Why Data Doesn’t Save the Nice People

One of these anglers is going home with dinner.

An infographic came through my feed this week, shared by one of my more thoughtful followers. You’ve probably seen one like it. “The Facts About Migrants in Australia.” Beautiful design. Sydney Harbour Bridge across the top. Pink graduation cap. Treasury figures. Census data. Sources properly cited at the bottom.

I fact-checked it. It’s accurate. Migrants really do pay more in taxes than they take out. They really are younger, better educated, more likely to be working. The numbers stack up.

And it will change exactly nobody’s mind.

Because while the well-meaning people are making infographics, Pauline Hanson and Angus Taylor are telling a story. And a story beats a bar chart every single time.

Here’s the thing nobody wants to admit.

Taylor and Hanson aren’t stupid. They’ve got staffers. They’ve read the Treasury paper. They know the average skilled migrant contributes about $200,000 over their lifetime while the average Aussie-born citizen costs the budget $85,000.

They just don’t care. Because they’ve worked out something the infographic-makers haven’t: the fight isn’t actually about the numbers.

The fight is about who you are, who’s on your side, and who’s making your life harder. Housing costs are through the roof. You can’t get in to see a GP. The roads are choked. Your kid can’t afford a house in the suburb you grew up in. Something’s gone wrong, and somebody needs to cop the blame.

You don’t beat that with a pie chart. You really don’t.

Why data doesn’t work on social issues

This pattern shows up everywhere once you start looking for it.

Crime stats have been dropping for thirty years. Tough-on-crime campaigns still win. Why? Because the fight isn’t about the trendline. It’s about whether you feel safe walking to your car at night.

The climate science is settled. The politics isn’t. Why? Because the fight isn’t about radiative forcing. It’s about whose town shuts down when the coal mine closes.

Same with guns in America. Same with drugs. Same with nuclear power. When the data is clear but the politics is loud, it’s almost always because the data is answering a different question than the one people are actually asking.

The migration infographic answers: “Are migrants good for the budget?” Yes, they are.

But Betty in Blacktown isn’t asking that. Betty’s asking: “Why can’t my daughter afford a house? Why does the bus take an hour now? Who’s looking out for me?”

And if your answer is “well actually, according to Treasury modelling…” you’ve already lost her.

What 20 years of running a charity taught me about this

I spent two decades running Action for Agriculture. Australian agriculture had an image problem with young people. Kids thought farming was boring, dirty, going broke, finished.

 We made infographics. Plenty of them. Good ones. But we never led with them.

We led with people. Young farmers, sharp, funny, articulate twenty-somethings doing extraordinary things with technology, sustainability, animal welfare. We called them Young Farming Champions. We put them in front of school kids. We ran the Archibull Prize where kids made art about agriculture after meeting these young farmers and hearing their stories.

Then, once the kids were hooked, once they’d met Cassie or Sam and thought “hang on, this is actually interesting,” then we’d hand them the infographic. The GDP figures. The export numbers. The sustainability stats. The careers data.

And by that point, they actually read it. Because they’d already decided they cared.

That’s the bit the pro-migration crowd is getting wrong. They’re handing Betty the infographic on the first date. Before she’s even sat down. Before she knows why she should care. And then they’re surprised when she walks out.

So what should the pro-migration side actually do?

Same order of operations.

Lead with people. Not “migrants” as a category. Specific, named, photographed humans. The Filipino nurse who looked after your mum in palliative care. The Indian engineer who fixed your suburb’s water. The Sudanese kid in your daughter’s class who’s just been picked for the rep team.

Get Betty curious. Get her invested. Get her thinking “hang on, that’s not the story I’m being told.”

Then, once she’s hooked, bring out the Treasury numbers. The 56% with tertiary qualifications. The $200,000 lifetime contribution. The employment rates. By then she’ll read them, because she’ll already be on the journey.

And here’s the bit the nice people really struggle with. Acknowledge what the other side is getting right. Housing pressure is real. Infrastructure lag is real. Wage pressure in some industries is real. If your pro-migration message pretends none of that exists, you sound like you live on a different planet to Betty, and she’ll vote for whoever doesn’t.

And the hard truth. The people making these careful, accurate, well-sourced infographics aren’t wrong. They’ve just got the order wrong.

Hanson and Taylor lead with story. Threat, identity, who’s on your side. By the time anyone gets around to checking the numbers, the emotional work is done and the data bounces off.

The nice people lead with numbers. And the story never gets told at all.

If you care about social issues, migration, climate, reconciliation, whatever your patch is, make your infographics. Make them beautiful. Make them accurate. But understand they’re the second move, not the first.

Hook them with a human. Seal it with the data.

That’s the order. We had it right at Action4agriculture. The pro-migration crowd needs to figure it out before the next election.

The Shit Sandwich and the Sacred Calling

Last week’s budget was described, by at least one prominent politician, as a shit sandwich. In the days since, my feed has filled up with variations on that theme. Angry posts from farmers and farming families, several of them quoting scripture, most of them warning that the government is now taxing Australians in life and in death.

