Tony Windsor (New England, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

Mr Deputy Speaker Andrews, I have had some interest in this particular issue, as you would be well aware from your time in government. The Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Development and Northern Australia made some interesting comments a moment ago. One of the things that I thought was very pertinent is that on coming to government in 1996 the coalition was of the view that the Commonwealth had no responsibility in terms of regional development. The then member for Gwydir, John Anderson, made it very plain—he was part of the razor gang at that particular time—that regional development was all about the states and had nothing to do with the Commonwealth. So this notion that, as governments come and go, regional development is always part of the process is not always in fact the case.

What we are talking about here is process; what we are talking about is administration of programs. There is absolutely no doubt that those who look at the Australian National Audit Office report into the Regional Partnerships program will see that there have been breaches not only of the guidelines of the Regional Partnerships program but of the Financial Management and Accountability Act 1997. Those breaches are going to be very important in my view to a parliamentary inquiry into the administration of those programs—not only important as to what they identify in terms of the past history of some of these programs but also very important to how the guidelines are constructed for the future of these programs.

The government has been very scathing—and rightly so—of the administration of the Regional Partnerships program. But the opposition does have a point in my view in relation to this Better Regions program, some of which has been uncovered in today’s Australian. There are certain similarities between the government’s use of the Better Regions program and the previous government’s use of the so-called strategic opportunities notional allocation—SONA—guidelines that the leader of the National Party would be well aware of. They were the guidelines to bypass any guidelines so that you can fund programs without any procedures at all. The underlying difficulty that I have with what the current government is doing—particularly if they want to maintain some degree of higher ground on this issue—is that the funding of election promises should go through some process in terms of the administration of that money. Otherwise, the current government runs the risk, as the previous government did, of being in breach of the Financial Management and Accountability Act. The government itself has to be careful here if we are going to go to a stage where due process and protocols are put in place and where public funds are administered in an appropriate fashion for the future. We have got to make sure that even if it is in terms of an election promise to a community group—and there are very many worthy community groups out there, and we are all well aware of that—there has to be a process to determine how that money is allocated that is outside the political process.

There is no doubt that the Audit Office, when it looked at the administration of the previous government’s Regional Partnerships arrangements, found that there were gross breaches of its own guidelines. There were allocations of funds to private businesses to upgrade their equipment when their competitor was within 10 kilometres. The guidelines said that funding would not flow if there was not competitive neutrality. That was breached time and time again. There was money allocated, as we have heard today, to communities and private individuals in cases where they did not even ask for it—the application forms were not filled out. We have to learn from those mistakes, from those absolute abuses of power, and make sure that in putting in place guidelines they are fair to all concerned and are not being rorted by one government or another. Otherwise, this whole exercise will have been for nothing. (Time expired)

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