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

I would like to preface my remarks today by saying that none of my comments are said with any rancour or lack of respect for my Labor colleagues. I think sometimes we tend to politicise committees and we should not. I have immense respect for my Labor colleagues, but, with the greatest respect to them in this particular instance, I think that they have written their report to an agenda rather than to what we received in evidence. We did not receive evidence that would have justified a number of things that have gone into the body of the report.

Wherever we went in Australia with this inquiry into the funding of local and regional community infrastructure, one thing stood out—and that was that there was no criticism of the program itself. There was criticism of the administration of the program by the department—such things as the slowness of getting applications dealt with, rising costs while applications were being dealt with and puerile questions being put to ACCs or proponents of programs, and those sort of puerile questions indicating that either the department did not have a knowledge or an understanding of the region where the particular project was going or alternatively—and I am reluctant to say this—they were trying to slow the process down.

One project in particular that stood out was a very elaborate playground that included access for disabled children and road safety training areas for kids on bikes. That project had been going on for over six years—not all through the department, I might add. There was a lot of preamble work done on that project in the community. I attended lots of meetings in the early days of that project when it was to be located near the olympic pool. It is called the Lake Ellen project, being located near Lake Ellen in the Baldwin Swamp environmental area of Bundaberg—a beautiful area.

One of the issues that slowed the project down and nearly cost the project its Commonwealth funding, because at that time the government was going to cancel those community projects that did not have contracts signed off—and I congratulate the government on going back on that and allowing those projects through—was the fact that the department wanted to know whether the Bundaberg City Council was a fit and proper person to run the project. That should be a given. When someone says to me, ‘Oh, some funny things happened at Wollongong’—come on! We have all these local authorities across Australia; to try to drag out Wollongong to make all the other local authorities look suspicious is just puerile.

This report is not supported by the evidence. I remember that at the meeting in Toowoomba, which I chaired, I asked the question: what are the criticisms of the Regional Partnerships program itself? I repeated the question. There were no criticisms. In fact, the member for Gilmore, who was sitting next to me, said something like, ‘Oh God, you’re game.’ But I wanted to hear what people had to say about the program. Almost everywhere we went there was not a criticism of Regional Partnerships. There was certainly criticism of the way it was administered—mainly, I might say, by the department. In fact, very few of the witnesses made any reference at all to the audit report, which I thought they would. I thought there would be a lot of argy-bargy around the Australian Audit Office report and there was not. There was very little.

After I said, ‘At every meeting we went to there was praise for this program’, one or two of my colleagues said to me, ‘Well, there are a lot of ACC representatives there and they would say that anyhow.’ Come on! Look at all those ACCs—57 or 58 of them across Australia. Most of them were very well conducted; certainly the ones in my area, Wide Bay and Central Queensland, were outstanding over the years and the chairs of those committees ended up on various Commonwealth reference groups because of their leadership. Are we seriously trying to say that all those voluntary people—engineers, doctors, accountants, farmers and union representatives—who all had busy lives were going to come and prostitute themselves in a concocted or confected scenario? Because the ACCs wanted the program, what these people said was suspect? That is a terrible slur on all those voluntary workers across Australia for the last 12 years. Remember, this program in its genesis was a Labor program, continued by the Howard government. It was a good program.

I am not saying that every project was good. There are always failures in this. There is a risk factor when you have a program as extensive as this. If you want to look back to the previous programs of the Hawke and Keating governments, there are plenty of failures there too. Have a look at some of the outrageously indulgent RED scheme projects. Some of them were just so wasteful it is almost unimaginable that they could have got through. Then there was the final employment program under the Keating government: the figures showed up after the event that it was costing $100,000 a client to get these people supposedly into jobs.

For $100,000 you could have bought someone a business. So do not say to me that, because there were a number of failures in the Regional Partnerships program, suddenly it was deficient. Nine-tenths of these projects, or even a higher proportion, were very good and, in my opinion, some of the ones that failed were underresourced. They were not indulgent in the sense that they had too much money and they were throwing it against the wall. The one I would cite is the Beaudesert to Bethania railway line. I could never see that being done for $5 million; that was probably a $15 million or $20 million project. It was a good concept—it was to link the people from around Beaudesert in south-eastern Queensland into the suburban rail system of Brisbane and, in turn, into the city. The concept was also forward looking, and the principle involved in it will probably be a term of reference that the minister gives this committee to look at in the future: how do we get rail services out to outer metropolitan and country areas? So it was a good concept, and there were others.

I have been in regional development for over 20 years; I know the field well. Some of the things that have been put into this report are the complete antithesis of good regional development. Regional development must be holistic. You must take the community, its resources and services on the one hand and you must take its means of production or its manufacturing base on the other hand and make sure that they work in harmony and work together. Tourism is a further overlay over that. You pull one of the components out and you get a lopsided community engagement. The other thing with regional development is that you must have a sense of ownership. That is absolutely vital. You cannot just impose government structures on people in country areas and get a result—it just does not happen. We have had examples of this over the years, especially in Victoria. Once the state government or the federal government pulls its money out, the whole regional development organisation falls over. For 12 or 18 months or two years nothing happens and then you get another model and work it up.

The way it should be done is by involving the community. For example, development boards should be in every town. They should be funded by, firstly, the local business community, which should pay a subscription; secondly, the local authority; thirdly, the state government through the department of state development or whatever it might be called in each state; and, fourthly, the Commonwealth government. It should be run by a board of local people. The best models in Australia have had that structure. Regional Partnerships or the ACC model came very close to that. But the model that my colleagues are suggesting will be much less than that because, in my belief, there is going to be far too heavy an emphasis on local government. I was ambivalent about assessment panels, and my appeal to government members is that they realise that if assessment panels are largely federal, state and local government and do not have those core people who understand how regional areas work then the whole system will not work. The very criticism of the department in this fiasco is that people in the department—and there is clear evidence of this—did not understand how things worked in the country or the scope of the various projects. If you are going to have an assessment panel that is set up roughly the same way, you are going to have a repetition of that lack of engagement. I am saying: if you have assessment panels, make sure that they contain businessmen, accountants, engineers—people who have an on-the-ground understanding.

The other thing I would say is: do not try to run this program through state offices. I suggested in my dissenting report that we should have three regional offices in Queensland, three in New South Wales, two in Victoria, two in Western Australia and one each in Tasmania, South Australia and the Northern Territory. The reason for that is that every two or three ACC or, as we are going to call them, RDA regions could be clustered under that regional office. There should be field officers, I agree with the report, but the field officers should be confined to that part of the state where they have knowledge and engagement. If you do not do that, you are going to have remote decision-making processes. So if you want to look at field officers, yes, I agree with having them, but I think it should be contingent upon them being in regional offices in regional areas. For God’s sake, don’t try to run this thing out of capital cities. I acknowledge that the parliamentary secretary has closed some of the capital city offices and I congratulate him for that, but I think he must replace those with a goodly number of regional offices.

I put in my dissenting report how I think this thing should be structured. I do not think there was a Sustainable Regions Program; wherever we went, people were saying that there needed to be a model like that where the proponents do not need to find 50 or 60 per cent of the money but, rather, 10 or 20 per cent. That is for deprived regions in endemic drought or unemployment or whatever it might be. We have another report to come and I have got a lot more to say about it. I am passionate about regional development. I think my colleagues have got it wrong and I will continue to pursue this matter well into the development of the program.

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