Hume City Council response attributable to Mayor of Hume City, Councillor Carly Moore.
Hume residents work hard, pay their rates and rightly expect reliable service delivery in return.
Throughout 2026, ongoing industrial action has caused significant disruption to Council services, particularly waste collection. We know residents are frustrated by uncollected bins and repeated service interruptions, and Council shares that frustration.
Our community has been patient for long enough.
Hume employees voted to participate in multi-employer bargaining with the Australian Services Union (ASU) in September 2025. Since March 2026, Hume has been negotiating alongside seven other councils and four unions to reach a new enterprise agreement.
Council has negotiated in good faith throughout this process and demonstrated its commitment to employees by providing a 2.5% pay increase in November 2025 while bargaining discussions continued.
Council respects the legal right of employees to take protected industrial action and supports fair wages and conditions for its workforce. At the same time, Council has a responsibility to protect essential services and manage ratepayer responsibly, particularly during a cost-of-living crisis.
Despite months of negotiations and Council’s continued good-faith efforts to reach an agreement, industrial action continues to disrupt essential services and unfairly impact Hume residents.
Every missed bin collection and every service disruption is felt directly by Hume residents.
Hume residents are carrying a disproportionate share of the impact. Of the eight councils involved in these negotiations, Hume is one of only three that continues to directly employ its red-bin collection workforce. As a result, industrial action affecting waste collection services has had a particularly significant impact on Hume households, despite this being a dispute involving multiple councils.
It is unacceptable that Hume residents continue to carry a disproportionate share of the burden from a dispute that extends well beyond our municipality. Residents should not be experiencing prolonged service disruptions while bargaining continues, particularly when Council has demonstrated its commitment to reaching an agreement through ongoing negotiations and support for employees during the process.
Hume’s Councillors support retaining the Victorian Government’s rate cap to help protect residents from further cost pressures and ensure Council services remain financially sustainable.
Fairness must extend to everyone involved in this process, including the residents who fund and rely on Council services. Hume residents rightly expect the services they pay for to be delivered reliably.
Residents should not be caught in the middle of ongoing industrial action. Essential community services must not be used as bargaining tools.
This remains a complex bargaining process involving eight councils and four unions, with the potential for additional councils to join. Reaching an outcome will require all parties to continue negotiating constructively and making full use of the bargaining processes available.
Any agreement must be fair for employees, affordable for ratepayers and financially sustainable for the long term.
The time has come to put residents first. We call on the ASU and all parties involved to bring this disruption to an end and focus on reaching an agreement through the bargaining process.
Our employees deserve certainty. Our residents deserve reliable services. Council remains committed to achieving both and securing an outcome that is fair, affordable and sustainable for the long term.
