Decision details

Moved by Deputy Lord Mayor Councillor Miller, seconded by Councillor Worling –

It is resolved that:

(A)      Council note:

(i)         while the Australian National Adaptation Plan (2025) invites local governments to develop climate adaptation plans, it creates an "unfunded mandate" by failing to provide the necessary capital to execute them;

(ii)        across Australia, local councils are facing a crisis where communities are becoming "uninsurable," shifting the ultimate financial safety net onto municipal budgets;

(iii)      this motion seeks a federally-administered solution that shifts the fiscal burden from ratepayers to the industries primarily responsible for climate-related damage;

(iv)      local councils own and manage billions of dollars in infrastructure currently threatened by climate-impacted events, including floods, water damage, and bushfires;

(v)       existing constraints on local government revenue-raising mean councils cannot address these increasing costs without significantly compromising other essential local services; and

(vi)      a Parliamentary Inquiry with regional hearings is essential to capture the lived experience of climate-impacted communities and the specific insights of local government leadership; and

(B)      Council endorse the following motion for submission to the 2026 Australian Local Government Association (ALGA) National General Assembly:

That ALGA calls on the Federal Government or Parliament to:

1.       acknowledge that the increasing costs of climate change—including disaster recovery from storms, floods, and bushfires, and community resilience building for heatwaves and sea-level rise—place an unsustainable financial burden on local government.

2.       recognise the inequity where local governments and communities bear these costs despite not being responsible for the 75% of climate pollution generated by major coal, oil, and gas corporations.

3.       establish a Parliamentary Inquiry into the adequacy of the 2025 National Adaptation Plan, specifically addressing the lack of additional funding for local governments to deliver mandated adaptation responses.

4.       ensure this Inquiry identifies concrete revenue sources to meet investment needs, including the implementation of taxes or levies on the coal, oil, and gas industries aligned with the climate damage their products cause.

5.       establish a National Climate Compensation Fund with a dedicated funding stream for local governments, commensurate with the scale of the financial risks identified in the 2025 National Climate Risk Assessment.

Carried unanimously.

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