There is no death tax in this budget. There is no inheritance tax. What there is, among other things, is the end of the pre-CGT exemption for assets bought on or before 19 September 1985. From 1 July 2027, those assets get a market value reset, and any gain after that date becomes taxable. For a family sitting on land a grandfather bought in 1972, that is a genuine change. The pre-2027 gain stays exempt, but the planning assumption that the asset would never attract CGT is gone.

That is worth being angry about if you are directly affected. It is not the end of civilisation, and it is not a death tax, but it is a real shift in the rules for long held family assets. The small business and farm CGT concessions remain in place. The 50% CGT discount is being replaced by cost base indexation, which is a return to how the system worked between 1985 and 1999. Trusts get a 30% minimum tax from 1 July 2028, with several categories exempt.

That is the factual picture. The emotional picture is different, and it is the emotional picture that gets shared.

The post that prompted this one quoted Proverbs 13:22, a good person leaves an inheritance to their children’s children, and built an argument that modern tax policy is in tension with biblical stewardship. It is a familiar move in rural commentary.

Farming gets framed as a sacred calling, a multi-generational legacy, the soul of the nation. The argument runs that ordinary commercial rules should not apply to it, because what farmers do is not ordinary commerce.

Here is the problem with that framing. A farm is a small business. It happens to involve land and livestock rather than dry cleaning or panel beating, but the structural features people invoke to mark it as different, capital intensity, weather risk, commodity price exposure, thin margins, succession planning, asset values shifting under policy changes, exist across the small business economy. A suburban café owner whose parents bought the shop in 1980 faces the same pre-CGT change as a grazier whose parents bought the property in 1980. Only one of them gets Proverbs quoted in their defence.

Farmers already have a substantial suite of concessions that other small businesses do not. The small business CGT concessions, the farm-specific rollover, farm management deposits, primary producer income averaging, fuel tax credits, drought assistance and the farm household allowance.  By international standards Australian farmers are lightly supported. The EU and US are far more generous. But by domestic standards, against other small businesses, the deal is good.

Which brings me to the honest version of the argument, the one farm lobbies rarely make out loud because it undercuts the rugged independence branding.

The rebates exist because food has to stay cheap. Australian consumers pay one of the lowest proportions of household income on food in the developed world. That is not an accident. Production costs are subsidised at the input end. Fuel, finance, drought support, levies matched by government. The saving flows through to retail. Governments of both major parties have made the same political judgement for decades. It is cheaper and less visible to subsidise farm inputs than to let food prices float to their true cost. A $12 loaf of bread ends governments faster than a fuel rebate scheme that nobody outside agriculture understands.

There is a second piece, which is food security. Most developed countries support domestic agriculture for the same reason they support domestic steel or semiconductors. You do not want to be wholly import dependent for something essential. That is a legitimate public interest argument and it is the one that should be made.

What is striking is that this argument almost never appears in the angry posts. Instead the framing is persecution. City elites who do not understand us, governments that hate producers, taxes designed to crush the family farm. It is emotionally satisfying and politically effective, but it obscures what is actually going on. The rebates are not charity. They are not a moral reward for choosing a noble profession. They are a consumer subsidy delivered through producers, designed to keep retail food prices down and maintain sovereign production capability.

If the argument were made that way, it would be harder to dismiss. It would also be harder to wrap in scripture, which may be why it is not the version we hear.

The budget is not a shit sandwich. It is a set of policy choices, some of which deserve sharp criticism. Pretending otherwise does the people most affected by the real changes no favours at all.

I write life stories. Here is one about a pair of mittens.

Most life stories are almost lost. They live in one person’s memory, in a few photographs, in a parcel kept in a drawer.

Every life carries small objects that hold whole histories inside them. A photograph. A letter. A pair of hand-knitted mittens. This is the story of one such object, and the journey it led to.

When I sat down with her, she brought out a parcel wrapped in brown paper and tied with string…

Inside was a body belt made from a flour bag, stitched into little pockets for a soldier’s belongings. A small Bible. A notebook and pencil. A cigarette case. Cigarette cards. And a pair of hand-knitted mittens.

The mittens had her grandfather’s initials embroidered on them.

She told me she had wondered about those mittens all her life. Had they come from home? From a Red Cross parcel? From some kind woman who would never know where they had ended up? Had Martin himself stitched those initials, sitting somewhere in Belgium, thinking of the wife and two little girls he had left behind?

Martin Henry Collins was a bombardier with the Australian Field Artillery. He was killed in action in Belgium on the 21st of September, 1917. He was twenty-seven years old.

He left behind a wife and two little girls. One of them grew up to be my client’s mother.

That parcel was almost all her mother had of him.

Her mother’s great wish, all her life, was to visit her father’s grave. But her health was poor, and the journey was beyond her. So her daughter promised that if her mother could not go, she would go for her.

In 1980, she made that journey.

She told me about arriving in the small Belgian town. About how quiet it was. About the British War Graves Commission directing them to a florist before driving them in an official car. About the endless rows of white headstones on either side of the road.

