CCRC do not break out grazing as a separate rating category, of note CCRC is the only QLD East Coast “high rates” Local Government Area (LGA) that does not break out grazing. The 6 QLD East Coast LGA’s who do break out grazing as a separate rating category charge Graziers an average of 43% of their “base” primary producers’ rates.

One significant issue in not breaking out Grazing is, there is no mechanism for Council to reduce “rates in the dollar” specifically for Graziers to keep rate increases reasonable at times when the QLD Valuer General office applies greater Grazing land valuation increases compared to the CCRC majority land user being Sugar Cane.

Graziers are the absolute stand out in terms of inequity of CCRC’s rates distribution. CCRC Graziers pay 1.8 times more “rates in the dollar” than the next highest Graziers in QLD and 2.6 times more than the QLD East Coast Grazing average, see graph below. CCRC Cane Growers, for example, also pay very high rates in comparison to their other QLD East Coast peers, but nothing like the disparity for Graziers, with CCRC Cane Growers being 1.6 times the average and are 4th highest when compared to their QLD East Coast Cane Grower peers, see graph above. This is not new, or a “blip”, when benchmarked against peers the CCRC Graziers position as slowly and consistently deteriorated since at least 2016.

At a local level, it can be seen all CCRC rate categories pay high rates in comparison to the average of neighboring LGAs, again the absolute stand out is Graziers being over 3 times higher than the average of our Neighbour’s. The graph below shows the rates in the dollar for the average value property in different rating categories for CCRC and the neighboring LGAs.

It maybe noted in the graph above CCRC rates are most closely aligned with Hinchinbrook again with the exception of Grazing. To better illustrate this the graph below shows the percentage variance in rates between CCRC and Hinchinbrook in different rates categories. Note: The 183% variance in Grazing translates to CCRC being 2.83 times more than the Hinchinbrook grazing rates in the dollar.

CCRC residential rate payers enjoy reducing “rates in the dollar” as their property valuation goes up. This combined with a lower starting point means the unimproved land value of a residential property needs to be $773K before they pay the same rates as the average primary production property unimproved value of $322K, see the graph below that illustrates this impact. From this it is estimated that well over half of the primary producers pays more in general rates than 99% of residential properties.

Best efforts were made to compare CCRC’s split of Capital and Operational expenditure between the broad rate payer categories. The data in the 2023 2024 budget paper on the CCRC website is not as detailed as required to be definitive and the allocation of costs is subjective, however, indicatively it would seem an average individual Primary Producer costs this year’s overall budget LESS than the average individual in most of the other rating categories. Yet in actual dollars paid in General Rates the average Primary Producer pays over 5 times more than the average urban resident, 3.8 times more than the average Mission beach resident. Noting the CCRC revenue policy states “in general council will be guided by user pays in rates and charges…….”

Do you graze stock on the Cassowary coast, large or small? Are you stakeholder in the local grazing industry? Please consider becoming a member to help support fair and equitable rates on the Cassowary coast. The membership application form can be found on the “contact us” page of this website.

All the data used above is readily available on Local Council and QLD gov websites and easily validated, “Rates in the dollar” information was sourced from each council’s “revenue statement.”. Valuation data was sourced from the QLD Valuer General’s “land valuation overview” papers.

Every effort has been made to validate and cross check this data, CCGA has no desire or need to fabricate or embellish data, should there be an error please contact CCGA via the email on the “contact us” page of this website with details of the error.