Today in Parliament, Abigail defended the democratic rights of Central Coast residents against a Labor bill that undermines local water governance.

Abigail said:

On behalf of The Greens, as our spokesperson for the Central Coast and a proud Central Coast resident, I oppose the Water Management Amendment (Central Coast Council) Bill 2024 without amendment. There has been a disconnect between what the Minister said in her speech today and the history of the councils on the Central Coast. There have been some comments today about the fact that the Central Coast has one council covering 345,000 people, and we do. If we rewind to 12 May 2016, that was one of the reasons that the community was so opposed to amalgamation at the time when we had Gosford and Wyong councils. There was no compelling financial case for that amalgamation. The community did not want it, but the then Liberal-Nationals Government pushed it through.

Our democratically elected councillors ended up just being booted out one day. The amalgamation process was really quite rough. The councillors were just told, "That's it. Out you go; grab your things. The Government has decided to amalgamate this council." As a part of the campaign that we were leading against amalgamation at the time, I remember trying to explain to people that we are talking about a local government area that is not that dissimilar in size to Tasmania. It is a really large area. I cannot remember the exact number of minutes, but I estimated that it would take well over an hour and a half to drive from one end of the Central Coast to the other. That is how big it is. Prior to the amalgamation, there were no financial issues—well, it was not completely without issue; there were some pretty rogue players on one of the councils. But we did not have serious financial woes at that time.

We were forced into the amalgamation and then we had the election of new councillors. Before the amalgamation, we had a neat little system where the Central Coast water authority was shared. The authority was jointly managed by representatives from both Gosford and Wyong councils. That was seen as creating checks and balances because two separate councils both oversaw that important water authority, and it was working very well. But we ended up with a majority-progressive amalgamated council. In fact, the mayor of the council had previously been a Greens member—although not at the time that she was mayor—and was very environmentally progressive. The local Liberal Party on the Central Coast, along with some other conservative groups, launched an absolutely disgraceful campaign to try to bring the council down. In the midst of all of that, the council was put into administration. That is a really important part of the puzzle.

The Minister referred earlier to the history that the council has had. That may well be the case with the newly amalgamated Central Coast Council that the then Liberal-Nationals Government put in place, but it was certainly not the case for the councillors. The democratically elected councillors have never been found to have done anything outside of their responsibilities and duties. They were rudely booted out in favour of an administrator being appointed in what was an incredibly volatile local environment between the Coalition and the progressive, environmentally leaning Labor councillors.

At the time, it was not really explained to the community why that had happened. It has now been four years of the administrator making all sort of decisions that really impact on the local people of the coast, who are unable to have any form of local democracy. It has been incredibly frustrating. General council elections have come and gone, and yet we were not allowed the chance to have an election for our councillors, for no good reason. We will finally have that chance in September, and we are very excited about it. But with this bill, the Government is once again telling the people of the Central Coast what they want. I would love to know which actual people the Government consulted with on the Central Coast because, without a democratically elected council, it is pretty hard to understand how it drew the conclusion that this was the best model, going forward, for Central Coast water assets.

It feels like the Labor Government does not trust the Central Coast to elect people who will make the right decisions about those sorts of things, and that is a very sad day for our local democracy. The water episode and IPART making some decisions that took the council by surprise played a small part in the financial woes of the council. I appreciate that but, again, I do not think it would have happened if we had not amalgamated. The Minister spoke a number of times about how the Government is implementing the key recommendations from the 2022 McCulloch report. The Minister should note that there was no key recommendation from that inquiry to treat Central Coast like other councils but with IPART oversight. That is not part of the recommendations from the 2022 inquiry at all. Both of the alternatives that the Minister floated had IPART involvement. What we end up with is a recommendation from the McCulloch report that said, "Let's not have Central Coast Council have its own water authority anymore, because it's confusing; it sits under two Acts," et cetera. If the council is not going to have its own water authority anymore, then it should be treated like any other council. Other councils are not subject to IPART oversight. They get to set rates themselves. I do not understand why we are infantilising the Central Coast Council by saying that the Government needs to step in now, ahead of elections, to change everything around without consultation with the public because the local councillors cannot be trusted to make these decisions for themselves.