About finding her grandfather’s grave, with a small posy of wildflowers already laid on it, placed there by local schoolchildren who choose particular graves to care for.

She told me about the daily service at the Menin Gate. The town falling silent. The bugle sounding. The six thousand, one hundred and sixty names of Australians with no known grave, recorded on the walls.

And she told me about the long drive back to Brussels, thinking about what she had done. I had gone for her. I had stood where she had longed to stand. I had seen the grave of the father she never really knew.

She is in her eighties now. The parcel still exists. The mittens are still inside it. And until we sat down together, the story of the parcel, and the journey, and the schoolchildren laying flowers, lived only in her memory.

Now it is written down.

That is the part of this I value most.

A life carries hundreds of small moments like the mittens. A flour-bag belt. A grandfather’s initials. A promise made to a mother. A bugle at dusk. Most of those moments are never said aloud, let alone written down. They live in one person’s memory until that person is gone, and then they are gone too.

When I sit down with someone to write their life story, my role is to ask the questions that bring those moments to the surface, to listen carefully enough to hear which ones matter, and to put them on the page in language that does them justice.

I do this for older people who want their own story preserved for their grandchildren. I do it for families who want to capture a parent’s or grandparent’s story before it’s too late. I do it because these stories are the inheritance one generation gives to the next, and once they are written down, they are safe.

If there is someone in your life whose story you want preserved, I’d love to talk.

More at synergyscape.com.au/work-with-me

Should Kiama Council Be the Developer?

Blue Haven Bonaira – Image source Archipro

Should Kiama Council build its own developments on its catalyst sites? The lessons of Blue Haven Bonaira and Blue Haven Terralong suggest not.

Yesterday I wrote about Kiama’s catalyst sites and what we could build if we got smart about the land council already owns. A thoughtful commenter, Graham, responded with a different idea. Don’t sell anything, don’t partner with developers, don’t do public/private anything. Instead, have council build the buildings itself, retain ownership of the land and the buildings, and lease the spaces out for long-term recurring income.

It’s a position you hear often in community conversations about council assets. Keep everything. Build it ourselves. Lease it forever. The ratepayers win.

In principle, Graham is right. Retaining ownership and capturing long-term rental income is, on paper, the best possible return for ratepayers over a thirty or fifty year horizon. No developer profit margin. No one else taking a slice. Pure value for the community.

The problem is that we already know how that story ends in Kiama, because we lived it.

Blue Haven Bonaira

The last time Kiama Council decided to be its own developer at scale, we built Blue Haven Bonaira. The cost blew out badly. By the time the dust settled, council had taken on debt it couldn’t service from the operating income of the facility itself. That debt is one of the reasons we are now under a Performance Improvement Order. Council eventually sold Bonaira to a Perth-based aged care operator in April 2025, well below what was needed to recoup the build cost.

This isn’t ancient history. It happened in this council, within memory, with consequences the community is still paying for.

Blue Haven Terralong

The Minister’s recent media release on the proposed PIO variation named Blue Haven Terralong by name. See my blog here. The Minister noted that council has advised “major investment is required at Blue Haven Terralong to address maintenance and fire safety compliance issues.”

The number behind that sentence is significant. The facility needs $51.2 million in maintenance and capital works over the next ten years just to bring it from a poor condition rating up to an average one.

That is what happens when a council owns a building it can’t afford to maintain. The asset deteriorates. Compliance becomes a problem. The people who live there, in this case vulnerable older residents, end up housed in something the institution cannot keep up.

Council didn’t fail to maintain Blue Haven Terralong because anyone wanted that outcome. It failed because councils, structurally, are not set up to be long-term property owners and operators of complex assets. That’s not a Kiama problem. It’s a council problem.

Why councils struggle as developers in 2026

The construction sector today is a difficult place for any inexperienced client to stand, and councils are inexperienced clients by definition.

Builders quote a price to win the job. Then, mid-project, they can come back with variation claims and escalation costs that can add millions to the original contract price. This happens because of scope change, events like Covid/Middle-East conflict or even legislative changes in the application of the construction code during the delivery period. Sometimes they threaten to walk if the new numbers aren’t accepted. A commercial developer with a portfolio of projects absorbs that risk across multiple buildings and has the commercial muscle, the legal team, and the market relationships to push back hard.

A council doing one building has none of that. They have one project, one contract, one builder, and limited internal expertise when the variation claim lands. The outcome is predictable, and the public record across NSW is full of examples. Government projects routinely come in well over budget when the client doesn’t have the in-house capability to manage construction risk professionally.

Delivering complex buildings in 2026 is a specialist business. Councils are in the business of running communities, and that’s a full job in itself.

What this means for the catalyst sites

I’m not arguing against ratepayer ownership of long-term value. That’s exactly the right goal. Graham is right about the goal.

The question is the mechanism. How do we capture that value without putting council in the position of carrying development risk, construction risk, leasing risk, and maintenance risk on assets it doesn’t have the capability to manage?

The answer is somewhere in the middle of “sell everything” and “council does everything.” It probably looks like this.

