Date: 6th July 2026

South Burnett Regional Council has formally opposed proposed changes to Queensland’s disaster recovery funding arrangements, with CEO Mark Pitt warning that a little-noticed change to the activation trigger poses a greater risk to councils than the widely reported shift to a fifty-fifty funding split.

Council adopted its position on the changes at its most recent meeting. Speaking to Chris Eddy for the Local Government News Roundup, Pitt said the current threshold — the point at which local governments become eligible for disaster assistance, currently $240,000 in Queensland — is set to rise to $2.7 million.

“They have just very quietly put that threshold up to 2.7 million,” Pitt said. “Now, all of a sudden, everything from a quarter of a million to 2.7 won’t be a declared event. So even with the fifty-fifty split, your access to funding opportunities will be restricted.”

Under the current arrangement, Queensland councils — along with Western Australia and the Northern Territory — pay the trigger amount themselves before higher-level disaster funding is activated. Pitt said South Burnett had been required to pay multiple triggers within a short period after experiencing three flooding events in a single recent year.

He said the scale of that exposure was significant relative to core council budgets. “Our reseal budget for a year is three million,” Pitt said. “If 2.7 becomes the new trigger and we have to pay it, that’s our entire reseal budget gone. You just can’t recover that sort of funding, or it will impact other service delivery badly.”

Pitt said the state and Commonwealth would need to work through the broader funding split, but the trigger change would have “a massive and significant impact” on South Burnett and other councils.