Brett Raguse (Forde, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Firstly, I thank the member for Hinkler for his contribution. I know, as he said, he is very passionate about regional development and has been involved for a long time. That was certainly made clear in the committee work that we did. I applaud him for flying the flag of regional development. It is interesting that this interim report of the Standing Committee on Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government came about because of issues raised in the audit report and a whole range of other inconsistencies. In fact, the member for Hinkler did refer to the electorate of Forde by way of talking about Beaudesert Rail, and it was certainly my experience that that was a project that went badly wrong. Without a doubt, over all the inquiry and the different projects we looked at, it was one that had been reviewed to death, so it was not a case of us going through that again. But can I tell you it was something I had direct involvement with at one stage simply to try to resolve the issues on the ground.

Again, I thank the member for Hinkler for his contribution, because in a lot of ways he has had to take a lot of hits from the media and different areas of government because of some of those projects that went wrong. His area has gained a lot from these projects and programs, and it says something about having a local member or other people on the ground who can assist in the implementation of projects. This interim report looks at a number of ways and suggestions about how we might in future roll out these funding programs. I think that is really the essence of this. I do not want to get too political in my statements today, other than talking about Beaudesert Rail and some of the issues that occurred there because I think we will all learn from that project.

The report on funding regional and local community infrastructure provides proposals for the new regional and local community infrastructure program. In context, this new infrastructure program does relate to hard infrastructure—the sorts of things that the member for Hinkler has spoken about. The Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and local government committee was asked by the government to examine the Australian National Audit Office’s performance audit of the Regional Partnerships program and to provide advice on new funding models.

The hearings garnered a wide range of views about the previous program and a replacement program. One thing that came across was that the communities maintain the view that they need support from the government. Infrastructure is vital for communities to remain vibrant and to be able to deal with the increasing pressures of growth—the community halls that we build, the parks children play in, the pools during the long hot summers, and public spaces that contribute to the community and outer-community regions. We know that the previous system was broken. Some on the other side might not have that view—certainly not the member for Hinkler, from the statements he made—but I have just explained where and how this program can work if we manage well the replacement of the previous program.

Let us look at recommendation 1 from the committee report:

The Committee recommends that the government establish well defined and clear objectives for the Regional and Local Community Infrastructure Program that sit within an articulated Commonwealth Government regional development policy.

How we structure and manage these types of programs is very important. This recommendation is one of the most important with regard to the Regional Partnerships program. I think the previous government started to have a meltdown and there was a breakdown of the process. Occasionally, of course, there was political outrage and there was certainly concern from the media and the opposition at the time about what was going on. I think those of us who have had direct involvement with the Audit Office would say that they perform a very important function. The report was certainly an indicator of a whole range of things that just were not taken into consideration.

An example is in the seat of Forde. While the Beaudesert Rail project dates back to 1999-2000, it really had a meltdown by 2001, so it was a process over a period of time. I will give you an example from the recent election campaign—recent being a year ago now. I was of course a candidate for the seat of Forde. There were promises being made all over the place under the banner of the Regional Partnerships program. It is certainly a difficult thing for a new member to come into a community and find that a particular expectation had been developed during the campaign. As we looked more closely at the promises, we saw that they certainly were not valid; they were, in the truest sense, pork barrelling. I do not want to politicise my statements today, but clearly it was an example of something that was used as a lever in the election campaign. We know it happens, but it was clear on the ground. I am still working with the community to get some future resolution on particular projects.

One project concerned a community precinct in Jubilee Park, which is a major park in the centre of Beaudesert; the park was to include ultimately a hydrotherapy pool. Of course, hydrotherapy pools around the country now are becoming of major importance to people with certain health problems. They are certainly very, very important pieces of community infrastructure. There were letters that said the pool was confirmed, that it was going to happen. Those claims were baseless and the community were of course very angry that baseless promises had been made. As the new member, I basically drilled down and found out that they were baseless and then I had to inform the community that the pool was not going to happen and discuss how we were going to resolve it for the future.

Another project was on Tambourine Mountain: the Zamia theatre, which was a project that had been undertaken by the local community. A historic theatre had asbestos issues and, on the basis of the asbestos, the building was kept stable until such time as there would be funding to go towards its upgrade. They stripped the theatre of everything—its internal walls, every piece of asbestos—on the basis that they were to get funding to renew and renovate this building. Of course, that was another promise that was made and not ever going to be delivered on. When you look at a community like Mount Tambourine, you see that they value such pieces of infrastructure. The theatre is now inoperative two years down the track; it now is a shell of a building that will probably need extensive dollars. Of course, the longer it sits, the more money that will have to be spent to bring it back to what was a very important piece of community infrastructure, one with certain historical value. Again, it is something that I am dealing with in the electorate.