Council retains ownership of the land. The land is the asset that appreciates, and the asset that gives council long-term leverage. Council does not need to sell it.

The buildings are delivered by a partner with the expertise, the balance sheet, and the risk management to actually deliver them on budget and on time. That partner could be a private developer, a not-for-profit community housing provider like Housing Trust, a state government delivery agency, or some combination. The point is that whoever holds the delivery risk should be someone equipped to manage it.

Council captures long-term revenue through the structure of the deal. A ground lease pays rent over 49 or 99 years. A development partnership shares revenue. An arrangement with a community housing provider can include a council ownership share of completed units that produces rental income forever. None of these models require council to be the builder or take all of the development risk.

Manning Street, where it ultimately makes sense to realise capital, can be brought to market at full development potential to fund the parts of the precinct that need council capital.

This is the conversation Graham’s question opens up. He’s right that ratepayer value shouldn’t be handed to developers. The interesting question is how to protect that value while also protecting council from risks it isn’t equipped to carry. There’s a third path between selling everything and council doing it all itself, and that’s probably where the real answer lives.

The lesson worth learning

The hardest thing about Blue Haven Bonaira and Blue Haven Terralong is that they were built with good intentions. Nobody set out to put council under a PIO or to leave vulnerable residents in a facility that needs $51 million in repairs. The people who made those decisions believed, like Graham does now, that council ownership and operation was the right answer.

The lesson isn’t that they were wrong about the goal. The lesson is that the model doesn’t work in 21st century construction conditions, and pretending otherwise just produces more Blue Haven Bonairas.

The current Finance and Major Projects Committee has, I hope, learned that lesson. The right path for the catalyst sites is one that captures long-term value for ratepayers without exposing council to risks it can’t manage. That’s not a compromise position. It’s the only sustainable one.

Thanks Graham for raising the question. The answer is imperative and it deserves the serious conversation you’ve started.

The Kiama We Could Build

 

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what kind of town we want Kiama to be in ten years.

The one where our kids can afford to live near us. Where the first responders we count on, the ambos, the police, the SES volunteers, can actually afford to live in the town they’re serving. Where the cafe owner in town can keep her staff because they have somewhere to sleep within twenty minutes of work. Where we still have a working leisure centre, a functioning council, and a community that hasn’t been quietly hollowed out by holiday lets and weekenders.

That town is possible. But it isn’t going to build itself, and it isn’t going to come from cutting another service or raising another fee.

It’s going to come from being smart about what we already own.

Most of us don’t think about it much, but Kiama Council owns some genuinely valuable land. Three pieces in particular keep coming up in my head when I try to imagine what’s possible.

There’s Havilah Place, where the old nursing home was demolished. It sits empty now, right next to our 42 year old leisure centre, in a part of town that already functions as a community hub.

There’s the leisure centre itself, which everyone agrees needs replacing. Council’s own advisory committee has already said as much, and has recommended building something bigger and better in its place: not just a pool and a gym, but a proper community facility with services, retail, maybe even council offices.

And there’s the Council Chambers on Manning Street. Two minutes from the ocean. In the middle of town. Possibly the single most valuable piece of land Council owns. But we can’t sell it while we still work from it.

Look at those three things side by side and a question almost asks itself. What if they aren’t three separate problems but three parts of one solution?

Imagine this. We build a new civic and community precinct on the Havilah Place and leisure centre site. Modern, well designed, locally appropriate. A new leisure centre at the heart of it. Council offices on an upper floor. A cafe at street level. Underground parking that makes the whole quarry function properly for the first time. Apartments above, a meaningful share of them set aside as affordable housing for the workers Kiama needs but currently can’t house.

Then, once Council has somewhere to operate from, we bring the Manning Street site to market at its full potential and use that capital to help fund the precinct that made it possible.

A precinct like that doesn’t need to be ugly or out of scale. It doesn’t need to look like every other coastal redevelopment from the last twenty years. Done well, it could be the thing visitors actually come to see. Done badly, it could be a disaster. The difference is in who designs it, who delivers it, and who Council partners with.

The best argument for getting the affordable housing piece right is sitting half an hour up the road in Wollongong. The Housing Trust opened a development on Crown Street in 2024 called Northsea. Fifty four homes in one building: some social housing, some affordable rentals, some private apartments. The principle behind it, the thing that makes it work, is that no door looks any different from any other.

You cannot tell, walking past, who lives where or how. A door is a door. A neighbour is a neighbour.

That’s what good mixed tenure housing looks like when it’s done by people who know what they’re doing. Several Kiama councillors have already been through Northsea. The reports back, by all accounts, were positive.

If we got a precinct like that built here, in partnership with an experienced Community Housing Provider, two things happen at once. We start meaningfully addressing our housing crisis, and we unlock state and federal funding streams that are not available to a normal council asset sale. The money is there. It just follows the right delivery model.

Kiama Council is still under a Performance Improvement Order. The deadline for a balanced budget has been extended to 2027/28, but the underlying problem hasn’t gone away. Costs keep rising. The fee debates over the holiday parks this past month show how politically painful the alternative looks: trying to plug a structural revenue gap by squeezing residents and ratepayers a little harder every year.

