Editorial: Switching Funding Game

ON Friday the government announced $7.7million for the Muswellbrook and Singleton Shires for 10 projects and described it as “major”.

See story: Where’s Out Slice.

Maths is definitely NOT my forte, but the bucket of money it came from was mining royalties which is more than $1.5 billion a year, so the “major” funding announced represents 0.0051 percent of that amount…so I think the description of “major” is more of an linguistic issue, because that can’t seriously be described as “major”, perhaps “statistically insignificant” is a better description.

But what the announcement also spells is less real funding for the Upper Hunter.

The money that was used was “Resources for Regions”which was designed to redirect mining royalties back to the communities impacted by mining and to be the icing on the cake.

The problem is, on Friday the funding was announced for upgrading roads, hardly something which should be considered over and above.

So the fact that this bucket of money is now going towards basic upkeep of current infrastructure is concerning.

Regional Councils are meant to take care of the roads, but with the way road funding is calculated they have more to do with less every budget, while urban Councils have to try and spend their portion before the next budget.

The bottom line is the general budget given to regional Council’s by the state needs to increase so that they can take care of basic services and the Resources for Regions needs to be used for what it was meant to do…projects over and above.

The town revitalisations in the Upper Hunter and the overpass in Scone are projects screaming out for this type of funding and are directly the result of mining.

It’s hard to be thankful for “major” funding announcements, when it is simply propping up a failing system in regional Councils and the spirit of the Resources for Regions has been reduced to propping up basic services and with relatively minuscule amounts of state money being spent.

Perhaps a major funding announcement would be more in line with a US style farm bill to support our farmers right now.