This is surely another instance of ‘government greenwashing‘ – governmental practice of propagating false, misleading, or unsubstantiated claims (lies) about its apparent do-gooding and benefits provided to its taxed community and to Ecology. 

 

A.   Introductory Abstract

 

As a local resident ratepayer of the Blue Mountains, during October 2026, we received a Council rates notice quarterly instalment invoice.  Yep, we’ll have to pay it because we have no choice.  We’ve been receiving local council rate notice invoices of course since we bought our residential property in Katoomba 2000, so twenty-six years ago.

We have noted that enclosed with the rates notice, some council paraphernalia.  Two issues are of interest to The Habitat Advocate:

 

(Issue #1)    Another mayoral broadcast letter to ratepayers about another looming land re-valuation, and;

(Issue #2)   Council’s lead article celegbrating the re-opening of access to the ‘Pulpit Rock’  (feature atop the Grose Valley).

 

We supply the details of each below separately, and cover the content and provide a critique of each respectively.

We firstly justify our inferred conclusion in this article’s title of “Labor Governments’ joint disinformation”.

 

(i)   Labor Governmental Dominance 

 

On topic, Blue Mountains ratepayers are governed at three levels at local council, state and federal levels.  We consider being over-governed.  Currently in 2026, all three levels of government in Australia are Labor, Labor Labor; so not much choice out there at present.   They feed and comply with each other. 

The New South Wales (Labor) state government has a policy of issuing property owners across the state with land re-valuations on a three yearly basis; the trend typically increasing in value over past years and indeed over decades.  Whereas the Labor federal government remains is hell-bent on driving mass immigration that directly increases demand for property for housing.  Whereas the Labor Blue Mountains Council currently comprising twelve councillors, 9/12 of the incumbents being Labor rusted-on, that is, vote as a pack else be ostracised from the Party quick smart – the party’s unspoken lore much implemented savagely.  Thus political representation is less so for the people’s rights and morseo for the Party’s ends.

 

Blue Mountains current political reality:     

 

 

(ii)   ‘Disinformation’?

 

The Cambridge Dictionary defines ‘disinformation’ as:

“deliberately misleading or biased information; manipulated narrative or facts; propaganda.”

 

There is a distinction between ‘disinformation’ and ‘misinformation’.

Misinformation’ is:

“false information that is spread, regardless of whether there is intent to mislead.”

 

Further…

“Both misinformation and disinformation refer to types of wrong or false information, though only disinformation is wrong on purpose….In addition, the recent advent of “fake news” is “false stories that appear to be news, spread on the internet or using other media, usually created to influence political views or as a joke.”

 

(iii)   Our Conclusion?

 

In both publications by Blue Mountains Council as disseminated to ratepayers, we consider both to be ‘disinformation’ and propaganda.

Read on…

 

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(Issue #1)    Blue Mountains Mayor Mark Greenhill’s letter to ratepayers – detached about another looming land re-valuation

 

We commence with an embedded copy of Mayor Mark Greenhill’s broadcast letter ‘Dear Ratepayer’ slipped in with our rates notice as follows:

 

Our initial observations:

 

(a)   It would seem a cop-out letter by the mayor to advise ratepayers in advance that Council has no influence nor benefit to be derived from Labor NSW Goverment’s ongoing land re-valuations.   

 

(b)   We are aware that the Labor Party is currently in government at local, state and federal levels.  We know from experience and longevity as resident ratepayers in the Blue Mountains that Blue Mountains Council soues in fact benefit finaniall  and substatially financiual y from land revaluations by its Labor ‘big sister’ in the NSW Government, is department the NSW Valuer General.  Also, the great rich aunty, Labor’s federal government is headlong into facilitating mass immigration, which is the driving force for imported demand for more and more housing thus the single impetus of such land re-valuations hiking – the only driver of higher council rates charges for incumbent local ratepayers.  We didn’t come down in the last rainshower, Mayor Mark Greenhill.  Stop your Greenwashing – start adding laundry liquid to wash!

 

 

(b)  Yet an increase in land valuation is the only determinant of the cost of our annual council rates. Mayor Greenhill in his letter states: 

“It  is important to note that changes to rates do no generate any additional revenue for Council.  The total amount we (Council) can collect is capped by the rate peg calculations.”  (para 5). 

