The best 9 cents you will ever spend
Every year Victorian Councils spend more than $13B providing local services to their communities. Collecting rubbish, maintaining local roads, giving us parks and reserves for sport and recreation, running aquatic centres, registering animals, providing oversight of planning controls and a whole lot more. They also run our public libraries.
And how much do Councils spend on their libraries? On average, 3.1% of total rateable revenue. That’s it. For every $ generated by Councils from their base source of income they spend 3.1c on a service that every member of the community can use for free. A service where you can:
borrow a book or magazine to read or DVD to watch (you can borrow hundreds if you like reading a lot)
join other people to chat about that book you read, or listen to the author talk about their story
help your toddler develop language and literacy skills
learn and improve your language skills if English is not your first language
sign your kids up for after school or school holiday activities
use the wifi to download a series to watch or stream it from the digital library
find somewhere quiet to study or work or write the next great Australian novel
ask a librarian to help you find some information, download a form or research your ancestry
read a newspaper or magazine in a comfy chair
connect with your community in many different ways
just be – in a safe welcoming friendly space, warm in winter and cool in summer, sanctuary in times of need, inclusive in times of loneliness and joyful in celebrating the very best of our imaginations and the human spirit.
So if anyone tells you that your library costs too much, ask them if they can think of a better way to spend 3.1c of every Council dollar. I don’t think they can.
Alternatively, think about this. That Council revenue comes from people like you and me paying rates on the homes in which we live. And on average we pay 9 cents per day to access all of the wonderful resources, services and smiles that we get from our local library. In my view – money well spent.
There you go – shortest blog piece ever.
But for those of you who want to know where I plucked this tiny morsel of data from … here goes.
Public libraries are one of the responsibilities of Australia’s third tier of government. The Commonwealth Government (first tier) collects income taxes, company taxes, royalties, levies and the like to fund our national service infrastructure and defence. They also channel much of that revenue back to our State and Territory Governments (the second tier) who provide schools, hospitals, trains and police and emergency services. Local Government (third tier) charges rates on residential and commercial properties and gets to do the local stuff because Councils are considered to be the ones closest to the community and can respond directly to local community interests and needs. Anyway – that’s the theory.
Councils generate revenue from a variety of sources, and every year they are required to publish their financial statements in an annual report that is: a) publicly available; and b) in a prescribed format which means that it’s really easy to find the data you want in 80 pages of financial statements. You just have to trawl through 79 different websites, find the Comprehensive Income Statement from the latest annual report, and capture the key figures you want. And you don’t have to do that because I’ve just done it for 2023-24.
Council revenue comes from:
rates and charges
statutory fees and fines, and user fees
grants – both operating and capital
contributions – monetary and non-monetary
other income.
The core part of Council revenue is the rates and charges, which on average represents 56% of total revenue (and for most Councils in a range from 50-65%). The rest can vary a bit between Councils and between years depending on major capital works, special projects, etc. But let me conservatively take the rateable income as the base, because if I took libraries as a % of total revenue it would only be around 1.7c per dollar.
Next we look at how much Council’s spend on their libraries. That data comes from the annual survey of Victorian libraries conducted by Public Libraries Victoria. It shows that in 2023-24 total library funding was $285M, of which $230M (81%) comes from Local Government. The remainder comes from State Government grants ($47M, 16%), user fees and charges ($4M, 1%) and other sources ($4M, 1%).
And if you break down that $230M library funding Council by Council against the rates and charges reported in each of the 79 Council’s annual reports you get a chart that looks like this.
It shows that the % of rates and charges spent on public libraries ranges from a high of 4.6% to a low of 1.1%. The maximum figures are in the Cities of Monash, Moonee Valley and Boroondara – LGAs with large library collections and high rates of borrowing (e.g. Boroondara has – 12.3 loans per capita vs a Victorian average of 6.5 and national benchmark of 6.0). At the bottom end you find small rural LGAs like the Shires of Yarriambiack, Northern Grampians, Alpine and Pyrenees which have limited library infrastructure serving a small number of people spread across large geographic areas.
The average figure is 3.1%, or 3.1c in every rate-generated dollar of Council income. Which in a fast-growing interface Council on the suburban fringe equates to $93 per household for a residential property with an annual rates bill in the order of $3,000. Which for a household of three comes out at something like the cost of a cheap meal out with the family, a night at the movies, an afternoon at the football or a tank of petrol.
Or, if you look at things a little differently, the $230M that nearly 7 million Victorians pay in Council rates to fund our libraries equates to 9c per day. That’s the best 9c I have ever spent. And what could be done if it was 10c … or even 11c per day!