Absolute Rubbish
In the idyllic expanse of the Shoalhaven, a region celebrated for its pristine coastline and verdant hinterland, a silent, insidious burden is slowly crushing its most vulnerable residents.
Garbage.
This isn't merely about over-flowing local landfill. It’s a stark indictment of inequitable decision-making at the highest levels of state government, compounded by a local council seemingly adrift on its purpose.
It’s time for both Shoalhaven City Council and the NSW State Government to pull on their grown-up pants and confront the filthy stench they have created with our waste levy.
by The Watcher / Investigating truth. Confronting power.
The waste levy is a fee paid by all council waste facilities to the NSW Government.
Despite that local ratepayers bear the brunt of the tax, the government does not fully reinvest that money locally in waste and circular economy infrastructure.
Ostensibly a tool to create better environmental outcomes, the waste levy contribution aims to incentivise recycling and resource recovery to reduce landfill.
But it's a regressive tax, forcing retirees and low-income families to choose between basic necessities and keeping a roof over their heads.
For years, Shoalhaven City Council has been locked in a Sisyphean struggle against an arbitrary Local Government classification that determines the waste levy.
Despite its undeniable regional character, Shoalhaven's community is shackled to the Metropolitan Waste Levy Area (MLA) by the NSW Environment Protection Authority (EPA).
More than a benign bureaucratic oversight, this is a punishing financial imposition.
While councils genuinely classified as Regional Levy Areas (RLA) pay approximately $100.30 per tonne for waste disposal, Shoalhaven residents and businesses are forced to pay the metropolitan rate, currently a staggering $174.20 per tonne for 2025-26.
That’s an average of $531 per household per year when it could be around $310.
This is a tax dumped on a tax, with a dollop of GST added to the top.
The sheer hypocrisy has long infuriated Shoalhaven residents.
The NSW Government, in its ongoing waste levy review, publicly declares its aim to "minimise impacts on cost-of-living" and "create a fair playing field for waste operators".
Yet, for Shoalhaven, this fair playing field is more of a cruel joke given that our community's average household income is already among the lowest compared to other councils in NSW.
The arbitrary levy is an unmanageable rates burden for retirees, low-income earners, and single-person or child-free households that don't generate much rubbish, but still pay the high waste tax.
These are the people forced to make impossible choices: foregoing healthy food or cutting back on heating in winter, all to scrape together enough to pay their rates and avoid the devastating prospect of losing their homes.
This is the brutal, human cost of high-level policy disconnect.
Local Government NSW (LGNSW) has long argued that future increases in the waste levy should be subject to a Regulatory Impact Statement (RIS) that specifically assesses the impact on low and fixed-income communities.
Their concerns, like ours, have been consistently ignored.
The financial drain on Shoalhaven is a real and measurable hemorrhage.
In the 2023-24 financial year alone, the waste levy cost Shoalhaven ratepayers a staggering $14.2 million.
This is a prime example of 'cost-shifting' – where the NSW Government offloads its responsibilities onto local councils, leaving ratepayers to foot the bill.
Across NSW, this cost-shifting amounted to $1.32 billion in 2021-22, an average of an additional $460 per ratepayer annually, a shocking 78% increase since the 2015-16 financial year.
This is not a sustainable model; it is systemic exploitation of local communities.
In 2018, a NSW Parliamentary Inquiry explicitly recommended that the NSW Government reclassify Shoalhaven from the Metropolitan Levy Area, finding "no justification" for its current status.
Crucially, the NSW Government formally supported this recommendation. Yet, six years on, Shoalhaven remains trapped under the higher levy.
This bureaucratic inertia is a profound failure to act on social injustice.
Shoalhaven City Council made "multiple representations regarding the matter dating from 2003 through to 2023" - a testament to their persistence, and to the State Government's deafening silence.
Imagine the millions that could have been saved, reinvested directly into local services, or used to alleviate the burden on struggling families.
The ill-fated Bioelektra waste processing project, despite its untimely collapse, projected a potential reduction in the Council's waste levy bill to the NSW Government by nearly $7 million annually (with $4 million from domestic waste alone).
This is what could have been saved if realistic, sustainable goals had been achieved.
Instead, after Bioelektra Australia collapsed, Shoalhaven Council then had to provide an additional $10 million to complete its Materials Recovery Facility (MRF) at West Nowra, pushing that total project cost to $37.15 million.
Such a reactive scramble to cover shortfalls could have been avoided with better long-term planning.
While the community grapples with these escalating and unfair waste fees, complicated questions linger about past financial decisions.
Had the Council, in previous decades, focused more diligently on securing its long-term financial resilience, the current financial pickle might have been less severe.
For decades Shoalhaven Council has overreached - taking on projects beyond its means, without open or transparent consultation.
Arguably, the most dramatic example of this is the 2007 agreement to sell off Comberton Grange land and quarry - for less than its value - to foreign investors, The Shaolin Foundation.
The purchaser, China's Shaolin Temple abbot Shi Yongxin, has been investigated by multiple agencies since 2015 for embezzlement, "improper relationships with multiple women" and "fathering illegitimate children".
Shi Yongxin was recently arrested and Chinese authorities have now launched a campaign to 'decommercialize' Buddhist temples.
Where that leaves the Comberton plan is anyone's guess (and a whole other story). The Shaolin monk eventually paid $5.2M back in 2014, but the land's current potential market value is about $90M.
So, now, we spin in a savage cycle of disadvantage.
When rates are artificially inflated by an unfair levy, people have less disposable income. This means fewer good decisions for their households and less contribution to their community.
If people can't afford to use Council's at-cost facilities, like waste transfer stations, they might resort to illegal dumping – a problem Shoalhaven is already battling, with such incidents doubling in the past two years and costing the Council more than $200,000 in clean-up.
Instead of incentivising recycling as the waste levy is supposed to, the tax can (according to LGNSW) actually deter lawful rubbish disposal thus creating extra cleanup costs for councils.
Furthermore, with less money, there's less inclination to buy local quality goods, instead seeking cheaper, often imported, products that don't last and generate more rubbish that can't be recycled.
This just adds to further waste burden, public cost, and environmental damage - a downward spiral that is emphatically not the circular economy that Shoalhaven wants and needs.
The waste levy we pay is collected by the EPA and largely absorbed into the NSW Government's Consolidated Fund, with historically only about one-third allocated back to environmental programs.
They call it "reinvestment" but it's actually revenue generation at the expense of local communities.
Shoalhaven City Council: you must try harder, not let the issue rot.
The recent 12% special rate variation approved by IPART for 2025/26, adding an average of $161.57 to residential rates , only exacerbates the problem without addressing its root cause.
Our community is struggling under a burden that you have consistently highlighted as unjust. While past advocacy is noted, the fierce realities on the ground now demand more than just "multiple representations."
It demands a relentless and unified front that refuses to accept the status quo.
NSW Government: get your priorities straight.
Grand announcables mean little to the retiree choosing between heating and garbage disposal. Go into bat for the people you expect to fund these big-ticket initiatives.
Implement the parliamentary recommendation you already supported six years ago and reclassify Shoalhaven.
Reinvest the levy funds where they are generated. Stop treating regional communities as cash cows to prop up a flawed metropolitan policy.
Shoalhaven people deserve a fair go, a clean environment, and a government that genuinely serves their needs, not political agenda.
The time for platitudes is over. The time for action is now.
For a detailed report and sources from The Watcher, read the document below.
