Rates appeal a brutal process

Your rates have gone up and you think it is unfair. So you think you will do something about it. Good luck, but the system is stacked against you.

For my property in Jindivick, the site value went up 43 per cent and my capital improved value went up 28 per cent from 2018 to 2019.

I wanted to know why, so I submitted an objection.

A valuer came on to my property without prior notification. When I suggested that he might be trespassing, he informed me he was entitled to enter the property under the Valuation of Land Act 1960, Section 3A.

I later received a notification that my objection had been disallowed, but no reason was given.

Upon inquiring I discovered that the review had been conducted by the same person who did the original valuation, using the same data.

I had primarily queried the land value, so had submitted examples of land sales in the area. But I was told the examples I had submitted were too old and instead the data used to reject my objection related to three small farms.

These properties had houses, sheds, dams, etc. on usable area up to six hectares. One even had a separate studio.

My property is a very hilly bush block with 0.3 hectares flat enough to accommodate the house and a shed.

When I claimed the properties were not comparable to my bush block I was told that was ‘a matter of opinion’.

In complaining about the valuation, the only next step available to me was to take the matter to VCAT.

But the increase in rates that I was objecting to amounted to $320.40 and to take the matter to VCAT would cost me $870.80 just to apply.

There I would have to fight the bureaucracy over, what I was informed was, a matter of opinion. And I would have to apply within a month of the original dis-allowance notice even though that happened to include the Christmas and New Year break and a period that the reviewer was on holidays.

So the process of establishing the value of a property is based on making a dubious comparison with other properties; by the valuer who may enter your property unannounced or even against your wishes; by a pointless review because the same data is used and it is conducted by the same valuer who established the original value; and, if you still object, the cost of challenging the decision probably far outweighs the amount disputed.

What a brutal process.

Peter King, Jindivick

Bronwyn Bishop and others have inveigled their way into esoteric government funded jobs.

Jobs some of which should be non existent and they have emerged with massive pensions.

I served our country as a conscript, being trained and sent to South Vietnam as an infantry rifleman.

Would this not be a tad more risky than the job role of any career politician?

My pension, which I regard as generous, is less than 10 per cent of that granted to career politicians.

To be fair , I must concede that I did achieve many more government sponsored helicopter rides than Bronwyn Bishop .

Lynton Malley, Cloverlea

We are grateful to the Gazette for generously providing space for the ongoing climate change debate.

The editor's decision to continue to print the views of the deniers may surprise or outrage readers but in a democratic society it is the correct decision.

As recent letters have suggested, however, it is now time to ignore ill-informed viewpoints and to move forward to a new and much more important climate change debate.

The old debate is over, even Blind Freddy knows the earth is warming. The 1.5 degree Paris target is dead and the world is now on track towards temperature increase of around 3.5 degrees.

In this situation, the new climate deniers are we who refuse to face up to the implications of this increase.

We may not yet know the details but scientists warn us of catastrophic consequences even if we somehow avoid the expected tipping points.

The new year has already given Australia a glimpse of what lies ahead.

More importantly as the environment breaks down, so to does the very civilization that we assumed would nurture our children and grandchildren.

At the moment Australia does seem to be burning so supporters of Extinction Rebellion could well be right, certainly we would not be the first human species to become extinct.

The inconvenient truth of 10 years ago has now become the terrifying truth – little wonder we seek to deny it.

Fortunately, there are still a few short years left for us to respond to this unprecedented challenge, however, what is needed is, as Sir Richard Branston recently described it, response on a total war footing.

Solar panels, storage batteries, home insulation and hybrid cars are positive individual responses but will achieve little unless we have bi-partisan support at all levels of government but especially at federal level.

At the moment Australia is at serious risk of being seen as an international pariah with its supposed clever accounting attempts to avoid our Paris emission reduction commitments.

Politicians on both sides have failed us because of their blind obsession with retaining or achieving power.

It seems the only solution now is for ordinary citizens to demand serious action starting with passage of a Climate Act similar to that of New Zealand and the UK.

Politicians who won't support it need to be tossed out (even our own respected Russell Broadbent who has to date been ambivalent in his support for climate action).

Fortunately, an Act of this type will be introduced to Parliament early this year by a climate-conscious independent member.

It will only be passed, however, if there is a groundswell of public support.

If we can achieve this much, then these columns would be ideal for debating the next most urgent policies and actions needed to ensure our future.

Neil O'Sullivan, Allambee Reserve

Many politicians as they enter parliament have grand visions of making a difference. That changes as they try to survive the next election.

