Ms Anna Burke (Chisholm, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I welcome the motion before the chamber today and the amendment that has been moved by the opposition. I was privileged to be part of producing the rather lengthy report that forms the basis of the motion before the parliament today. It is long overdue; the report was tabled in October 2003. I suppose it is a case of better late than never. While the motion before the chamber does mirror what is in the report’s recommendations, it does not go far enough. It certainly does not recognise the complete value that local government adds to our community. When doing the report we adopted, I suppose, a pragmatic view that, yes, constitutional recognition by way of referendum was preferable but, as it was not really within our power as parliamentarians to deliver that, what we could deliver was the motion before parliament today. Local government often feels like the third wheel: ignored by everybody. As one witness in Perth put it most aptly, ‘Local government is the shag on the rock overlooked by everybody.’ We got him to repeat it again because we thought getting that into Hansard was pretty cute. It really did sum it up. Out there in the land of government services, local government was seen as just rates, roads and rubbish. Of course, they are far more than that.

One of the difficulties of dealing with this report and going across the country—and you only need to look at the number of submissions we received—was that I think the vast majority of local government councils at the time of the report, and there were 721, put in submissions. We made a valiant effort to meet with as many of them as we possibly could. I can attest to that because I kept getting on planes that kept getting smaller, and the pilots kept looking younger. We endeavoured to meet with those people out there—the people who have a lot of that face-to-face interface with their communities in delivering services.

A big difficulty is: what is local government? What does it actually deliver? Each local government is so incredibly different. You only need to look at the size of the geographical area that some local governments cover. In Perth, some are as big as Victoria and some, like Peppermint Grove, are literally one block. The inconsistencies in the size of areas represented by local governments makes it difficult to actually regulate what they do. Some councils are responsible for airports, some councils are responsible for ports, some councils are responsible for transport and some councils are responsible for sewerage. Other councils have gone into massive service delivery.

In my neck of the woods, my two major councils both have retirement villages and nursing homes. They own them, run them and provide the services. In Victoria, councils have taken on a great deal of aged care servicing, so nowadays it is viewed as council’s responsibility. They are actually getting funding from the Commonwealth to provide that service. They are the service deliverer. But they are now seen by the community as the people responsible for that. If something falls over, the council gets blamed. This really is iniquitous because they are just providing the service model.

One of the difficulties was actually going around and saying to local governments: ‘What is your job? What should you do?’ Fundamentally, they kept saying, ‘We need to do whatever the community asks.’ That is all well and good if you can fund it and support it. One of the great difficulties is that rates can keep going up and people can keep getting hurt by them. Councils can look for other revenue bases like fines and fees. I can certainly attest that both of the councils in my neck of the woods are getting in a lot of fines—and I am paying the majority of them! So we are out there subsidising the other method of creating revenue for these councils, but it is unsustainable. There needs to be a far more sustainable basis of funding for these local governments so they can provide the vital services their communities demand.

But local councils also need to get to the stage of saying, ‘No, this is not our responsibility.’ Just because the state or the federal government puts out a funding model and says, ‘Look, you can tender for this,’ should it be the responsibility of local government to apply for those funding dollars? What happens is that a lot of those funding dollars are offered on the basis of a two-year program. At the end of two years the program is over and there is no more funding, but the local community says, ‘No, that service must continue.’ So what does local government do? It picks up and continues funding that and has to find a revenue base to do that. It is unsustainable. So a lot more recognition has to go into what the role of local government is. During the inquiry we decided that that was virtually impossible for us to quantify and answer, but we did conclude in the final chapter of this report that a way forward was to have a sensible discussion and for all levels of government to ask: ‘What are our basic roles and responsibilities? Where is there overlap?’

It has been estimated by an academic who provided research into the report that about $20 billion is wasted in duplication through the three levels of government. We can have the debate about whether we are overgoverned and whether we should get rid of a tier of government, although that is probably a long way off. But, at the same time, there is massive duplication. If you have someone who comes into your electorate office and says, ‘I’m looking for assistance with child care,’ you can actually go to three levels of government to find them that assistance with child care. If someone comes and looks for assistance with aged care, you can again go to three levels. A lot of it is duplication. A lot of it is waste. We need to finetune that—we need to sit down and actually work that out.

We recommended that the council of ministers come together with an appropriate representative from local government. One of the difficulties in this report was finding out who actually speaks on behalf of local government. Their peak bodies would say, ‘We can only come if we’ve had a motion; we don’t really speak on behalf of them.’ But getting representation for what is now 700 local government authorities to come and actually provide a voice is virtually impossible. A greater sense of who is speaking on behalf of these groups needs to be achieved within local governments so that they can come with a clear voice. The Australian Local Government Association do a good job, but they are limited again in what they can say on behalf of local government. So we need to ascertain who speaks on their behalf.

Towards the end of the report which forms the basis of the motion today—in chapter 7, which we titled ‘The way forward’—there is a good quote from an official from DOTARS. He said:

The FAGs act is really structured on the basis that local government is a creature of the states. It does not provide a direct relationship in that sense ... To move away from that requires the Commonwealth to take a quite different view of local government, its relationship with it and its governance. That is a debate which really has only just started—it is probably a starting point which the committee’s report will provide some guidance to government on.

Yes, it has, and this report does go some way to doing that, but the first step is for the federal government to recognise local government—to say, ‘Yes, local government is a valid part of the governance within our country,’ to give it credence and to then sit down at the table and talk to local government, because the federal government requires a great deal of service delivery through local government.

