Warrnambool City Council will pick up the $16,628 annual bill for two school crossing supervisors after the Victorian Government withdrew its 50 percent funding contribution.

What happened: Councillors unanimously voted in Monday's meeting to continue funding supervisors at the Bromfield Street and Queens Road crossings near Saint Joseph’s Primary School.

“Our children and their families deserve this and they should be funding it all across the state,” she told the meeting.

Why has the state withdrawn? Revised State Government criteria means crossings that have been upgraded with infrastructure such as a wombat crossing (a raised zebra crossing), traffic signals or pedestrian-operated signals, may no longer qualify for funding, even if they continue to be heavily used by students.

How many kids use it? Recent usage counts recorded 317 school-aged users across the two crossings during morning and afternoon periods. The number of passing cars was not recorded. 

What’s the cost? Warrnambool City Council has 33 supervisors across 29 crossings in the municipality - the current state government subsidies add up to $274,362 for the 2026-27 financial year. 

At Otway Blueberries, Lisa Agnew relies on 35 workers between December and April to delicately pick the small fruit from its bushes.

As immigration becomes a political football, Agnew and other farmers who spoke to the Brolga are worried that in the push to cut numbers, staff may be harder to get and fruit will be left to rot.

Of the 35 pickers, eight are Australian. Many of the rest hail from Vietnam.

What’s going on: Federal Minister for Immigration Tony Burke announced last month that the government would introduce new limits on the Working Holiday Maker visa by using a ballot system for second and third year visa applicants.

Who gets the job? Angew prefers to hire pickers who have worked at the farm previously or been referred by previous staff. Facebook pages are also a common way to hire overseas workers. 

“For any business, training is a process, and it’s costly, and you want to avoid it where possible,” she said. “If you can get repeat workers, you’re in a much better position from the start of the season.

“Obviously the previous staff will have a second year [visa], best case scenario a third year, [so] that they can come and work for me before they have to go home for good.”

Migration politics: She said the current focus on migration and changes to working visas was “incredibly short-sighted” and to cite housing shortages as the reason behind cutting migration was “utter rubbish”.

“When we’re not in season, no one’s living on our property, other than obviously us, the occupants. But when we’re in season, they’re all housed there,” Agnew said.

“We are not creating some sort of trouble for the local community. If anything, we’re creating income for Gellibrand and Colac by the fact they're going to shop in the local area.”

Not enough staff: Angew said Labor’s ballot system would affect the pool of workers available to hire. 

“You've got to do the first 88 days to get into the ballot for the second year visa, and then you've got to do six months,” she said, adding that applicants may not commit to a third year visa if the number of available slots was too low.

“For us it's going to cost a lot of money, because we're going to have to start from scratch each year with trying to get new people. 

“When our workers leave us, they go to another farm. That’s how the cycle works. When you mess with that cycle, all blueberry farms will be affected … you're going to end up with fruit not being picked.”

Full story below.

Hannah Stewart's parents farmed the Otways knowing when the rain would come. Decades later, she can’t be as sure. 

In the Otway Ranges, Stewart is the fifth generation at the helm of her family farm, Yan Yan Gurt West. Her parents laid the bedrock for a robust, regenerative property, but Stewart says the biggest issue for her farming cohort is financial and weather unpredictability. 

What happened? Yan Yan Gurt West, in Deans Marsh, primarily farms sheep, producing meat and wool. Hannah Stewart grew up on the property. Four years ago, she took over the farm from her parents alongside her partner. 

Stewart described her childhood as “very lucky”, retelling stories of mustering livestock on horseback in her teen years. 

Then versus now: Stewart said the biggest issue to contend with while running the farm nowadays is that “there’s a lot less predictability in the weather now”. She said in regions like the Otways, seasons were previously relatively stable. 

She said costs have become unpredictable as well. 

Stewart explained that her partner and herself have “brought a lot of different things to the table” since taking over the farm. This includes things like landscape change by rebuilding understorey and closer analysis of pastures, soil and animal health. They’ve also introduced multi-species cropping and rotational grazing to rest paddocks sufficiently. 

The bigger picture: Victoria’s Climate Science Report shows that, as of 2024, heatwaves have become more intense, average annual rainfall has decreased and dry periods have become longer. 

For Stewart, this has manifested in a variety of ways. A week before she and her partner sold their first set of lambs, the market crashed by 80 percent and the region headed straight into a drought that lasted two years. 

Now, future drought is potentially on the horizon, with an El Niño event declared in June, which locks Australia into a six-month weather pattern that reduces cloud cover and creates extreme heat. 

Full story below.

The City of Ballarat has pushed for a data centre freeze, amid anxiety about a proposed facility in Miners Rest. 

What happened? During September’s City of Ballarat council meeting, council voted unanimously to write to the Victorian Government demanding a moratorium on new data centres across the state until a proper planning and sustainability framework exists. 

The motion was brought forward by Councillor Jim Rinaldi. 

The background: In July, Resi Ventures and X2M announced intentions to build a data centre in Miners Rest, 10 kilometres outside of central Ballarat, on an old quarry site. 

The announcement was met with trepidation from locals regarding water, power and environmental impacts. 

Local anxiety: Several queries were read out during public question time, asking where the data centre's water, power and fire protection would come from. The answer was the same: there's no application yet, so nobody knows.

What people said: City of Ballarat CEO Evan Kind acknowledged the prospect of the centre being built felt “incredibly unsettling for the community”, but said there is currently an information gap. 

Councillor Rinaldi moved that council write to Premier Ben Carroll, and other relevant ministers, seeking a moratorium on new data centres and expansions “until a comprehensive Victorian data centre planning and sustainability framework is established”. 

At other levels: AI and the data centres that power it have been a hot topic in 2026. 

On September 22, the Victorian Government released the Sustainable Data Centre Action Plan, laying out expectations around land and water use, and mandated distance from residential areas. 

🌏The bigger picture: In Australia, the amount of data centres has doubled. There are currently 165 data centres, with 225 more proposed throughout the country. 

Johanna Lim, from the United States Studies Centre, told the Gippsland Monitor data centres will become “the backbone of the digital economy”.

Full story below.