Paul Neville (Hinkler, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a good question and it really goes to the heart of what regional development is all about. As an objective observer of regional development, which is my occupation, I have to say that neither government—of coalition or Labor persuasion—has ever given regional development the recognition it deserves. I think the failure of the REDO scheme—and I am coming to the member’s question—was that it depended entirely on federal government funding and, when that was cut off, the whole thing fell like a pack of cards. My personal view—and I am sure the member would agree with me on this—is that regional development only exists and prospers where the people involved with it have a sense of ownership.

Having lived with the regional development model for many years, the Queensland government have built a model of involvement. At least for the tourism side of regional development they have cultured a model under both coalition governments and Labor governments—so it is not exclusive but they have all had the good sense to understand how it works—whereby there is a membership base of somewhere between 400 and 600 members, depending on the size of the region. On top of that, the local authorities give money. On top of that again, the Queensland state government, to its credit—under both National Party and Labor governments, and it still exists under the Beattie government—have given another level of funding. So with those three levels of funding the regional development organisations, in respect of their tourism activities, have done extremely well.

The member has a valid point in her question insofar as no government of coalition or Labor persuasion has ever really seriously addressed the problem of building a fourth tier on that—a federal government tier. I suppose what the coalition has done has been to throw that job back to the ACCs—which, to the credit of the previous Labor government, were their invention. The ACCs, despite the criticism of some of them, have been very effective. In fact, I have two of the best of them in my electorate. I have one at the northern end of my electorate called the Central Queensland ACC, chaired by a fellow called Kym Mobbs, who is an exceptional practitioner. The ACC in the southern end is chaired—and most people in Australia know this man—by Bill Trevor, the mayor of Childers, whom you would remember from Childers backpacker fire fame. They are two men who are very proactive in bringing to the government projects that will enhance employment.

It is easy to say you can solve this problem by throwing money at it; you cannot. Unless there is that sense of ownership and involvement, it does not happen. I know this intimately because I was the regional development practitioner for a city and 10 shires. It is a very difficult job to pull all those diverse forces together. Coastal shires have the new lifestyle—the sea change mentality—the regional city for the area has a different mentality and the rural shires want to see the enhancement of rural life. You have to meld those forces together to create a generic promotion of that area.

I think the failure has been that we have so heavily complicated the system. The member’s question is a very important one; I am glad she asked it. I do not throw this back in her face; I really mean this from the bottom of my heart. We could be doing a lot more in regional Australia. The ACCs go a long way towards achieving that. I am not saying they are perfect. I am not saying that there is not a better level above the ACC. But in my area, because I have these very focused chairmen, we have been able to bring forward to the government some very important projects. Some of them are ACC regional partnerships, some are sustainable regions and some go back to the old regional solutions. There is a mixture of them.

To give you an example, a fellow called David de Paoli was growing chillies, and very successfully. What David de Paoli said was, ‘If I could get some money from the federal government, I would build a factory and I would process these chillies.’ I am not saying he did this just at the behest of the federal government; he put a lot of his own money into it as well. Now he employs over 100 people and is the leading chilli grower and manufacturer in this country and is exporting to the Middle East and Asia. That was about half a million dollars in round figures.

Then there was another company called Jabiru. You have all seen Jabiru aircraft at your airports. They are the little fibreglass planes that they are now using in aeroclubs. They come from a firm called Jabiru Bundaberg, which was founded by two men, Phil Ainsworth and Rodney Stiff, who had previously worked for the cane harvester manufacturer, Austoft, which you would be aware of, Mr Deputy Speaker Causley. They went out on their own and said, ‘There is a niche in the market for light aircraft.’ We have helped them on a number of occasions both with those sorts of grants and with export market development grants. The other day when the minister was not available at short notice because of the air crash—the name of which eludes me—and he had to go to the funeral, I was asked to open that plant. What a thrill it was not opening the plant but marking the step forward in that plant. Their thousandth aircraft went off the floor that day. This is a very small Australian company.

Then there is another firm that manufactures agrifibre. They have taken cannabis—the non-medicinal form, I might add—and used it to develop a fibre industry. That fibre will have a huge impact in the fibreglass and building industries and so on as it develops. Another project was soft shell crabs. I do not know if you know this, Mr Deputy Speaker—I did not know this—but at a certain time in its cycle of development the soft shell crab turns soft and sheds its carapace and its claws. Interestingly, during that short time it is soft.

If you harvest the crab at that stage you can cook it—the reason being that, during that period of going soft and shedding its carapace and claws, the crab purges itself, so there is no muck in its innards. So you have this beautiful fresh crab and you can eat the whole lot. If you harvest it at that stage the whole thing—the nippers, the legs, the carapace—is edible. Half a million dollars—it is huge business; six or seven times the price of fish on the international market. These industries are all worth about or under a half a million dollars.

