Daily News Round Up – 21 May 2026

Very local, state, national and the wider world, in everyday language, for people who haven’t got all day.

Forget the media releases and the big-picture pitches. It’s what ordinary residents stood up and asked the Premier that tells you what’s really worrying this town. Overdevelopment, a highway land grab, and petrol prices that reach all the way down to Kiama.

Not much happening today. Just the way we like it. Betty’s on the crossword, Kevin’s resting his eyes, and the world can wait till after the toast. (Image by AI. Betty awarded it a gold star for the kookaburra and a firm “see me” for the spelling.)

Why I’m doing this

Like a lot of you, I don’t have hours to sit and trawl through the news. Between work, family and everything else that lands on the to-do list, keeping across what’s actually going on falls to the bottom of the pile. So I’ve started doing the digging for you.

I’ll post these whenever I get the time – no set schedule, no promises. When life gives me a window, I’ll do the rounds and put one up. But the idea stays the same every time: a quick, no-jargon round-up of the stuff that actually touches your week, pulled from the papers worth reading so you don’t have to.

Grab a cuppa. This won’t take five minutes.

Very Local: what our community actually asked the Premier

The big one this fortnight was the NSW Community Cabinet at The Pavilion on May 19. More than 300 of us turned up to put questions straight to Premier Chris Minns and most of his cabinet. You’ll have read the Council’s media release about the projects it pitched (Spring Creek, the Bombo Waste Treatment Plant, the Kiama Sports Complex). That’s all worthwhile, but it’s the big-picture stuff. Here’s what ordinary residents got up and asked, because that’s the part that tells you what’s really worrying people around here.

Overdevelopment and our town’s character. This was the question that opened the night and drew applause. Locals asked why Kiama, a heritage town, is being pushed to take so much high-density development when there’s approved land elsewhere. One resident put it bluntly: South Kiama Drive already has around 400 approved lots and Jamberoo around 1,000, so why are luxury apartments worth millions being proposed in the middle of town where ordinary families can’t afford them, while we lose car parks and town space? Minns said he respected the concern about “character,” talked up a meeting with the Mayor about opening up new housing to the north of town, and pitched what he called “density done well.” Make of that what you will.

The Princes Highway land grab. A resident said the government is acquiring far more land than needed for the highway upgrade – in their case about 2,000 square metres – leaving a service road just 10 metres from their son’s bedroom instead of over 100 metres away. They also slammed being given only 14 days to wade through a 1,000-page environmental document. The Premier admitted it was “deeply regrettable” but said you can’t build infrastructure without sometimes taking private land.

Parkinson’s nurses. Lesley Errington from Parkinson Support Kiama pushed for funding for Parkinson’s specialist nurses in country regions, arguing they save the public hospital system money. Health Minister Ryan Park wouldn’t pre-empt the budget but said they’re “looking at that very, very closely.”

The South Coast rail line. A union rep asked when we’ll get a firm commitment to upgrade and electrify the line. Minns acknowledged a decade of underinvestment in heavy rail while Sydney got new metros, pointed to an emergency repair package, and said any commitment needs a fairer share of federal infrastructure money.

EV charging. A local who started a transport business using an electric vehicle said there are no fast chargers in the Kiama area at all, forcing him to leave the LGA to recharge. Minns pointed to statewide funding and, tellingly, linked the push to “dramatic rises in petrol and diesel prices as a result of the Middle East.” (Hold that thought for the international section.)

Other questions covered youth crime prevention, Indigenous housing funding, food waste, and staffing and plastic waste at the new Shellharbour Hospital.

Read more: Was the Kiama boycott brave, or an own goal? See bottom of post

Across NSW (State)

The cost of living is still the headache that won’t quit. Sydney remains the dearest city in the country, with house prices tipped to push past $1.88 million this year. There’s one small mercy for renters, though. After years of relentless rises, things have finally steadied, with Sydney house rents holding around $780 a week, the longest calm spell in nearly a decade. Groceries, mind you, are still pinching everyone.

Housing supply is the theme tying the state together, and as the Community Cabinet showed, it’s landing hard right here on the South Coast.

