The Australian Local Government Association (ALGA) has pushed for state and federal governments to stop dumping new duties on local governments, without the appropriate funding support.

ALGA’s submission to the upcoming National Commission of Audit says early talk of increasing servicer delivery functions for local government needs to be bundled with increased resources and funds.

The peak body’s submission shows that it is costly to continually push services down the line to the level of government closest to the recipients.

Insiders say the trend of cost-shifting onto councils has been ramped up, and is now putting council budgets at risk as their expected duties increase.

Estimates from ALGA say about a billion dollars per year is spent on cross-jurisdictional financial manoeuvres, which often leave local governments holding the bag.

ALGA’s submission cites several occasions where services have been pushed to the local level, but not backed by ongoing funding.

It cites the Hawker Report of 2003, which highlighted the handing-over of regional airports from the Federal government to local government in the 1990s to re-shuffle the costs. The transfer came “without sufficient funding” and so became a “major burden” on many regional councils. This was exacerbated by expanded security needs after 2001.

A similar case was indentified in the ALGA submission to the Commission of Audit, wherein the Commonwealth provided grants for councils to expand their local child care services. The representative body says local governments were again left with mounting costs when federal grants fell short.

ALGA says the Inter-Governmental Agreement (IGA) signed by all levels of government in 2007 “needs to be strengthened”, to re-iterate considerations of the cost to local government when it is made to pick up new duties.