There is a better way out of this. Council already knows it, in fact. The Finance and Major Projects Committee is already looking at the catalyst sites. The question is how ambitious we’re willing to be about what we do with them.

If we sell the land raw, we get a one off cash injection, and a developer captures most of the long term value. If we instead establish planning certainty for these sites first, whether through rezoning or a site specific plan or a concept approval, then partner properly, that value flows back to Kiama ratepayers. The principle is well established in public asset divestment around the country. The closer Council gets a site to a deliverable approval, the more of its value Council captures rather than handing it to the next buyer.

This what smart councils do with land like this.

The honest version of this is that Kiama has a narrow window. State and federal policy is currently more supportive of mixed tenure housing delivery than it has been in twenty years. We hold the land. We have a council under genuine financial pressure that needs sustainable revenue. We have a working model just up the road. We have councillors who have seen it and understood it.

Windows like this don’t stay open forever. In five years the funding programs will have shifted, the political climate will have moved on, and the catalyst sites will either have been sold off in pieces for short term cash, or we will have done something genuinely transformative with them.

I know which version of Kiama I want to live in.

The draft Council budget is on public exhibition until 24 May. If you have a view on how Council uses its strategic assets, this is the moment to say so. Submissions can be made through Council’s website. Even a short submission helps, because what councillors hear from the community shapes what they feel able to consider. Here is a step by step guide

You can also speak to your councillors directly. They are accessible, and most of them genuinely want to hear from residents who are thinking constructively about the future of the town.

Kiama has been given a difficult hand to play. But we are not without options. We own real things, in real places, at exactly the moment when doing something visionary with them is most possible.

Let’s not waste it.

Kiama Council had the playbook. Five councillors voted not to use it. The union did it anyway.

Council voted not to ask the Minister. The union asked anyway. Nobody thanked Cr Cains.

New to this issue?

This post is part of a series covering Kiama Council’s budget, the holiday parks proposal and the Performance Improvement Order. If you want the background before diving into the detail, the earlier posts are here:

  1. Council is counting on you not reading this – submission guide
  2. Ron Hoenig just put Kiama Council on notice. Here is what I said and why you should too.

  3. Kiama Council wants submissions on a dead budget.

Start there. Then come back here.

This is my reading of the public record. Happy to be corrected.

On 21 April 2026, Cr Mike Cains moved a motion that Kiama Council write to the Minister for Local Government asking three specific questions about the budget, including whether the cuts proposed in the draft budget were actually necessary.

Council voted 5 -3 to say no.

For: Brown, Cains, Tatrai

Against: Larkins, Lawton, Matters, McDonald, Warren absent from the vote Draisma

Three weeks later, the Minister answered the questions anyway. The cuts are no longer necessary. The community got an extension. Council didn’t ask for it. The union did.

And the community is still being asked to submit on the cuts-driven draft budget by Saturday 24 May.

Here’s what happened.

Cr Cains’ motion asked the Minister three things:

(a) Whether a failure by KMC to project a balanced budget in the 2026/2027 financial year would trigger the appointment of an administrator;

(b) Whether short-term deficit budgeting, if presented alongside a long-term financial sustainability strategy, is considered acceptable; and

(c) The extent to which KMC is expected to balance immediate fiscal constraints against maintaining essential services, community infrastructure, and economic activity.

The Minister has now answered all three. No, an administrator is not being appointed. Yes, staged deficit budgeting with a long-term strategy is the path. Yes, the impact on services matters and the deadline can move to accommodate it.

The questions Cains wanted Council to ask have all now been answered. Council just didn’t ask them.

Council had been through this exact process two years earlier.

At the same 21 April meeting, two letters from Minister Hoenig were tabled in front of councillors.

A letter dated 30 January 2024 – Hoenig’s Notice of Intention to Vary the existing PIO, sent to CEO Jane Stroud, giving Council 28 days to make submissions.

A letter dated 23 May 2024  Hoenig’s variation of the PIO, issued after Council had formally engaged and made its submission.

The 2024 correspondence is the exact playbook for getting a PIO variation. Council had it on the table on the night Cains moved his motion. Five councillors voted not to use it.

The union didn’t wait.

On 9 April 2026, the Illawarra Mercury reported the United Services Union had emailed its members confirming it was actively pursuing a meeting with the Minister to seek an extension. The email said:

“An extension will avoid the need for immediate cuts, since the losses can be drawn out which means the need to cut positions and services is less immediate.”

That’s two weeks before Cains moved his motion. The union had already identified the path. It was already walking it.

Council sent the cuts out for exhibition anyway.

At the same 21 April meeting where the Cains motion was lost, Council unanimously endorsed the cuts-driven draft budget for public exhibition.

The same meeting also noted, in a separate resolution about the Reflections unsolicited proposal for the holiday parks, that any proceeds “will be incorporated into the draft budget, resulting in the potential elimination of the budget deficit.”