Across the Country (Federal)

Treasurer Jim Chalmers handed down a big-swing Federal Budget on May 12. The bits that matter for ordinary households:

Fuel relief. A $14.8 billion package to shore up fuel supplies and ease petrol prices, a direct response to trouble overseas (more on that in a tick).

Housing tax shake-up. The government wants to limit negative gearing to new builds from July 2027 and change capital gains tax, aiming to give first-home buyers a fairer shot. The Opposition is dead against it.

The tightrope. The Reserve Bank is so worried about inflation that Governor Michele Bullock has signalled she’d rather risk a recession than let it run loose. So Chalmers is walking a fine line between giving people relief and making prices worse.

Around the World (International)

The big one is a US and Israel war with Iran, which has been running for weeks now, and it’s a big reason your petrol’s gone up. This week Trump warned of fresh attacks within “two or three days” if there’s no deal, while Iran says it’ll widen the war if it’s hit again. Much of the fighting centres on the Strait of Hormuz, a key oil shipping lane, which is squeezing fuel prices the world over. That’s the same petrol pain our EV bloke raised at the Community Cabinet, so it really does reach all the way down to Kiama.

In Gaza, a fragile ceasefire is wobbling, and there’s been global outrage after several countries, including Italy, France, Canada and the Netherlands, summoned Israeli ambassadors over the treatment of captured aid-flotilla activists.

The bottom line: trouble in the Middle East pushes up oil, oil pushes up petrol and prices here, and that’s why so much of the Budget was built around it. It’s all connected, even from the South Coast.

Read more: Was the Kiama boycott brave, or an own goal?

When Premier Chris Minns brought his Community Cabinet to Kiama on May 19, one chair sat conspicuously empty. Cr Mike Cains stayed away “out of principle,” arguing the meeting was “theatre rather than listening” and branding the state’s housing target and the council’s Performance Improvement Order “ultimatums.”

Give him this much. When you believe the deck is stacked, fronting up and smiling for the cameras can feel like lending cover to a done deal. A boycott makes noise. It gets a headline.

But noise isn’t leverage, and leverage was exactly what was on offer. A Community Cabinet is one of the rare days the Premier and half his ministry are physically in town and obliged to sit and listen, with more than 300 residents getting straight answers and commitments on the record. If your gripe is that the government won’t listen, the empty chair hands them the perfect reply. We were here; you weren’t. You can’t be ignored from a meeting you chose to skip.

The Mayor and the other councillors turned up and put Kiama’s case to the Premier directly. That’s the harder, less glamorous job. Get your concerns on the record, and make the government say no to your face. It rarely trends, but it’s how small councils claw back ground against the state, where the leverage is lopsided at the best of times.

So on the day Kiama most needed every voice at the table, one of its loudest stayed home. Principled? Maybe. But from where we’re sitting, it looks a lot more like a free kick handed to the other side.

Cr Cains is welcome to respond. The comments are open, and we’ll happily run his reply.

Over to you, Kiama: brave stand, or own goal? Have your say below.

A note on Betty and Kevin: Betty grew up in Kiama before life took her to Blacktown. Her brother Kevin still lives in their old home town. Keeping up with what’s happening down the coast is partly nostalgia for the place she came from, but mostly it’s how she and Kevin fill those long phone calls she looks forward to all week. That’s what this Catch Up is really for. Not just the news, but the conversations it keeps alive.

Sources: The Pulse Illawarra, Illawarra Mercury, South Coast Register, Sydney Morning Herald, Al Jazeera, The Conversation, and others.

Albo the Silent Partner – a budget explainer for Betty from Blacktown

Somewhere in Blacktown, Betty is reading the budget papers. Her accountant isn’t answering. Her family’s at work. The Treasurer is on the telly saying “distortions. This post is for her.

G’day Betty.

You rang your accountant. He didn’t ring back. Your daughter’s working two jobs and your son-in-law’s on night shift, so the family WhatsApp is all emojis and no answers. Meanwhile every news bulletin has someone in a suit yelling about “indexation” and “distortions” and you’re left wondering whether the bloke on the telly just took something off you or gave you something, and whether you should be cross about it.

