Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

My particular view is that they thought: ‘We know where we want the boundaries to be. We will hand-pick a team and call them the Queensland Local Government Reform Commission.’ I wonder and question whether a note of where those lines would be was scribbled on a piece of paper even before they started the process. I know that the member for Kennedy has concerns about that in his part of Queensland.

That notion that bigger is better started with looking at the books of councils. The first thing they did was say, ‘We are going to take away from the analysis all of your water revenue.’ So shires like Redland effectively lost the ability to count their water revenues on their balance sheets. But those same councils had to count all of their sewerage treatment plants. A place like Redland had five of them. That was highly inefficient. There was no way for that council to pull those down, move them and centralise them. But the councils, which are creatures of the state government or, as some describe them, body corporates of the state government, were not actually given a chance to be viable at all.

It is one thing to say that it is too small and it is not viable, but you need to look at the evidence. The public policy research—Sproats in 2001, Allan in 2003, Dollery and Crase in 2004—is clear. You can quote them all. You will not find any of the people making substantial contributions to the public policy debate saying that bigger is always going to be better. Allan said that bigger is not necessarily better at administrative level because efficiency and effectiveness of local councils actually is not a function of size. It is a function of other things, not size. The effectiveness of councils depends a great deal not just on size but on their location, on where their demographic sectors are, on where the utilities are placed, on where they have to get their services and sometimes even on rainfall issues and the need to maintain local roads. All that has an effect on council viability. The greatest one of all, which I know will be brought up by subsequent speakers, is that councils rely on state funding to survive. If the net government revenues of a state like Queensland are increasing faster than those of any jurisdiction in this country—faster than those of the Commonwealth—then where is the money going that should be running councils? We know that Queensland’s GST revenues may well be increasing at nine per cent per annum, but that is not being reflected in their funding to councils; in fact, far from it.

The other notion is that there are grounds to suggest that there are firm benefits from amalgamation—that in some cases there are savings that accrue by joining up councils. This is where I come to my next point, which is a little bit of the history that has not been adequately detailed. We know that there have been two previous failed referenda on this topic, in 1974 and 1988. They were held under very different circumstances and in a very different environment, and naturally a referendum will only succeed if there is a nationwide concern for the survival of councils. Where it happens step by step, state by state, it is unlikely that a referendum will be successful, and that is why local plebiscites are so important.

The member for Lingiari spoke of hypocrisy and said that if the federal government could make certain decisions in the national interest in the Northern Territory then the states should be able to do the same. This sort of pub style argument that if X slaps Y then Y should be able to slap Z simply does not stack up, because the Queensland constitution used to say—in 1993, before Premier Beattie got his hands on it—that there were specific grounds for compulsory and non-compulsory referenda if you wanted to change local government boundaries. Without taking up the valuable time of the chamber, effectively there were compulsory referenda where the state sought to merge and abolish and there were non-compulsory referenda where the state sought simply to move boundaries. They were in the Queensland Local Government Act 1993. They were clearly put in there because people have a right—and it is why we are here debating this bill—to decide how they are represented.

While states do have some control over councils, they should not have the right to eliminate, to amalgamate and to move without consultation. Under the Queensland act of 1993, until it was changed this year, they used to have a say. That quietly, methodically and systematically changed with the Local Government and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2006. It was part of the Beattie process where first of all he tilled the soil to make it easy to do, he removed the ability of people to stop him and then, of course, he made the claim, by using bracket creep, that councils were inefficient. Where just a handful of councils were probably non-viable, he managed to bracket creep to take it from probably 13 to 43. How did he do that? He said: ‘On a range of characteristics of local government evaluative markers, if just one of them is not viable or not fiscally strong, we will call the whole council non-viable. You need only to fail one criteria and we will call you non-viable.’ That is what they did. They simply moved the criteria until they got 43 of Queensland’s councils and then they had their reason to move them.

Then we had the backflipping, where they had gone one step too far in taking away from councils their right to have a plebiscite; all they could conduct were anonymous phone polls. What an appalling situation to get to in a country like Australia. Mr Beattie’s retirement is also very disappointing—while I respect a Premier who has had a long period in public office and their right to leave, to leave knowing that this was not only half done but poorly done, I think, really does let down the people of Queensland.

This is where I want to move to a more subtle point that has not been brought up in this debate—and that has been the view of the other side of this chamber and, in particular, of the member for Griffith, who quietly, when the reforms to Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory were proposed, marched his troops in like a conga line and told them to be mute on that issue, because that is what the polling had told him. When it suited him to get an invite up to Noosa and say that he was against amalgamation, suddenly the bloke down here said to the Premier up there—and normally there is not a bit of paper you can squeeze between them—’Look, I need to come out against you on this amalgamation stuff. Do you know what? Perhaps we can convince Queenslanders, who have a history of voting one way federally and another way in state elections, that our member for Griffith over here is right behind Queenslanders on opposing amalgamation.’ If you out there fall for that, you are a fool, because they are Labor and they have the same spots—and you cannot for a moment tell me that just because someone is elected to a federal seat and not a state seat in that same city, in that same neighbourhood, they hold an utterly different view on their local government.

