Yarra City Council adopted an Advocacy Roadmap in November 2025, and in April 2026 chose to highlight some of the items under the brand ‘Yarra Decides’, with the aim of obtaining spending promises from the state government in the lead up to the November 2026 state election.
The Advocacy Roadmap is a flawed document because it contains a huge U-turn in established policy, which was to support the Medically Supervised Injecting Room (MSIR). The community wasn’t invited to comment on whether MSIR policy should change. Instead, a small number of anti-MSIR activists were informed of an alternate motion (to U-turn the policy) and were invited to attend the council meeting to speak in support of it. Only after people had spoken (in which the alternate motion was referenced) did the public actually see the text of the alternate motion, immediately before Councillors voted on it. For councillors who promised honesty, transparency, and good governance during the election campaign, it was a shameful process.
Asks in the Advocacy Roadmap
The Advocacy Roadmap contains 26 asks; two of them are good, asking for improvements in public transport and bike lanes:
Most of the remaining asks are for money, using the excuse that it will cost a lot to support a doubling of its population by 2050, which only highlights that Yarra doesn’t have its own financial house in order.
Yarra has two clear ways of obtaining the revenue required for reinvestment in services to support an increased population; it doesn’t have to beg the state for funding. The two ways are:
- supplementary rates derived from each new apartment
- charging non-resident commuters a reasonable fee to park all-day
Supplementary rates
Most of Yarra’s expenses, such as maintaining roads, drains, or open spaces, are fixed, i.e. they don’t increase as the population increases. In contrast, as the number of homes (and population) doubles to 2050, revenue from rates increases, over and above the rate cap. Such increases are called supplementary rates. They occur when a property is subdivided, e.g. when multiple townhouses or apartments replace a house. In other words, increasing Yarra’s population is good for the budget. Each new rateable property contributes additional revenue which can be used to invest in services to support the city’s mostly fixed costs. That extra revenue is ongoing, it arrives every year, which is a lot more reliable than grants or election promises from the state government. There is no reason to cry poor.
Charging for parking
Yarra is unique because of its inner-city location. It is the closest council area to the CBD (apart from the City of Melbourne itself). We are visited by 125,000 workers each day, and this number will also grow to 2050. Many of these workers park all-day for free, in 2-hour and 4-hour zones, simply by setting a timer on their phone and then moving their cars.
Council has a clear opportunity to raise additional revenue of $40 million per year, simply by charging non-resident commuters a reasonable fee to park all-day on our streets. Such a reform would be a win-win-win for commuters, residents, and Council:
- commuters wouldn’t have to go out and move their car every few hours
- residents would be protected from commuters taking all the parking spots, because the number of daily tickets sold each day can be limited by the parking app
- council would find digital daily parking tickets much easier to check and enforce, and would benefit from huge additional revenue
Again, there is no reason to cry poor.
State government congestion levy
Yarra’s crooked thinking is highlighted by how it describes the state government’s congestion levy as a ‘hit’. This isn’t true. For each year that Yarra is required to pay $630,000 to the state as a congestion levy, it will receive $3,000,000 (or $3 million) from the state to invest in active transport infrastructure. The state government congestion levy is a huge financial win for Yarra, worth $2.4 million per year.
Get your own house in order
The first message residents and ratepayers should take away from the Advocacy Roadmap is that Yarra should stop begging the state for money and should instead get its own financial house in order.
Secondly, the Advocacy Roadmap should be used to point out how the state can improve its own policies, strategies, and plans, in ways that would benefit Yarra’s residents and ratepayers, such as by:
- delivering the Strategic Cycling Corridor network on state government controlled arterial roads, with a budget of $100 million per year; including revitalising shopping streets with wider footpaths, protected bicycle lanes, protected intersections and level access tram stops
- giving councils authority to design and implement traffic control devices on local streets, e.g. to deliver wombat crossings and modal filters (as has been done in NSW)
- speeding up trams by using smart traffic lights to clear intersections as trams approach
- reforming the bus network to deliver effective public transport to areas far from train stations
- managing driving congestion on state government controlled roads by imposing demand responsive driving charges
Conclusion
In the lead up to the state election in November 2026, we’re calling on Yarra City Council to stop complaining and instead to step up and commit to providing what our City needs.
Published 2 May 2026.