Let me have a crack. No jargon. Promise.

What actually changed on budget night

A week ago, on 12 May, Jim Chalmers handed down the budget. Three things matter for normal people:

One. From July 2027, when someone sells an investment, a rental, some shares, a business, the tax rules change. The old deal was simple: hold it more than a year, only pay tax on half the gain. The new deal: you only pay tax on the bit that beats inflation (the “real” gain), but with a minimum tax rate of 30% on whatever’s left.

Two. Negative gearing, where landlords offset rental losses against their wage, gets limited to new builds only, also from July 2027. If you’ve already got an investment property, nothing changes for you. You’re grandfathered in.

Three. Family trusts get a minimum 30% tax from July 2028. This is the bit that’s upsetting small business owners, because a lot of them run their butcher shop or tradie business through a trust.

What it means for you, Betty

Here’s the thing the government has been hopeless at saying out loud: if you’re a pensioner, the minimum 30% tax on capital gains doesn’t apply to you. Pensioners are exempt. That’s in the budget papers. Nobody’s said it on the 6 o’clock news because it doesn’t fit either side’s story.

If you own your home, your home is not touched. The main residence exemption is untouched. Sell the house, no tax. Same as it ever was.

If you’ve got a bit of super, your super is not touched. The CGT discount inside super funds stays.

If you’ve got a rental you bought years ago, nothing changes for you unless and until you sell, and even then the old rules apply to the gains you’ve already made.

So far, so boring. So why is everyone yelling?

Why everyone’s yelling

Because of the bit that isn’t about Betty. It’s about Betty’s nephew Luke who runs a life-coaching business, or your neighbour’s daughter who started a little software company in her garage. When they eventually sell, the government takes a minimum 30% slice. Small business owners have started making AI memes of Anthony Albanese photoshopped into their shop windows as the “silent partner” the bloke who didn’t do any of the work but turns up on settlement day with his hand out.

That’s the meme. And memes win arguments these days, Betty, whether we like it or not.

Now , the government will tell you there are small business CGT concessions that still let eligible owners halve or even wipe their CGT bill on sale. That’s true. They are real and they are generous. But Jim Chalmers spent a week not saying it loud enough, and Anthony Albanese spent a week saying “we’re returning to the pre-1999 system” as if anyone under 50 remembers what the pre-1999 system felt like.

The bit that should actually worry you

It’s not the policy. It’s the competence.

A week after budget night, Labor’s own backbenchers are telling journalists they can’t explain it. The Prime Minister himself admitted yesterday that the trust changes “will take longer to develop”, which is political code for we announced it before we’d finished designing it. He’s said he’ll bring the CGT legislation to Parliament “in a fortnight.” Everything’s in a fortnight. Nothing’s actually happened yet.

If your accountant won’t ring you back and the Treasurer can’t explain the policy on Insiders, that’s not your fault, Betty. That’s theirs.

What to actually do

  1. Don’t panic-sell anything. The changes don’t start until July 2027. You’ve got over a year. Existing assets are mostly grandfathered.
  2. If you’re a pensioner, breathe out. The minimum tax doesn’t apply to you.
  3. Keep ringing the accountant. When he finally picks up, ask him two questions: does anything I own get caught by the new rules, and if so, when do I need to decide anything? That’s it. Don’t let him bill you for an hour of jargon.
  4. Watch the trust stuff. It’s the bit most likely to change between now and when it’s legislated. If anyone tells you what the final rules are before about September, they’re guessing.

The bottom line

The budget isn’t the disaster the memes suggest, and it isn’t the masterstroke the press releases suggest. For most pensioners and most homeowners, very little changes. For people who own businesses they plan to sell, or who use family trusts, there’s real stuff to work through and the government hasn’t finished working it through itself.

Anthony Albanese has earned his new nickname. He is the silent partner, silent on the bits that would reassure you, silent on the bits that would honestly admit what’s still being figured out. Until he starts talking like a human being instead of a Treasury press release, Betty from Blacktown is going to keep being confused. And so will the rest of the country.

Hang in there. Ring the accountant on Monday. And if he still won’t pick up, ring me.

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.