So at the meeting where Council voted not to ask the Minister, Council also acknowledged the cuts might not even be necessary.

And then sent the cuts-driven budget out for public exhibition five days later.

14 May 2026.

3:25 PM  Kiama MP Katelin McInerney issues a statement thanking the United Services Union, staff, community members and her petitioners.

4:26 PM  Minister Hoenig announces the proposed PIO variation.

Late afternoon,  Council “welcomes the extension.” The CEO thanks the United Services Union “for its strong collaboration and partnership in making the PIO request to Minister Hoenig.” The Mayor thanks the Minister for meeting with him at Parliament House.

Nobody thanked Cr Cains.

One more thing worth noting.

The minister also required council to strengthen its financial reporting to the Office of Local Government. Four years into a Performance Improvement Order. The community is entitled to ask what that means for the accuracy of the budget documents currently on exhibition.

What the record shows.

A councillor formally proposed the path. Council voted it down 5–3. The union pursued the same path externally. Our MP Katelin McInerney campaigned. The community wrote directly to the Minister. The extension came through. Council welcomed it.

The CEO publicly thanked the union that lobbied around her own draft budget.

The Mayor publicly thanked the Minister for the outcome he had voted three weeks earlier not to ask for.

The community is still being asked to submit on that now dead draft budget by Saturday 24 May.

The submission period should be extended. Full stop.

This is all your submission needs to say. Copy it. Send it.

“Given the Minister for Local Government proposed a variation to the Performance Improvement Order on 14 May 2026 extending the budget deadline by twelve months, I ask Council to pause the exhibition period, revise the draft budget to reflect the new timeline, and give the community adequate time to respond.”

Add your name and address. Send it to yoursay.kiama.nsw.gov.au and council@kiama.nsw.gov.au and councillors@kiama.nsw.gov.au  before 24 May.

Step by step submission guide here

A note from me. I’m a community member trying my very best to make sense of this bombardment of information and what it means for our town and our families. If I’ve got something wrong, tell me and I’ll fix it. If I’ve got something right, send your submission before 24 May.

Kiama Council wants submissions on a dead budget

A timeline of the farce. More time for the process, less time for the public.

The federal budget had a good run on the front page. Then Kiama Council kept asking the community to make submissions on a draft budget the CEO had already confirmed was obsolete, and stole the show. You can’t write this stuff. Except they did. In two media releases on the same day. Then again on social media. And again. And again.

This is my understanding of the timeline from the public record. Happy to be corrected.

  • 7 May  Mayor McDonald and CEO Stroud annouce they met Minister Hoenig at Parliament House. Mayor says he is “confident of a positive outcome” on the PIO.
  • 13 May  Council posts on social media that “budgets are officially having a moment” and asks the community to submit on the draft budget by 24 May
  • 14 May  Council publishes first media release of the day. It announces an Extraordinary Meeting on 30 June and mentions a “potential” ministerial extension to the PIO. The reason given for the delay: staff need more time to read community submissions.
  • 14 May, 3:25 PM  Member for Kiama Katelin McInerney issues a statement welcoming the extension and acknowledging the United Services Union, staff and community members who advocated against the proposed budget cuts.
  • 14 May Council publishes its second media release of the day, welcoming the PIO  extension. The CEO confirms the services proposed for cutting in the draft budget will now be retained. This is very interesting and I will give it some more thought. Council CEOs do not, as a rule, publicly thank the union that has been campaigning against their own draft budget. That is not standard practice
  • 14 May, 4:26 PM The Minister’s office issues a media release proposing the extension.
  • 24 May Submissions still close. On a budget the CEO has confirmed needs to change.
  • 30 June  Extraordinary Meeting. Staff get the extra time. The community does not.

Read that again.

The CEO has given herself and council staff extra time to read submissions. She has not given the community extra time to write them on a budget that now reflects the actual situation.

The draft budget on exhibition was built around a deadline that moved on 14 May. The services it proposed cutting are no longer being cut. Council is still asking you to submit on it before 24 May.

The submission period should be extended. Full stop.

This is all your submission needs to say. Copy it. Send it.

Given the Minister for Local Government proposed a variation to the Performance Improvement Order on 14 May 2026 extending the budget deadline by twelve months, I ask Council to pause the exhibition period, revise the draft budget to reflect the new timeline, and give the community adequate time to respond.

Add your name and address. Send it to yoursay.kiama.nsw.gov.au and council@kiama.nsw.gov.au and councillors@kiama.nsw.gov.au

before 24 May.

Want to say more? Step by step submission guide here

Media releases referenced: Minister for Local Government Ron Hoenig, 14 May 2026, 4:26 PM. Kiama Municipal Council, “Kiama Council to hold Extraordinary Meeting for Budget,” 14 May 2026. Kiama Municipal Council, “Kiama Council welcomes Performance Improvement Order extension,” 14 May 2026.

A note from me. I am a community member, not a council spokesperson and not a journalist on a deadline. I am doing my very best to make sense of this bombardment of information and what it means for our town and our families. If I have got something wrong, tell me and I will fix it. If I have got something right, send your submission before 24 May.

