John Cobb (Calare, National Party, Shadow Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

I know a town of 150 people in the most remote location of New South Wales in a round cannot compete with the big ones. It is a fact.

I will go back to the debacle surrounding all this in the first place. The Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government, the Hon. Anthony Albanese, has been very disparaging of the previous government and of the National Party, in particular, over Regional Partnerships. He accused us of rorting the program and of terrible things. Yet this is the same person who had not been the minister for more than five minutes before he rorted big time a program about noise abatement and Mascot airport. He gave $14 million to a school in his own electorate but outside the program, so just to the one school. He did not even increase the region in which people could apply for the noise abatement funding, which I believe would have added something like $250 million—an enormous figure—to the whole program so that everyone else who was just as far outside the current program as this particular school in his electorate could have been included. He just gave it to that school. He did not make it available to anyone else. Without commenting on that any further, I say I do not think he of all people is in any position to throw stones or anything else.

Anyone who went and listened to people talk about this program would point out, as I think the member for Hinkler might have said, the people were not upset with anything except perhaps the time it took the department to do the processing. They were not upset with the program, they were not upset by the fact that it was commercial and in fact they were very supportive. Everyone I heard at the two hearings I went to was very supportive of the commercial aspect. All saw exactly what it did in providing jobs et cetera. They were very appreciative of the fact that it was flexible enough to allow Tibooburra to compete with the bigger towns, be they on the edge of Sydney or in the central west.

I am here in this parliament to represent the seat of Calare in western New South Wales and its country people. As well, I do see myself as being a member of the Australian parliament, not just as somebody from west of Condobolin in New South Wales. I think we have all got a responsibility. I believe I very much have a responsibility in that way to the taxpayer of Australia. I have a duty to equity, and I have a duty to seeing the taxpayer’s money well spent. I think the member for Parkes said something to the effect that if you do not take any risk, you actually do not have any gain either.

As for the old program, I think that, yes, we could have mucked around with the edges and made it better. But basically its aim was to give regional people an opportunity to help themselves. I would ask the Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government to stand up in parliament and say which PCYC, which medical centre and which community hall we should not have helped. If there were any failings in that program they were far outweighed by the good that it did. The first two medical centres in Australia that were helped by this were actually both in my electorate—not under my hand, and I was responsible for this program at one stage. The Cobar and Narromine centres were the first two, and they set a benchmark that went right around Australia. These were medical centres in areas that did have a problem attracting doctors and did have a problem putting records in one place. It has all done so much and set a standard for what can be done by common sense and by not having rules so rigid that a community is unable to access funding. That is what has been so good about it.

As I said, I have no great problem with some of the changes they want to make, like doubling the amount before you get to the stage of having to do the full process to make it quicker et cetera. That is fine, possibly even common sense. But I would beg those responsible, if we do get a program in the future—and, if we do, I will bet it is just before the next election, but no-one will actually get any money before the next election; I will guarantee that too—to not make it impossible for small towns. Do not make it a program that puts a council or a region in Sydney on an equal basis with a small, remote town in the electorate of Kalgoorlie or Lingiari. And that is another thing—as somebody who used to be involved in this program, I can tell you that, in fact, applications made from Labor electorates basically had a success rate equal to any other. In fact, if any area was down on the success rate of applications, I think it was our own, but there was virtually no difference between the success rate of applications out of Labor electorates and the success rate of any other applications. The fact that there were far more regional electorates in coalition hands—there certainly were in those days—than in Labor hands meant that of course more projects were successful in our electorates. After all, it was based on helping regional communities.

For the sake of people in the future I would beg the government to focus on being flexible enough to allow the small towns an opportunity not to have to compete with cities or large towns. I think that was one of the beauties of the previous program—it had the flexibility. It allowed them to do it and it did not mean that everything had to be run to a particular rule that disadvantaged them.

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