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

I regret that I have to lodge a dissenting report to this report, Funding regional and local community infrastructure: principles for the development of a regional and local community infrastructure funding program, final report. I have never done it before, and it is the only time in my 16 years experience of this committee that it has ever occurred—at least from the opposition side. I do so because I think it is important that this report have credibility based on the evidence. My mentor in this was the Hon. Peter Morris, a Labor Minister for Transport from this place and later chair of this committee. All his reports were driven by the evidence, even at times when it was not favourable to his government, and his reports had an authenticity about them that was recognised around the world. I think it is unfortunate that the emphasis on a lot of committees has changed so that the committee reports reflect the philosophical outlook of the government of the day backfilled with some of the evidence that might agree with that rather than what the evidence itself was. In saying that, I do not reflect on any of my colleagues—I am very fond of all of them—nor do I want to reflect on the hard work and professionalism of Michael Crawford, Sophia Nicolle and the people who worked on both the interim report and this final report.

The overwhelming evidence that we received at the hearings was that the witnesses had no beef with the ACCs themselves, nor for that matter their programs, nor for that matter their work. People saw them as being a very good organisation. They had plenty to say about the department, its slowness and its lack of appreciation of the projects. I know some projects went wrong; it is always the nature of these sorts of programs that, if they have a commercial aspect, some projects will fail. But all I can say is that I had a very positive outlook on it in my electorate and that most of my projects—not all of them but most of them—did have a commercial bent to them and played a significant part in bringing down unemployment.

If you are going to be a department of regional development and sponsor and spawn a new body called Regional Development Australia, how in the name of heaven can you step away from mentoring industry, including medium-sized industry, in regional Australia? It is a contradiction in terms not to do it. In addition to that, I am deeply concerned about the fact that, against even the government members’ recommendations, the government itself is rolling a lot of these regional development organisations into state regional development bodies. I think that that will in time be an invitation to state control—until some federal government gets sick of it and pulls its money—or, alternatively, an invitation to cost shifting.

There is no real integrated regional development in this country, and there has not been for 30 or 40 years. If you really want to see it done, and done well, go to Ireland, where the two major parties have a 10-year agreement not to fiddle with the regional development plan. That is the sort of thing we should be moving towards, not this pathetic picking at each other about whether your program is better than mine or not. We need to see our country develop and ensure that, especially, those areas in regional Australia which traditionally have had more trouble attracting industry receive some form of priority. In my dissenting report, I put a scale in place that honourable members can look at that says how I think money should be made available to the regions. I think that with grants of less than $50,000—and we saw this in evidence in Toowoomba—the RDA organisation should be able to allocate them on a simplified basis. That was the case with the particular state government department we saw in Toowoomba.

There are four levels of regional development: federal government, state government, local government and the community. The RDAs have to be part of that community and reflect that community. If they just become a pale reflection of the state government regional development organisation, I think they will be a failure and I would find that quite regrettable. I would recommend to the minister, who is settling this this week, that he really do something about it.

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