The carbon tax had little perceptible effect on Eurobodalla Shire Council’s budget and its repeal will also be hard to account for, a senior official says.
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The council’s finance manager Anthony O’Reilly said the council has been allowed to lift rates by 0.4 per cent in the 2012/13 financial year as an advance on any carbon tax effects.
However, the Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal had reversed that increase for the current financial year and ratepayers would pay 0.4 per cent less.
Mr O’Reilly said electricity and gas prices had been the obvious risk factors for the council during the brief life of the carbon tax, but any effect had been difficult to discern.
“There are no identifiable windfalls from the repeal of the carbon tax, other than any decrease in electricity costs would be welcome,” he said.
While electricity prices had risen, some of that could be sheeted home the cost of infrastructure investment – poles and wires – being passed on to customers.
“This is where it all becomes very muddy in terms of the actual impact of the carbon tax,” Mr O’Reilly said.
“We don’t know what the impact is, specifically.”
He hoped any decrease in energy prices as a result of the tax’s repeal would be passed onto consumers, but ongoing infrastructure costs might also be passed on.
“Broadly, electricity went up and now we are hoping electricity goes down,” he said.
Mr O’Reilly said greater energy costs worn by those who provided goods and services to the council would have been passed on, but again, they was no mechanism to account for them.
It was difficult “to say how it has affected us particularly”, he said.
“The intent of the electricity companies is to now pass on any savings that have come through because the repeal, but we don’t specifically see that,” he said.
“No-one issues invoices which said, ‘this is because of the carbon tax’.
He said broad statements had been made about the project impact on the average household, “but that was of no help to us”.
He said the cost of fuel for the council’s fleet of vehicles and machinery also did not lend itself to easy analysis in terms of the carbon tax.
“Again it is very hard to determine,” he said.
“We have all seen large increases in fuel prices of the past few years and on, the South Coast, we are consistently in the top ten (of highest bowser prices).”
Mr O’Reilly said the Eurobodalla has escaped charges levied on other local governments for not taking enough steps to reduce carbon load on the waste stream.
“Some councils had to allow for an increase in the price of their waste facilities,” he said.
“Given our mix of facilities, we did not reach the limit, so were not required, nor did we, collect any monies in relation to the carbon tax.”
Mr O’Reilly said the council had set aside $125,000 in cash to cover any projected impacts of the carbon tax, but that fund was no longer needed.
“To be conservative, we held it there as a contingency for any unseen impact, but it will go back into unrestricted cash,” he said.