Cabonne is rewriting what counts as a farm for rating, and zoning will not decide it
On 28 July Cabonne Council endorsed a draft Farmland
Rating Categorisation Policy for 28 days’ public exhibition. It would
assess land on its dominant use, commercial farming purpose and profit motive, rather than
its zoning
, and introduce five subcategories including an environmental one. A councillor
raised the obvious problem in the chamber before it even went out: land held for
environmental purposes may not always have the opportunity to generate a profit
.
Submissions closed at 5pm on Wednesday 26 August 2026.
Rating categorisation is one of the least visible things a council does and one of the most consequential. Under the Local Government Act 1993 land is put into a category, and farmland is ordinarily rated differently from residential or business. In a shire like Cabonne, where the question of whether a given parcel is genuinely a farm is not always obvious, the criteria are the whole argument.
What the draft would change
The council’s exhibition notice says the policy establishes a clear, consistent and
transparent framework for determining eligibility for farmland rating categories across the
Cabonne Local Government Area
. The substantive shift is the test. Categorisation would turn
on dominant use, commercial farming purpose and profit motive rather than zoning.
A rural zoning would not, by itself, get land into the farmland category.
It also introduces subcategories: Extensive, Intensive, Environmental, Forestry and
General Farmland. And it sets out application, assessment, review and appeal
processes, together with minimum eligibility criteria for a range of agricultural
activities
.
Minimum eligibility criteria are the part landholders will want to read. A threshold that is sensible for a broadacre grazing operation may land differently on a small intensive enterprise, and the policy is where those lines get drawn.
The tension a councillor named before it went out
The minutes record two contributions. Clr Rawson requested that the wording in the
profit-making section of the policy be reviewed to ensure it does not conflict with the
environmental farmland subcategory
, and the meeting noted that land used for environmental
purposes may not always have the opportunity to generate a profit
.
That is a real design problem rather than a quibble. If eligibility depends on a profit motive, and one of the subcategories is explicitly for land managed for environmental purposes, the two can pull against each other. Land under a conservation agreement, or being revegetated, may be doing exactly what the environmental subcategory contemplates while producing no profit at all. Whether the final wording resolves that is the single most useful thing to check when the policy comes back.
Clr Pull strongly encouraged members of the public to make submissions on the draft policy
during the public exhibition period
.
Update, 27 August 2026: the submission deadline has passed
The exhibition notice gave 5pm Wednesday 26 August 2026 as the closing time, and that time has now been and gone. Council’s Have Your Say page still carries the original notice unchanged, still worded as though submissions can be made until that time, and it does not say what happens next or when the policy comes back to Council. We are not treating an unchanged page as evidence that submissions are still being accepted, and we will report what Council adopts. Changed today, and only these: the standfirst, the page description, the social description and the sentence below said submissions close in the present tense and now say they closed. The lodgement details are the notice as it was published, kept as they ran.
How submissions were made
Submissions closed at 5pm on Wednesday 26 August 2026. They could be posted
to the General Manager, PO Box 17, Molong NSW 2866, emailed to council@cabonne.nsw.gov.au, or
lodged through the form on the council’s Have Your Say site. The notice adds that where a
submission is made by way of objection, the grounds of objection must be specified in the
submission
, which is worth taking literally: a submission that states a reason is harder to
set aside than one that states a position.
What else the same meeting did on rates
Two related policies were adopted outright on the same night rather than exhibited. Council adopted a Rates & Charges Hardship Policy and a Debt Recovery & Management Policy. Read together with the farmland draft, the meeting was a rates housekeeping night: who qualifies for the cheaper category, what happens when someone cannot pay, and how the council pursues what it is owed.
Our view, labelled as such. Putting the categorisation framework in writing and exhibiting it is the right way round, and the motion’s stated aims of clearer criteria and consistent outcomes are the correct ones. The thing to watch is not whether the policy is well intentioned but whether the profit test does work the council does not intend, and a councillor has already put that on the record. Twenty-eight days is not long for landholders to read a criteria document and work out which side of a line they fall on.
How we sourced this
The resolution, the councillors’ remarks and the two adopted policies are from the minutes of Cabonne Council’s ordinary meeting of 28 July 2026, held at Molong, which we downloaded as a PDF and read on 3 August 2026. The description of what the draft policy does, the subcategories, the submission deadline and the lodgement details are from the council’s own exhibition notice on its Have Your Say platform, read the same day.
What we have not done. We have not read the draft policy itself. Cabonne publishes minutes on its business-papers site but not agendas or attachments, so the document is not available there, and the exhibition page describes it rather than reproducing the criteria. That means the minimum eligibility thresholds, which are the part most likely to affect an individual landholder, are not something we can report. Anyone in that position should ask the council for the draft before the deadline. We have not sought comment from the council or from either councillor quoted, and the remarks are as recorded in the minutes.
Sources
- Cabonne Council, Minutes of the Ordinary Council Meeting, 28 July 2026 (PDF, 16 pages, downloaded 3 August 2026): item 13 and resolution 26/07/13 endorsing the draft Farmland Rating Policy for 28 days’ exhibition and the reasons given in the motion; the recorded remarks of Clr Rawson and Clr Pull; and items 14 and 15 adopting the Debt Recovery & Management Policy and the Rates & Charges Hardship Policy.
- Cabonne Council, DRAFT Rating Farmland Policy (public exhibition notice, read 3 August 2026): that categorisation turns on dominant use, commercial farming purpose and profit motive rather than zoning; the Extensive, Intensive, Environmental, Forestry and General Farmland subcategories; the application, assessment, review and appeal processes and minimum eligibility criteria; and the 5pm Wednesday 26 August 2026 deadline with lodgement details.
Farm in Cabonne, or read the draft differently? Tell us and we will check it against the documents and log the outcome here.