They learn to conform, learn to speak the politician's language and become more intent on keeping the status quo.

By then they have also adopted the lies, obfuscation and spin of the manner of experienced politicians.

Further in to their time in "the big house" they try to stand out so that the public will remember them and the legacy they wish to be remembered for.

In less than 10 years most will have moved on and be out of parliament. The public won't remember their deeds.

However for some, what they have or haven't done won't be forgotten and history will judge them without the colorful embellishments that political advisers have used in the past.

The politicians will point to achievements but will a surplus carry more weight than a lack of cohesive coherent climate policy?

Will the purchase of submarines override the blatant misuse of carbon emission credits? Will acceding to the demands of climate change denialists show them in a positive light?

Scott Morrison will be remembered for being late to come to the aid of the nation.

In all likelihood his legacy will stem from how he responded in a crisis and he may well be less remembered than the firefighter who politely declined to shake his hand in Cobargo.

Greg Tuck, Warragul

Nicholas Peck’s challenge (Gazette 14/1) for climate change ‘deniers’ – in which classification I assume he would include me as an Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) sceptic – to find a single institution among the “100 top universities” sharing ‘denialist’ views, is powerfully instructive.

I’m sure that Mr Peck is correct in suggesting that a “Google search” would yield a 100 per cent consensus against the ‘denialist’ or ‘sceptic’ camps.

This is because our universities have long been captive to the vice-like grip of politically correct groupthink, a situation that intimidates all but the most fearless to conform or suffer the consequences.

There is also the massive dumbing down of educational standards in general.

My own experience is as good an example as any and sheds some further light on the problem of academic groupthink.

For the past six years of my academic employment (2008-2014) before retirement I had the privilege of receiving two successive three-year contract appointments as Associate Professor at a small regional medical school to teach physiology to first-year graduate-entry students.

While the students were a joy to engage with, I became increasingly sceptical about the standard-setting methods employed for assessment in the end-of-year examinations, mandated by the parent metropolitan faculty and following widely accepted international practice in medical education.

The director of our regional school kindly granted me access to our school’s assessment data, on which I performed an internal audit spanning the years 2010-2012.

My audit clearly showed that the method we used (based on the popular Angoff method and its variants) was totally invalid.

In due course I reported these findings in a paper titled “Angovian Methods for Standard Setting in Medical Education: Can They Ever Be Criterion Referenced?” and published in the International Journal of Learning, Teaching and Educational Research (readily accessed by Googling “Angovian”).

As the end of my second contract loomed, I approached several academics at the school’s parent faculty many times, seeking an honorary (adjunct) appointment in my forthcoming ‘retirement’ to continue these studies and so audit the parent school’s assessment data at no financial cost to the faculty.

These approaches were either refused or ignored..

It is important to note that these ‘Angovian’ methods of standard setting have been in use in Australia for many years to meet the requirements of the Australian Medical Council in its 2012 Standards for Assessment and Accreditation of Primary Medical Programs.

However, when I published my 2014 IJLTER paper invalidating this methodology, nobody seemed to want to know or to support further research along these lines.

I could go on … academic groupthink is a terrible thing!

Brian Chapman, Drouin

First the flat-earthers denied that climate change was happening at all. Then, when the intensity of drought, flooding and cyclones became so serious it could no longer be ignored, they acknowledged the weather was changing but refused to recognise its cause.

Now they’re at it again – seeking to have us believe that a lack of bush clearing, and not climate change, is to blame for Australia’s unprecedented catastrophic fires.

Fire management scientists have explained that controlled clearing is not a magic bullet.

So have the former heads of fire and emergency services who had unsuccessfully sought to meet with Federal Prime Minister Morrison since April last year to advise him of the national infrastructure needed to fight the bigger, faster and hotter bushfires ahead.

There had been controlled burning in some areas subsequently devastated by the present fires.

Controlled burning can be ineffective in stopping fires of the ferocity created by our new weather conditions.

Its far-reaching smoke can be hazardous for humans with some health conditions and damage agriculture.

Furthermore, the window in which prescribed burns can occur without risk to life and property is shrinking due to climate change. Selective logging can increase wind flow and make forests more flammable.

For well over 20 years, climate scientists have explained how burning coal, oil and gas is changing our climate.

They warned of the extremities in weather that would result and its impact on fires if we failed to address human-generated climate change. What is happening now is only the beginning.

There will be far worse ahead if we don’t listen to scientists instead of armchair experts and insist that our governments act to reduce human-induced climate change.

Rhonda Florrimell, Drouin