Initially, I thought a mistake had been made in the bill, so I put up an amendment. But we have had discussions, and it is clear that the intention is to do something quite different to what was recommended: to exert a level of control over the Central Coast Council that no other council is subject to, because apparently our council cannot be trusted. The current IPART ruling operates until the end of 2026. By that stage, the Central Coast will have democratically elected councillors who can then work out if they need IPART after that. My amendment proposes that the status quo be maintained until 2026—that all of the other proposed changes be implemented, but the new councillors then be allowed to make decisions. They will be the elected representatives when it comes to these issues—not the Minister, and not the Labor Government. Quite frankly, the people of the Central Coast are really sick of being told what they can and cannot do with their council.

Consider the history and what it feels like to be a person on the Central Coast who has had their council ripped away from them not once but twice in under 10 years. In that context, this heavy‑handed approach to telling the Central Coast Council what it can and cannot do with its water really hurts. It stings. I ask the Minister, again, to reconsider the approach that has been taken in this bill. If we omit the IPART oversight, it is a good bill. But I cannot, in good conscience, support a bill that degrades the Central Coast in the way this bill does.

Abigail went on to move the following amendment:

 I move The Greens amendment No. 1 on sheet c2024-122B:

No. 1Role of IPART

Page 6, Schedule 3[2], lines 5–7. Omit all words on the lines.

I flagged the amendment in my contribution to the second reading debate, and the Minister for Water discussed it in her reply as well. To clarify, Sydney Water and Hunter Water are both statutory, State owned corporations. The Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal [IPART] needs to set the prices for those bodies because they are accountable to the New South Wales Parliament. In every other case across New South Wales where a council is instead responsible for its water services and water rates, IPART is not involved because the council has democratically elected councillors. Those councillors are accountable to the people who elected them to make those decisions.

If the public do not like the rates—maybe one council has higher water rates but lower rubbish rates, or whatever it happens to be—it is up to the people who elected those councillors to decide whether or not they think that was a good idea. They have a direct line to the councillors regarding those pricing decisions. We have simply pointed out the fact that Central Coast Council will be different from every other council because it no longer has its own authority where IPART was setting rates. It will now be dealt with like every other council, except that it will still be subject to IPART. That is the problem.

We said that we obviously would not want the IPART pricing to drop off straight away under this legislation, so we would allow that IPART pricing to continue until 2026, as it is already set to do. At the end of that period, the democratically elected council would decide what to do next. One could even go back and consult with the council—having then had someone to consult with—about what the public and councillors would prefer to happen. On that consultation point, the Minister commented that the community was consulted as part of that review process. However, that review concluded that IPART should not have a continued role in a system where Central Coast Council no longer has its own authority yet is treated like every other council.

The model that has been proposed was not recommended as part of that review process, so there has not been consultation with the broader public—and certainly not with any councillors, because we do not have any—in relation to the role of IPART. That is the point. That is the problem. Why are we dealing with Central Coast Council in such a different way to every other council? It feels very unfair and belittling. Please let the people of the Central Coast have the democratic ability to make their own decisions. I commend the amendment to the House.

Labor and the Coalition spoke against the amendment and the House voted in the negative, to which Abigail responded:

I thank everyone who has contributed, particularly my colleague Dr Amanda Cohn. She has spent a long time, both as deputy mayor of Albury and as our local government spokesperson, in regular contact with around 70 councillors from a huge number of councils across this State, pretty much all of whom oppose the bill on the basis that it does not make sense. The Minister is saying, "This is just a little backstop for the people of the Central Coast", at the same time as saying that the Central Coast is not being picked on or treated any differently to anyone else. I back the point of my colleague in asking, if it is about providing this extra protection, when will we override the local democracy of every other council in New South Wales? What I am hearing is that, just like the Liberals, the State Government is quite happy to override another level of democracy. It is about time we wrote councils into our constitution so that we do not let State governments constantly override them. This is an attack on local democracy. It is really shameful and belittling. I understand that the amendment is not going to pass, but a claim that it is anything other than an illogical picking on the Central Coast is just not correct.

Read the full debate in Hansard here.