Chris Bowen (Prospect, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

And benefits everyone in the region. It is now 10 years since the Better Cities Program was abolished and we have seen 10 years of lost opportunities when it comes to the sorts of programs that could have been funded under Better Cities.

I would also like to make mention of the issue of flood mitigation, which is a particularly important issue in my electorate. Under the previous government’s Urban Flood Mitigation Program, funding was provided to local councils on a 2:2:1 basis—that is, two from the federal government, two from the state government and one for local councils. A lot of work was done under that program, particularly in Fairfield city. Many of us in Fairfield, including me, remember the impact of the 1988 floods, which left a damage bill in our city alone of $15 million and at least 700 dwellings and more than 30 factories flooded above floor level. Emergency services rescued 550 people. I remember trying to get home in the 1988 flood. I had to jump fences and swim across my neighbour’s backyard just to get home. It was a particularly devastating thing for Fairfield, and over the last 20 years Fairfield City Council has made a really strong effort to conduct flood mitigation works to reduce the impact of future floods. The 1988 flood was what we call a ‘one-in-a-hundred-years flood’, but it is likely to come again and Fairfield City Council has identified $23 million worth of outstanding flood mitigation works. The Urban Flood Mitigation Program was effectively emasculated by the incoming Howard government in 1996 and there has been very little federal government support for flood mitigation since that time. I think Fairfield City Council has written to every successive minister for local government and to the Prime Minister, and the issue has been raised at local government conferences; yet we have seen no action and no progress.

I want to refer briefly to the matter of child care, which is of course an important matter in the community. I was concerned that the federal government recently changed the way in which the child care supplementary worker program was implemented. Fairfield City Council, amongst others, has for 20 years provided the supplementary worker program, which is a program whereby child-care centres are given support and assistance in dealing with children with special needs, who have a greater call on resources and have special educational needs in the early years of their life. That program was put out to tender and Fairfield City Council bid, with other south-western Sydney councils, to continue the work that they have done over the last 20 years. They lost that tender and the work has now gone to another organisation. I have nothing against that other organisation and, in principle, putting government services out to tender is nothing that I would object to, but where you have a council that has done good work—nobody has complained about the work; it has been done efficiently for 20 years—I really would question whether the move to put that work out to tender has been driven by a case-by-case analysis or by an ideological approach.

I do want to say something about local government itself. I think local government could do more to help itself. The honourable member for New England referred to this. I feel there is more scope for amalgamation in local government. I cannot claim to speak for other states. Sydney is the only city that I know well in terms of the local government boundaries. But I think that, for efficiencies, larger councils are better. I served for nine years on a council of 200,000 people, which makes it the fourth biggest city in New South Wales. I think that councils with very much smaller populations than that could do well to examine the prospects of amalgamation. I do not refer particularly to rural areas, because they obviously have big areas to cover, but to metropolitan areas where you have very small councils. Fairfield City Council, I once said when I was mayor, mowed the same area that some of the smaller councils were in total. Fairfield City Council’s parklands were equivalent in area to Hunters Hill Council, which is one of those councils that should be looking seriously at amalgamation to improve the services it has available to its residents. I think amalgamation should as a general rule be voluntary but that local government should be taking it very seriously.

The other initiative that I think councils should be embracing is the Independent Hearing and Assessment Panel, which again we introduced in Fairfield council. We were, I think, the second council in Australia to introduce one after Liverpool. It is a process with a much less confrontational approach to development approvals—

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