
Elections are coming up so voters should be asking themselves exactly what he has achieved in thirteen years? The same goes for several others.
May 29, 2020 at 3:29 PM
Yup averages is bullshit. PM earns $300000 and I earn $80000. Average wage is $190000. Would luv to have this average.
May 29, 2020 at 5:41 PM
Hyams is a profession spin doctor that is his full time job at the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council, (AIJAC) this where he practises his trade of defending the indefensible when needed.