(c)  Councilhas form, so how disingenuous.   For us, the major’s broadcast letter is one of a number of enclosed such mayoral letters we have received over the years arriving ahead of yet another a looming land re-valuation from the NSW Valuer General. 

The previous such broadcast letter received from Council of a looming land re-valuation was undated around December 2020, and roneo signed by the Council’s CEO Rosemary Dillon (copy below… 

 

 

The NSW Valuer General is a sub-department within the NSW Government. 

“The Valuer General reports administratively to the (NSW) Minister for Lands and Water and the (NSW) Secretary of the Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure.”   

[SOURCE:  ^https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valuer_General_of_New_South_Wales ]

So despite the NSW Government spin of its NSW Valuer General being “independent” simply due to its chief being appointed by the NSW Governor General occasionally, this department functionally ain’t independent of the NSW Government.  (= disinformation)

 

Of note, we’ve retained records of every rates notice to date.   Actually out of interest, we compare the rates in 2001 when we paid our first rates after purchase to those in 2026 as follows:

Our Council rates of 2001:

 

Our Council rates of 2026:

 

Year on year, council’s annual $772 tax on our residential property of 2001 has since risen to $2420 per year.  That’s a threefold increase   Decades prior to us, hundreds of bush blocks around the Blue Mountains local government areawhich were purchased mostly by families as a future investment ‘nest-egg’ into affordable real estate property with perhaps the hope and later opportunity to eventually build their family home.

However, due to the federal Liberal/Labor desperate fettish for mass immigration (the “populate or perish” mantra) saw their council rates skyrocket between a post-WWII acquisition and in the decades subsequent.

 

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(Issue #2)    Council re-opening access to Pulpit Rock?

 

(content pending)

 

 

 

Background to the title of this article:  “Pulpit Rock reopens after major upgrade“:

 

Attached to our latest rates instalment invoice, Blue Mountains Council habitually slips in its usual Community Newsletter.  From experience we dismiss it as council propaganda trying to trumpet to the rate paying plebs how well Council is spending ratepayers money.  

On this latest invoice in the mail Council has boasted that further rate hikes are pending due to forces outside its control; those being land revaluations by a Labor NSW Government and such due to Australia’s Federal Labor Government’s fixation policy on mass immigration driving up housing demand and so land prices.  Labor > Labor > Labor.   It’s so politically complicit  self interest of  Mass Immigration, drives Land Value hikes, drives local rates hikes. 

We seem to be receiving such land valuation hikes on a more frequent basis in recent years.  Both the NSW Government and the Council are 100% Labor, so we presume the two have close connections.  It’s as if Katoomba where we have resided since 2001 has politically morphed from being one of regional town status to becoming some suburb of Sydney, so swallowed up by the Labor NSW Government in Macquarie Street as some conceived outer suburb of the Sydney mass immigration megalopolis agenda.  That’s perhaps the rationale of the local municipal council rebranding the Blue Mountains as a City.

“In May 1946 Katoomba was proclaimed a City.  On 1 October 1947 the Municipality of Blackheath, the City Katoomba and the Blue Mountains Shire Council, together with Blue Mountains County Council, were incorporated to become the Blue Mountains City Council.” 

[SOURCE:  ^https://www.bmcc.nsw.gov.au/about-us/council-overview ]

 

Frankly, we can’t see the Blue Mountains much resembling a city. 

 

 

May it’s now here more frequently to keep the milder-clime hordes from afar away!

We do note that it came with a smiling message from Mayor Mark Greenhill that we copping a land revaluation hike, but his council is not responsible.

 

So here’s council’s article:  “Pulpit Rock reopens after major upgrade“

 

 

Yet, the fact is that this press release article by Blue Mountains Council is wrong.  It was not

“the 2019/202 summer bushfires destroyed all visitor infrasntraucture.” 

It was the Parks Service that lit the fires as a backburn after  it failed comprehensively and deliberately to extinguish the Gospers Mountain pile burn fire that had started months earlier on 26 November 2019 some 70 kilometres north away lit on a rural farm property off Army Road. 

The NSW Government custodian of the Blue Muntains World Heritate Area NPWS (Parks Service) deliberately ignored the Gospers Mountai Fire so lettig its spread to widepread into the Greater Blue Mountains National Park.  So Park Service in its negligent desperation intentionally set fire to the Blackheath escarpment atop the Gross Valley, which included Pulpit Rock and its trail.  

 

(content to be continued)