Voters in Sydney’s Northern Beaches, where the council just voted to hike rates by close to 40%, should expect Liberals to target their local federal teal MPs with cost of living attack lines.
Crikey understands the Liberal Party, which lost the Northern Beaches seats of Mackellar and Warringah to independent challengers in recent years, plan to use the rate hike as an argument not to vote for the teals in the upcoming federal election.
The proposed argument would go roughly like this: because the councillors who voted in support of the hike are essentially a “teal” grouping due to the support they’ve received from political funding outfit Climate 200 and federal MPs Zali Steggall and Sophie Scamps, those MPs should bear some responsibility for the rate rise.
“The suggestion is utterly ridiculous,” Steggall told Crikey. “Unlike the Liberals, I’ve consistently voted for cost of living relief — including supporting housing affordability, cheaper medicines, reducing HECS and lowering energy bills — while advocating for higher social benefits and rental assistance.”
Blaming the federal teals for the council’s decision may be risky, given it could also remind voters of the reason Liberals were absent on the council vote regarding the hike: the party’s NSW division missed a deadline to hand in nomination forms last year, a blunder labelled by insiders as an “absolute disaster”.
The Liberals who might have been councillors were it not for the nomination fiasco have not been late in pointing out what could have been.
“I understand that head office at the Liberal Party made a huge mistake, a huge blunder by not nominating its candidates. Unforgivable. But at the end of the day, just because it’s the law, it’s not a democracy … almost 50% of the primary vote across the Northern Beaches … is Liberal, and [Liberal voters] don’t have any representation whatsoever,” former Liberal councillor Karina Page told The Sydney Morning Herald last week.
Meanwhile, in nearby North Sydney — another area where independents and Liberals will be battling for a federal seat — the local council recently flagged a possible 87% rate hike over two years to keep its finances afloat.
In a statement after the council vote, Steggall urged local governments to only propose rate increases in a “manageable way so that residents are not unfairly burdened”. She also pointed to a state parliamentary report that had found councils were finding it “increasingly difficult to fund critical infrastructure and essential services for the community”.
Scamps criticised the rate rise in a statement last week, saying: “With families and households across the beaches already struggling with high energy bills, housing costs, and everyday expenses, another big cost increase during a cost-of-living crisis is unacceptable.”
Scamps’ Liberal challenger James Brown has already begun putting the strategy into action, telling The Sydney Morning Herald: “I’ve just knocked on the doors of 50 houses in Narrabeen, and five of the people I spoke to voted teal last time and won’t be voting teal this time, and they mentioned the council rate rise as one of the reasons for that.”
Monash University political scientist Zareh Ghazarian said he expected cost of living arguments to form a major part of the upcoming federal election campaign.
“The major parties are going to go with what works for them, and cost of living is obviously a big one — the teals will be campaigning on being different to the major parties, and so this will be a test for them,” he said.
The Northern Beaches Council said in a post on its website that rates had not kept up with increasing external costs and that the gap had been “increasing every year”.
“The impacts of rising inflation on construction and materials and day-to-day council operations, loss of income from the pandemic and the massive cost shifting from other tiers of government are threatening our long-term financial sustainability,” the statement said.
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