Kingborough is a long, narrow municipality stretching from the southern fringes of Hobart down the Channel to Bruny Island and the approaches to the Huon. The bulk of our population lives in the north. But much of our land, and much of our natural environment, lies in the rural communities that run along the length of the LGA.
Those rural communities are the best stewards of their own land. They are farmers, smallholders, families, and small business owners who have invested their life savings into properties they know intimately and care for personally. They are on the ground every day, nursing their land through drought, fire, storm, and regrowth.
Environmental rules that apply to rural Kingborough land are most credible when shaped by the people who live on that land day to day. Lived local experience should carry real weight in how policy is designed and applied. Rural landowners who have nurtured their properties through every season, every fire risk, and every regrowth cycle bring insights that no policy document can replicate.
As Mayor, I will lead a review of council generated environmental rules to determine whether they are helpful guidance for good stewardship or punitive green tape that acts as a handbrake on the aspirations of our rural families and small businesses throughout the rural parts of our LGA.
This substantive review of environmental policy will be conducted as part of the broader Environmental Services review set out in Priority 3. That review will determine which instruments are fit for purpose, which need reform, and which should be retired. I am not going to pre-empt the findings of a review that has yet to be conducted. What I will commit to is that the review will be honest, thorough, transparent, community informed, and prepared to make hard calls where the evidence supports them.
The principle is simple. The people best placed to nurture and care for the local environment are the locals who live in it. Council’s job is to support rural families and landowners in the stewardship they are already doing.
Bushfire risk and fuel load management
The greatest single threat to Kingborough’s biodiversity is a catastrophic bushfire. For at least 15 to 20 years, council’s environmental regulations are alleged to have actively discouraged landholders from reducing fuel loads on their properties. The same policies intended to protect the environment may instead be creating the conditions for its destruction.
The rural community that lives on and manages this land is Kingborough’s best asset in fire prevention. Council must stop working against them and start working with them.
The exposure we are actually carrying
More than 90 per cent of the Kingborough municipality is mapped as bushfire prone. Kingborough also carries the highest bushfire building exposure of any council in Greater Hobart. The Greater Hobart Bushfire Exposure Index, reported publicly in October 2024, placed 1,727 Kingborough buildings, or 10.5 per cent of those assessed, in the higher exposure categories. Hobart was next with 1,205, then Clarence with 751, Glenorchy with 203, Sorell with 202 and Brighton with 137. Of the 4,225 higher exposure buildings identified across the whole of Greater Hobart, roughly two in every five are in Kingborough.
That is the context every other decision in this priority sits inside. It is not a reason for alarm. It is a reason for method.
Why this is now a cost of living issue
Insurance premiums are a price signal. They are the market’s read of physical risk, and they are set by what is actually on the ground, not by what is written in a policy document. There is no reserve of money sitting somewhere that can be legislated into existence to bring them down. The only durable way to reduce the cost of insuring a home in Kingborough is to reduce the risk to that home, and then make sure the reduction is counted when the risk is priced.
No mayor can guarantee any household a lower premium. Insurers price across whole portfolios, not council by council. What a mayor can guarantee is that the mitigation work Kingborough ratepayers already fund is properly recorded, properly evidenced, and put in front of the people who price our risk. That is entirely within Council’s control, and Kingborough does not do it today.
The pilot Kingborough has already joined
Kingborough Council is a partner in a bushfire preparedness pilot with the City of Hobart, RACT and the University of Tasmania Fire Centre, announced in June 2026. Council is contributing funding towards the staffing that runs the program, alongside vegetation management on Council land at the pilot locations and practical support such as free green waste disposal days and street skip bins. The initial phase works with just over one hundred households along the urban and bushland interface in Hobart and Kingborough. Expansion beyond that depends on an application to the Commonwealth Disaster Ready Fund.
Very few residents know Kingborough is involved at all, and a pilot covering roughly one hundred homes in a municipality with more than 1,700 higher exposure buildings is a start, not an answer. The job of the next Council is to take what the pilot proves and scale it.
Property level risk information belongs to the property owner. Every participating landowner should receive their own assessment in full and in plain English. Individual property risk ratings should not be published, because that would affect people’s insurability and the value of their homes without their consent.
Council’s own land
The pilot has already surfaced the uncomfortable case. A household that had managed its own risk properly, and was assessed as relatively low risk as a result, still faced a dominant residual threat from the land next door. That land was managed by council. If we are going to ask a landowner at Sandfly or Snug to manage their block, we have to be able to show what we are doing with ours.
A council I lead will:
- Review all environmental regulations for their impact on fuel load management and fire risk
- Work directly with rural landholders on practical fuel reduction strategies
- Extend green waste collection arrangements in the lead up to fire season to assist landholders in preparing their properties
- Hold Council land and road reserves to the same fuel management standard Council expects of ratepayers
- Allow burn registration flexibility for multiple or larger piles, rather than one pile at a time, where it is safe to do so
- Support biochar and other alternatives for landholders who cannot safely burn
- Ensure environmental policy explicitly accounts for bushfire risk as a primary threat to biodiversity
- Advocate to state and federal government for funding and support for community based fuel load management
- Assess Council owned and Council managed land for the bushfire risk it transfers onto adjoining private property, publish the works programme that follows from it, and report progress against that programme annually
- Back defensible space at street scale rather than house by house, with Council as coordinator and facilitator rather than sole funder, beginning in the areas of highest assessed exposure
- Establish a mitigation evidence register recording every fuel reduction, firebreak, access improvement and flood mitigation project to a standard insurers can actually use, and provide it to insurers annually
- Publish what the pilot with RACT, the City of Hobart and the University of Tasmania Fire Centre finds, what it has cost Kingborough, and what Council intends to do with the results
- Give every participating landowner their own property assessment in full and in plain English, and oppose the publication of individual property risk ratings
- Support continued funding for the University of Tasmania Fire Centre, one of very few bushfire research centres of its kind anywhere in the world and a Tasmanian asset worth keeping