A lot of the reports, submissions and information provided to the hearings were very complimentary of the Roads to Recovery program. When we first started out on this adventure, the member for O’Connor was the minister and he moved that we go down the track of doing this report—and I commend him for it. At the time it was probably a bit of a political swipe at the states, because it was about cost shifting from the states to local government, but we discovered that cost shifting is not just from state government but also from the federal government. There is also a bit of cost shifting back from local government onto both state and federal levels, but it is virtually impossible to quantify that.

As the CEO from one of the councils that fall under my area said: ‘Cost shifting happens. Let’s draw a line in the sand. Let’s not worry about trying to redress it. Let’s move on. Let’s work out how we can go forward in a better model of funding, with a better system of distribution of grants to local government so we no longer have this cost-shifting problem. Let’s not have this blame game or this situation where, at the end of the day, the ratepayers are picking up the tab because the only way local government has of finding the shortfall is to increase people’s rates.’

There has been a great deal of discussion from the Prime Minister recently about opening up land and ensuring that more land is available for first home owners to purchase homes. In those discussions, the impact that would have on existing infrastructure has not been looked at. It does not look at any of these massive growth corridors. The member for Holt can testify to this probably much better than I can, because my suburb is very well settled, but there was no thought of how you would deal with the services in this urban sprawl—the water problems, the road problems and the sewerage problems. If you build a new suburb, you have to build a new school, child-care facilities and things like that, and the impost falls to local government.

There has been no discussion about how local government could pick up those things. The federal government—in its talk, which was a beat-up rather than about taking responsibility for interest rates—had not looked at its responsibility to and its relationship with local government. It is local government that will bear the brunt and, at the end of the day, it will be the ratepayers. I can tell you from various discussions that developers do not want to pick up these costs. It is the ratepayers who will bear them.

It is also about our environment and our way of life. In previous Labor governments there were ministers who were passionate about urban sprawl and good design. People such as Brian Howe and Tom Uren did some great work, but that has all gone by the bye. We never see that any more. We never talk about good urban planning, good design and good development; we just have political grabs that suit the purpose of the day. But we need to think about these things. Federal government needs to have a much better relationship with local government so it can put these things in place.

Certainly, environmental issues fall very heavily on local government—for example, water conservation. One of the great difficulties that was discussed throughout this report was the system of FAGs and the distribution of funding from the Commonwealth via the Grants Commission to the states. There was a lot of confusion about how it worked, who monitored it and who supported it. The report says that we should go back to basics and reassess how that money is distributed, because some councils have a great revenue base and some rely solely on their FAGs. We need to redress that and to work it out. At the hearings, one councillor from the Maroondah City Council put it this way:

At the moment each municipality plays the game of ‘trying to maximise your grant’ at the expense of other councils playing the same game in a scenario where none of them fully understand the rules of that game. This is a recipe for a waste of effort and perennial frustration.

And that came through time and time again: the complete, perennial frustration about how grants worked, how they were allocated and who worked it out. The federal government, by recognising local government in this way, now has the responsibility for going back and assessing how those grants are delivered, who actually is responsible for them and how they all work. Some councils are missing out and other councils are doing well. When you have the Brisbane City Council in the same funding pool as a tiny regional council in Queensland, competing for the same set of funds and not knowing what the rules of engagement are, it is very complicated. And it is those smaller councils that are obviously missing out.

At the same time, one of the greatest frustrations I have is representing a suburban electorate—where the majority of people live. Often my constituents are very frustrated that there is no such thing as a ‘burbs’ grant. There are rural and regional grants that go on out there, and sometimes my constituents get very annoyed that they pay all these rates for all these things but are never recognised as living in an area of need. And sometimes there are areas of need within those suburbs that need to be recognised.

Certainly, one of the difficulties is, as I said, quantifying what local government does. One of my local councils run a very effective small business incubator. It is a model that other councils recognise and look at. But is that the role of local government? They have decided that it is. There was a void there that state and federal governments were not filling. They run this very successful small business incubator that has now produced some great small businesses in our area which have been able to move out into their own premises. We need to go back to basics and say, ‘What is it that the levels of government do?’ so that we are not having this duplication and this constant moving about on where to go and what to do.

As one of the other councils put it, councils are also stepping back from accepting infrastructure grants because they also need to determine what their roles and responsibilities are. I will quote again the Mayor of the Bega Valley Shire Council. He said:

We basically said as a council, ‘It is fine to get the funding for some new infrastructure—a new toilet block or a new boardwalk or whatever—being matched fifty-fifty, but do we really need that or are we better using that $100,000 or $200,000, or whatever the matching figure is, to do something that the community really needs, like fixing the roads or upgrading some old timber bridges?’ We made a conscious decision to reduce the matching grant funding and use it for only stuff we really need rather than stuff that looks nice and maybe has a nice community feel.

And that is one of the hard decisions that local government needs to come to. I always say to councils in my electorate that they have a much harder job than I have. They do it part time, they get paid nothing and they are generally the ones abused at local functions—whereas we can swan around and get away without facing that absolute abuse. Most people know who their local councillor is, because when the rubbish has not been picked up they are the person who gets the blame. They are the ones that really take it on the chin. I think councils need to decide what their main game is, instead of accepting funding that they cannot use or that they accept and then need to continue. I commend the motion and the amendment moved by the opposition to the chamber. (Time expired)

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