As a homeowner in the City of Kingston I want to reduce council rates to help our community with the current cost-of-living pressures. I’m sick of undisclosed amounts of our hard-earned money being spent on woke virtue signalling exercises. I believe our Council needs to bring their focus back to delivering the basics – ROADS, RATES and RUBBISH.

Rate increases are lazy revenue raisers for council leadership and just encourage more wasteful spending. By making council more efficient we will be able to cut your council rates.

We need to cut the bureaucracy and inefficiency and to ensure rate payers receive the best value for money, as well as increasing transparency to make local government and Council employees more accountable. Smaller, leaner and efficient government will mean lower taxes and more money in your pocket.

Less wasteful spending on irrelevant projects will mean lower rates. I will work to rein in government overspending that contributes to higher prices and cost of living pressure on residents.

Parking and minor infringement penalties are excessive and not proportionate to the offence. Penalty amounts are too high and have a significantly harmful impact taking hard working, productive residents’ money under the Kingston City Council regime. Overzealous policing and non-compassionate enforcement is unreasonable. There should be more leeway applied to marginal offences such as minor time overstays and partial car parking space infringements.

Council should have a friendlier approach towards its residents, and we shouldn’t get punished for parking in our own street.

I’m a small businesses owner of over a decade, we are the backbone of our society. We create business for other local businesses (and the council), and a community we serve and employ. While running a business is challenging even in good times, we've seen government restrictions destroy small businesses over the last few years and its set to continue. Large businesses have the resources to deal with ever-increasing government regulation, small businesses don’t. Council has on oversized negative impact on the efficiency and success of small business. There are too many rules, fees, and permits. Regulation is a tax on our time. This is time that can be spent with family, friends or improving and growing our businesses. I’ll work to make it easier for small businesses to operate and grow in Kingston. This includes stopping new regulations that make it hard to do business and rolling back rules and regulations that hurt small businesses.

My aim is to improve the culture of Council for Kingston to facilitate not block entrepreneurship, our local small businesses and economic growth. As a small business owner, I want Kingston to have the best business conditions in Victoria, I’ll always fight for small businesses to thrive within our local communities. Supporting a flourishing local economy means more jobs and higher incomes for employees and better services offered in our area..