I am hoping that we can resolve such issues with the rollout of the new programs and the fact that we have had the Australian Council of Local Government bringing groups together, that we have local government involved in the process. It is certainly one of the recommendations that we have put forward: that councils should have various ways of accessing funding. Importantly—and I spoke about this yesterday in the House with regard to nation building, and we are going to talk about it again in fact—Labor governments are very much about the future, about having a vision and about nation building. Yesterday I used examples in the field of education showing that, from the Whitlam era through the Hawke-Keating era and now into the Rudd government, our vision for an education revolution is very much built on nation building. There is the soft infrastructure and the social infrastructure that we put in place, but these programs for funding community projects are very much about providing the hard, physical, infrastructure.

I know the opposition continually talks about us making false promises; they throw out catchphrases and say that we are hairy-chested about our promises. The reality is that we are nation building, and this is another component of that. We fund communities directly by engaging as many of the stakeholders as possible. Local government councils on the ground are certainly a major part of the way that we were looking at rolling out this particular program.

It is very important to understand what we have done as a government. The very first, historic meeting of the Australian Council of Local Government was about bringing local government to the table to start talking not only about how we might put in place a particular fund like this but certainly about all of the other opportunities we have to utilise the three tiers of government. We are now talking about the three ‘spheres’ of government. It is really about making those tiers of government more efficient. The role that local government will and should play in community development—and certainly in infrastructure development—is very, very clear.

If you look at Queensland, you see that there was a huge amount of political fallout over the council amalgamations, where we took 157 councils and turned them into about 73. It was historic, it was a mammoth task and of course, as you would expect, it raised a lot of concern in the communities. Interestingly enough, it is very much in line with how we fund local infrastructure, how we put projects into place. Local government is very much a part of it. People used to say and have said to all of us, ‘Why do we need local governments? Why do we need state governments? What does the federal government really do? Why can’t the federal government have involvement at different levels?’ The reality is that there have been constraints on how we do that. Local government is an area of interest to us of course; we understand that there really does need to be some reference within our Constitution to local government and the role it plays.

The three levels of government are here now—and I am sure they will be here for a long time, irrespective of what anyone’s desires may be. It is about efficiencies. I will give an example regarding the local government amalgamations in Queensland. We have all heard people say that we have too many politicians. People who do not engage with politicians do not quite understand what we do. That is a shame and that is probably something we need to manage a little bit better. Certainly in my state of Queensland when you say to those detractors, ‘How do we reduce the number of politicians?’ no-one can really tell you how to do it. But I note the efficiencies gained through the local government amalgamations. In Queensland there are now 770 fewer politicians because of the amalgamations.

When you talk to people about maintaining the three spheres or tiers of government, you should also note that we can build efficiencies and we can allow the implementation of funding sources like this to have direct benefit on the ground. Local government is very, very important to us. Less than 12 months into the amalgamations, Queensland is dealing with that. This is about funding programs that are in place with local government through our new dialogue. By bringing everyone to the table we can roll out a whole range of infrastructure—social infrastructure as well as the physical infrastructure that we are talking about here.

I mentioned before the example of Beaudesert Rail—and I said I would give some examples. It was a project that was well conceived. For the area, it was going to mean major tourism activity. But you had very aged rail infrastructure that had been closed for 15 years at the time. It had been closed for a whole range of reasons but certainly there was a need for ongoing maintenance. There were 40-odd timber bridges and 40 kilometres of not very good track. One of the reasons that rail line was never modernised was that it had some very hard bends, with soft foundations put in place in the 1860s. The state government at the time looked at that corridor to upgrade it as a normal rail service, and at that stage it was looking at something like $60 million just to put a basic service in place.

Five million dollars went to the Beaudesert Rail project—$5 million to get a historic rail system up and running! If you do the calculations it would be almost $5 million a year simply to maintain what was an ageing piece of infrastructure. In fact, it got to the stage where local government and state government came to the party—of course Queensland Rail still had some role to play in that particular corridor. Within the first couple of years, local government spent, in kind and in cash, far more than the $5 million that went to a project that was going to establish a rail. The 12 months of establishing the project—upgrading, renovating buildings and platforms and even putting a steam engine in place—simply gobbled up most of the money. In fact, this particular organisation was pretty much insolvent by the time it was due to open its doors.

While the particular rail ran for a period of time, we had much community anger because there were creditors who were owed large amounts of money. In fact, not only was all the money spent; there were creditors of probably $6 or $7 million unpaid. So this particular rail was never going to succeed. In the end, the creditors lost 85 per cent of the dollars when the administrators finally ruled everything out. There was so much anger in the community that the rail could not continue because there was a series of small sabotage activities against the rail—bridges getting burnt. It created an enormous amount of community anger.

That really is an example of projects that go badly wrong. Today I commend this interim report because I believe it is on the right track in terms of how we should better engage with local government. We should better engage federally directly on the ground to be able to fund programs but we must certainly have some very legitimate processes in place. On that basis, I commend this report to the House.

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