Ron Hoenig just put Kiama Council on notice

The Hon. Ron Hoenig MP, Minister for Local Government has given Kiama Council more time to fix its budget. That means there is no longer any reason to rush decisions about the holiday parks, Blue Haven Terralong, or waste collection. The community has until 24 May to make a submission, and this post explains what to ask for and why it matters.

Today the Minister for Local Government Ron Hoenig sent out a media release proposing changes to Kiama Council’s Performance Improvement Order. His office made sure it reached the community directly.

Here is what it says and why every person in Kiama should read it carefully.

First, the good news

The minister is giving council an extra twelve months to balance the budget. The new deadline is 2027-28 instead of 2026-27.

That sounds dry. Here is what it actually means.

The reason council was moving so fast on the Reflections holiday parks deal, from a Friday proposal to a secret Tuesday night vote, was budget pressure. Get a deal done, fix the deficit, move on.

That pressure has just been reduced by twelve months.

And the extended deadline means council will not have to cut libraries, youth services, the Leisure Centre, the Visitor Information Centre or the Pilot’s Cottage Museum. That matters to a lot of Kiama families and it is genuinely good news worth acknowledging.

So the community can now reasonably ask why council would keep rushing a decision about its most valuable community assets when the minister has just said there is time to do this properly.

Blue Haven Terralong

The minister is requiring council to get an independent business case done for Blue Haven Terralong. Not a council business case. An independent one.

Why is this distinction important? Because Blue Haven Terralong needs $51.2 million in maintenance and capital works over the next ten years just to get from a poor condition rating to an average one. There are fire safety compliance issues. The people who live there are some of Kiama’s most vulnerable residents. It is their home.

Council already sold Blue Haven Bonaira, its aged care home, to a Perth based operator last year. The community needs to watch carefully what the independent business case recommends for Terralong and whether residents get a genuine say before anything changes.

It is also worth knowing that the draft Operational Plan currently on public exhibition opens its Retirement Village Operations section with the phrase “pending market sounding.” That language sits in a document about a service for vulnerable residents, and it is a fair question to ask what market sounding has been done, with whom, and on what terms.

An independent report recommending a sale or transfer to a private operator is not the same as the community agreeing that is the right outcome. One is a document. The other is a decision. Do not let anyone confuse them.

The waste services question and why this stands out

This is the part of the media release that deserves the most attention and has received the least.

The minister is explicitly requiring council to keep domestic waste services in house.

In November last year council’s CEO issued a public statement saying council was not outsourcing domestic waste services and that anyone suggesting otherwise was wrong.

Then the minister put the prohibition in writing as a formal condition.

Those two things do not sit comfortably together. And here is what makes the gap harder to explain away.

Council’s own draft Operational Plan for 2026-27, the document currently on public exhibition and inviting your submissions, contains the following deliverables:

2.3.2.4.1 – Undertake planning work and design for merged depot at Minnamurra

2.3.2.4.2 – Prepare for regional/testing market for waste collection services. Undertake testing and document results

4.1.3.2.1 – Specifications for waste collection trucks reviewed and ready for tender, including improved telematics and data capture technology

Testing the market is the language councils use when they are sounding out external providers. It is the step that comes before a tender. Reviewing truck specifications ready for tender is the step after that.

These are not hypothetical. They are scheduled deliverables in a draft plan dated 30 April 2026, published by council, sitting on the council website right now.

The minister’s prohibition is not addressing something theoretical. It is addressing something council had written down.

The community deserves a straight answer about how the CEO’s November statement and the deliverables in the draft Operational Plan are meant to be reconciled. One of them needs to be revised. The community is entitled to know which one.

The holiday parks. What the media releases have not told you.

The minister’s proposed variation includes one line about the parks. It says the extra time will allow council to investigate opportunities for the long term management of its tourist parks which could improve its budget position over time.

Notice the words. Investigate. Over time. Not rush. Not this year. Not before 24 May.

It is also worth noting that the draft Operational Plan contains a deliverable under holiday parks for “new management contracts developed for upcoming year and Management Model review as per the Service Review to be progressed.” That is council scheduling new management contracts for the parks within the financial year covered by this plan. The minister has just said investigate over time. Those two timelines do not match.

Here is the context most people in Kiama do not have.

Four of the five holiday parks are on Crown land. Under the Crown Lands Management Act 2016 the state government can remove council as manager of those parks for no reason and pay council nothing in compensation. That is not a worst case scenario. That is what the law actually says.

This means the Reflections proposal is not a straightforward commercial negotiation between two equal parties. It is a council that knows it could lose the parks anyway sitting across the table from a government owned corporation. That changes everything about how you assess the deal.

Here is the part that should make every ratepayer sit up.

If the four Crown land parks go to Reflections, the revenue from those parks goes to Crown Lands, not to Kiama Council. The only financial benefit to council is that it no longer has to pay to run them. That is a cost saving, not a revenue generator. It is a very different thing from what the mayor has been saying about eliminating the deficit and generating revenue.