Make no mistake: there is only one difference between Premier Beattie and the member for Griffith—one of them is elected and one of them wants to be. Infrastructure for roads has just evaporated away in the last year because of the panic to build desalination plants. It is okay for the Premier to wear that one, but you will not see the member for Griffith standing up at all in that regard. When it comes to water infrastructure coming way too late in Queensland, it has nothing to do with the member for Griffith. No; suddenly these two cannot be seen on a football field together. Then there are issues like the Nuwater Recycled Water Project to pump recycled Brisbane water from Luggage Point back inland to Gatton, to the power stations and Toowoomba. It was okay for Labor to bury that one for five years in the hope that the federal government would step in and fund it, but you will not see the member for Griffith standing by the Premier there. When it comes to locking up the bay—a simple issue of Moreton Bay rezoning—you will find all federal Labor members utterly mute on that issue and they will let the Premier do the hard slog.

The soft peddling occurs with the member for Griffith, who floats along in a Hawker Britton miasma of advisers, staying well clear of anything that looks, feels and smells like the Queensland Premier. That is sad for a movement like Labor, but it is what they have to do and it is what they will do to get elected. We will be reminding Queenslanders of that. That is why this bill is so terribly important.

The member for Capricornia was in the chamber. Will she be participating in the debate? I hope so. She represents an area directly affected by this appalling period of Queensland public policy. Will she speak in defence of her local constituents? No. Why is that? Has she been briefed explicitly to stay well away from the most poisonous of issues for 90 per cent of the land area of Queensland? Where are they standing up and defending the views of probably 90 per cent of their constituents? This issue is not one that falls 55/45, where we agonise over polling. This issue is 90/10. This is absolutely appalling. Any jurisdiction would only handle this issue if they knew they could do so without any political implications. That appears to have been the timing of what we have witnessed.

After the Queensland government rolled back on 22 August, I submit that only one public policy event occurred and that was on 16 August, the week before, when this bill was proposed. That is why this bill is very important. The member for Fraser—a very experienced person in public life—has now stepped up and said, ‘Look, I’m concerned about where the voting boundaries would be, what the logistics would be, the cost and the timing, and how difficult this would be.’ That is not what this bill is about. The poor people of Queensland just happen to have a federal election coming up in the following months, but these people are losing their system of local government completely and it would be wrong not to act. The fact that the member for Fraser is actually focusing on the minutiae of this bill just indicates that Labor really have not picked up the big picture—that is, large areas of Queensland are enormously distressed. The only thing that can turn that around is the bill we are debating today.

What we have from Queensland is a refusal to consult—and we are now used to that in Queensland. The notion that they punish Queenslanders who want to have their say is new—and I think that is probably what provoked the federal reaction. I think it has to be put on the record that I did speak on this matter very early—in fact, on 31 May. I signalled then that this would be a problem. That was well before August, when it attracted the attention of the public domain. What I was signalling there was genuine concern about this process.

Where are we at now? I want to defend our local councils, certainly those in the area I come from and all those up in the south-east Queensland area. They are working on optimal service delivery. They are contributing to regional economies. They are running their planning through the integrated planning authority. They are working on better environmental systems and social planning. They have partnered up into supra-council bodies, like SEQROC. They are working in virtual local government areas. They are cooperating with the federal government on a regulation reduction incentive fund of $50 million to help councils work together—and do you know what? This actually has been working very well. I am yet to be convinced that there actually was a problem with our local governments.

I am happy to say that we can go around and run a fine toothcomb through the administrative and financial processes of some of the small and very remote councils and we need to make a case that they are viable—and I know that someone who will speak after me will do that. I do not criticise the process of examination. That is not what this bill is about. It is about the removal of the right of ordinary local—in this case—Queens-landers to have their say. The fact is that they could have had their say from 1993 onwards. It was written in a Queensland act and it was removed earlier this year—maybe surreptitiously; I do not know—to set the soil and the political scenario to allow the Premier to do exactly what he has done.

We have a Queensland government who stopped listening. We have had their refusal to consult, their punishing of those who sought to speak against them and, today, exemplified by the fairly weak resistance from the other side of the chamber and their decision ultimately to support our bill, clear evidence that we have in the member for Griffith ‘do anything, say anything and try anything in order to get elected’. If it means bailing out on a state Premier now, that will happen. We need to ask ourselves a very hard question: where would we be with wall-to-wall Labor, had this whole diabolical process happened and had there not been a coalition government to pull it up? I support the amendment of this act.

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