Then there are the sea scallops. A firm in Bundaberg is growing the spat, the spat being the genetic product that creates the scallop. They take it out into Hervey Bay, to the east of Bundaberg, into farm type areas, where they deposit the spat and out of that grows the scallop and the shell and so on. It can increase the number of scallops in the area manyfold—three, 10, who knows how many times. That was done for half a million dollars.

I know that both the members in the chamber, for whom I have great respect, come from large provincial areas—Ballarat and the Hunter. Nevertheless, sometimes in country areas we look for the big hits in regional development. We look for the Comalcos. Not that I am in any way decrying Comalco. I would have Comalco in the southern end of my electorate, as I already have in the northern end of my electorate, tomorrow. But we often go for the big hits, and in this development of regional expertise we do not recognise the medium sized industry that employs 100 or 120 people. If you get four, five or six of these you can be employing anywhere from 500 to 750 people. In small and medium sized communities, that is a significant difference to the generation of industry in those areas.

So I appreciate the question. I know I have strayed beyond the general bounds of the honourable member for Ballarat’s question, but it is a thing I believe in passionately. I have never been able to get state or federal governments, even though they do it in tourism for some reason or other, to say, ‘Let’s empower the regional bodies to do this work.’ If you do not have the sense of ownership, the sense that you are creating jobs for your local region, it does not happen.

I have a great admiration for Gladstone, in the northern end of my electorate. For many years we had heard that there were $8 billion worth of projects on the drawing board. Gladstone is a totally different kettle of fish from Bundaberg, which is in the southern end of my electorate. Gladstone is the big industry. Gladstone is the fastest growing port in Australia. With 12 per cent of Australia’s exports it will rival the Hunter in the next 10 years. I do not say that with any sort of hubris but, if it is not ahead of them, it will be up there with them. It is big business. The honourable member knows that—she has seen Gladstone; she knows what it is all about.

Gladstone is a different kettle of fish. There we have big industries like Comalco, with 2,000 people employed in the construction and 600 permanent employees at the end of it. There will be 1,500 people employed to get to stage 2 and another 300 or 400 permanent employees after that. You would know that from the smelters in the Hunter Valley. But what they did in Gladstone was set up a development board—part local government, part port authority, part private industry. They said, ‘We’ll bring a practitioner in here. We will not tie him down with state development and this rule and that rule; we’ll let him be a free agent’—like a trade commissioner operates. Indeed, the person they appointed had been a trade commissioner and a consul-general in at least three overseas countries. The difference he made in two years was amazing. So the member for Ballarat is justified in asking that question. I think both sides of politics have really failed badly in not giving a sense of ownership to regional development in places like the Hunter, Ballarat, Bendigo, the Green Triangle, the Wide Bay region, the greater Mackay region, Townsville and the Cairns region. We have some amazing provincial cities.

One of the first jobs I had in regional development—and I started off, as you could imagine with my political background, being a bit ambivalent about it—was to analyse Gough Whitlam’s ideas on regional development. There are not many things on which I agreed with Gough Whitlam, I must admit, but he had the idea of going to the states and saying, ‘We’re prepared to take one of your provincial cities, like Albury-Wodonga.’ He apparently offered the same deal to Joh Bjelke-Petersen for Mackay or Bundaberg, which was not accepted; he was in the process of developing Monarto in South Australia. He said, ‘We cannot go forever just letting Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne’—and to some extent Adelaide and Perth—‘keep sprawling with no purpose. We need to have other cities in Australia that are not capitals that develop industry and purpose.’ To the credit of governments in New South Wales—and I know there has been a lot of criticism since and I know in some respects it failed—I think the Albury-Wodonga experiment has a lot to commend it.

For example, I still think today that, rather than let Brisbane, the Gold Coast and Ipswich continue to just sprawl, we would do well to go onto the Darling Downs, perhaps south of Toowoomba, between Toowoomba and Warwick, and build a new city of 200,000 or 300,000 people with fast rail links and road links to Brisbane—because that has to be done anyhow. Those on the Standing Committee on Transport and Regional Services with the member for Shortland all know that, for the inland rail from Melbourne to Brisbane to work, we have to engage at some time or another with the Toowoomba range. Until we do that, a lot of these schemes are not going to work.

I think there is a great case for doing something about that and creating a new city on the Downs. It can be planned perhaps not with the same intricacy as Canberra but with the same sorts of values of wider footpaths and a better lifestyle. Plan it so you are not pouring money down the drain patching up after the event. I got up to give a small contribution, but nothing affects me or goes to the core of my being more than regional development, and I thank the member for Ballarat for the opportunity. I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.

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