Victorian Government seems happy to lose revenue

 

Its hard to understand why the State Government has chosen to forgo revenue worth tens of millions of dollars annually by not properly identifying the volume of sand resources extracted by major businesses. A brief forensic audit would reveal the extent of lost revenue. Details currently displayed on the DEECA website demonstrate that records are not kept showing the volume of resources exploited. To quote some specific details: 2.4.3 Extractive production statistics Production figures as part of annual production return reporting to the Department can be used to provide insight into the importance of the WAs in the study area. An analysis of the data has been completed using de-identified data. Production figures are available digitally (from the Resources Right Allocation Management (RRAM) system), but only for returns post-financial year (FY) 2014-15. All sand production reported between FY2015-16 and FY2017-18 from the South Gippsland LGA was derived from the study area. Production from the study area accounted for all glass sand, 30.4 per cent of concrete sand, and 9.8 per cent of fine sand over that period (Figure 2.6). This analysis of the production statistics demonstrates that RRAM production data are inconsistently completed, for example, there may be a product entered but with no production data, production commodities, and production units of measure are missing. Sixty five of 117 RRAM data records for production returns from sand within the MSA for FY2015-16 to FY2017-18 have incomplete, missing or non-comparable data. An additional complexity is that extractive resource estimates and RRAM production data do not include classification of extractive material according to specific geological units as per GSV seamless geology and the Australian Stratigraphic Units Database (maintained by Geoscience Australia, based on GSV and geoscience research inputs). This is especially relevant to sand production from the southeast portion of the MSA, because there is geological uncertainty surrounding the distribution and correlation of the three sand resources.

An audit would reveal the loses to the State of Victoria by the lax administration of extractive industries.

In addition to the loss of revenue resulting from being unable to assess extraction volumes. Councils are deprived of rate revenue in rural areas they can only collect rates on the value of each site which was originally classified as farmland, even though planning permits have been issued which increase site values by many millions of dollars.