Date: 3rd July 2026

Balranald Shire Council CEO Terry Dodds PSM has challenged the way Commonwealth grant funding is allocated to rural and remote councils, arguing the current model rewards administrative capacity over genuine need.

In an opinion piece posted to LinkedIn, Mr Dodds takes aim at the Sustainable Communities Program, established to support communities affected by water recovery and buybacks in the Murray-Darling Basin. According to Council’s own analysis, Balranald Shire has received $731,331 from the program to date, despite what Mr Dodds describes as roughly $75 million in buyback activity in the shire in recent months. He says other eligible councils have received tens of millions of dollars each.

Mr Dodds argues the disparity reflects a structural problem rather than a funding shortfall alone. Competitive grant rounds, he says, favour councils with dedicated grants officers, strategy teams and forward-planning units — resources larger councils typically have and many small rural councils do not. Staff in smaller shires, he notes, are often stretched across roads, water, waste, governance and statutory service delivery, leaving little capacity to prepare complex, time-pressured bids.

The piece also takes issue with the use of benefit-cost ratios (BCRs) as an assessment tool. Mr Dodds contends that BCRs are well suited to comparing narrow efficiency outcomes, but poorly suited to allocating adjustment funding, since small populations and thinner local economies can suppress monetised benefits regardless of actual need. He points to broader research suggesting conventional cost-benefit methods can understate welfare gains and that public investment benefit forecasts carry more uncertainty than is often assumed.

Taken together, Mr Dodds argues, these two factors risk a “double penalty” for small and remote councils: reduced ability to compete for grants at the application stage, and reduced likelihood of scoring well against BCR-based criteria if they do get to assessment. He describes this as an inference from the evidence rather than a proven causal chain, but a strong one.

His proposed remedy is a shift away from competitive merit rounds as the sole mechanism for adjustment funding. He calls for a needs-based baseline allocation for the most affected councils, dedicated capability support for bid preparation, simplified application pathways for small councils, and assessment frameworks that give explicit weight to equity and disadvantage.

“Small communities should not need to be expert contestants in a policy game designed elsewhere just to secure a fair share of assistance,” Mr Dodds writes. “It should be easier, not harder, for small, thinly resourced, highly exposed councils to access support when government policy has imposed costs on their communities.”