Council’s own published financial statements show exactly how much the parks earn each year. Those figures are in the Special Purpose Statements. The community should be asking council to explain, using those actual numbers, how handing the parks to a government owned corporation improves the budget when council stops receiving the income.

And then there is Kendalls Beach.

Kendalls Beach is the only park not on Crown land. Council owns it outright. It is the only park where council keeps all the money regardless of what happens. The community deserves to know what is being proposed specifically for Kendalls. Because if Kendalls is being bundled into a deal with the Crown land parks, council is giving away the one asset in the group it actually has full commercial control over.

The Snowy Valleys precedent. Read this carefully.

There is a precedent worth knowing about and every Kiama ratepayer should read it carefully.

Snowy Valleys Council ran a similar EOI process for its caravan parks. Reflections put in an offer. The council’s own assessment panel looked at all the offers on the table and found Reflections’ offer was below market rate compared with what other operators had submitted. The panel recommended council reject it. Council followed its panel’s advice and said no.

Then the Minister removed Snowy Valleys Council as Crown Land Manager of the parks. Not because council had done anything wrong. Because the Minister can. The law says so. Reflections was appointed in council’s place.

The council said no. The minister overrode them anyway.

That is the legal reality sitting behind every conversation Kiama Council is having with Reflections right now. A voluntary deal that is the alternative to an involuntary one is not genuinely voluntary.

The bigger picture

The PIO extension gives council time and it gives the minister political cover. If council rushes the holiday parks deal anyway that is council’s call to make and council’s consequences to wear. The minister has put the careful path on the record.

The community’s job is to make sure council takes it.

Update: Council has now responded

Council welcomed the minister’s proposed variation today and the mayor confirmed he met Minister Hoenig directly at Parliament House last week before this announcement was made.

But the CEO’s response raises a question that needs a plain language answer before 24 May.

She says the holiday parks deal is the mechanism for clearing the deficit. Her words: our ability to clear the projected deficit is certain, provided we can get through the tender process with a successful outcome.

If that is true, the community deserves to understand exactly how the deal clears the deficit when revenue from the four Crown land parks would flow to Crown Lands rather than to Kiama Council under the Crown Lands Management Act.

The numbers are in the published financial statements. The community is entitled to a straight answer before the submission window closes on 24 May.

The CEO also thanked the United Services Union for lobbying the minister directly to include the requirement that waste services stay in house. The union that represents waste workers felt it necessary to go to the minister themselves to get that protection in writing. If outsourcing was genuinely never being considered, why did the union need to do that?

And one more thing. Premier Chris Minns and his ministers are coming to Kiama next Tuesday for a Community Cabinet at The Pavilion. That is a direct opportunity for the community to ask the questions that have not yet been answered about the holiday parks, Blue Haven Terralong and waste services.

Be there. Bring your questions.

What the community should be asking right now

Before any decision is made on the holiday parks, council should answer these questions publicly.

Using the actual figures from the published financial statements, how does handing the Crown land parks to Reflections improve the budget when the revenue stops coming to council?

What is being offered specifically for Kendalls Beach and why?

Were there any discussions between Reflections, Crown Lands or the NSW Government and council before the unsolicited proposal arrived on 17 April? The mayor has confirmed he met the minister at Parliament House last week. Were the holiday parks part of that conversation?

Will there be a dedicated community engagement process on the Crown land parks before any lease is signed, separate from the current budget submission window which closes 24 May?

How are the waste collection market testing and tender preparation deliverables in the draft Operational Plan to be reconciled with the CEO’s November statement that domestic waste outsourcing was not being considered?

What does the independent business case process for Blue Haven Terralong look like, what does pending market sounding in the draft Operational Plan refer to, and how will residents and the broader community have a genuine say before any decision about its future is made?

The bottom line

The minister has done several things today that are genuinely in this community’s interest. He has required an independent assessment of Blue Haven Terralong. He has explicitly stopped council from outsourcing waste services. He has slowed down the holiday parks process and named it as something to investigate properly rather than urgently.

He has also, without quite saying so, raised a serious question about the gap between what community members were told about waste services in November and what is written down in council’s own draft Operational Plan today.

The community now has more time and more information than it did yesterday. The question is whether council will use both honestly.

The information exists. The honest conversation about what it means has not happened yet.

A step by step guide to making a submission on the current budget and Delivery Program before 24 May is here 

Want to go deeper?

Kiama Council released its next meeting agenda today. All 1000 pages of it. A community member has analysed the key sections relevant to the holiday parks, the budget and Blue Haven Terralong. Read their analysis here

And if you want the devil in the detail:

Crown Lands Management Act 2016: https://legislation.nsw.gov.au/view/html/inforce/current/act-2016-058

Kiama Council Annual Financial Statements (Special Purpose Statements are in Part 2): https://www.kiama.nsw.gov.au/Council/Community-Reports/Annual-Reports-and-Financial-Statements

NSW Office of Local Government Performance Improvement Orders: https://www.olg.nsw.gov.au/councils/performance-improvement-orders/