Wilson Tuckey (O'Connor, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The area consultative committees, as the member for Lyons just mentioned, commenced as a Hawke government Labor initiative. At that time, they were committees of an advisory nature and were very much focused on welfare issues. There was nothing really wrong with that, except that nobody took any notice of them. While they had a small budget and could make some small grants in the thousands of dollars, they were not really going to go very far.

When I, as the Minister for Regional Services, Territories and Local Government, was charged with the amalgamation of a series of assistance schemes grants, it became patently obvious to me that what was lacking in the community was a hands-on, close, defined body that could advise people on the processes that they needed to undertake and that could also provide them with all of the relevant information close to hand. At the time I referred to them as shopfronts, and I got the approval of cabinet for them to be restructured in that way. Amongst all the successes that I can remember of the Howard government, the operation of area consultative committees in that particular format was extremely successful.

The role of the ACCs included making recommendations for projects. It is an interesting point that, when the then opposition chose to criticise some of the grants that were made, they invariably accused our government, which of course always reserved the right to make grants directly, of not consulting the area consultative committees. The government did not have to, but at no time in that recommendation process did the local people, the ACC people, give the government bad advice. It was only part of a stage in the process. The ACCs recommended projects, which then went through an assessment process that was sometimes at the state office level but always at the Canberra level. That was done in a variety of areas—the most notable being Regional Partnerships. The Labor opposition at that time wanted to attack Regional Partnerships. They reckoned it was some sort of special scheme for Liberal electorates but, in fact, most of the Labor electorates that were in the regions did extremely well out of it when members chose to actually tell their constituents about the opportunities that were available. Some did not tell their constituents.

The current proposal is to say to the ACC people: ‘You didn’t do your job. We don’t want you. We don’t want an involvement of the Commonwealth at this level.’ The government, as is its right, has come up with a variety of other schemes, but it is asking sometimes existing and sometimes non-existing state development commissions—which we know of in Western Australia—to take over the job. The state development commissions throughout the country, and particularly in Western Australia, typically had about 20 staff and grants of matchsticks. They never had any money to give out and they were a huge bureaucracy. The ACCs were tight. I think their wages bill was limited to $300,000 a year. They were there seeing that the money went through the system and out into the community.

Under the terms of good administration of government, why would you sack those people? Why would you do that and hand over either to commissions that had to be created or that had a pretty poor record of letting the money get to real people. They spent it all themselves and I do not know if that will change. It has been my view over the many years that I have been in this place that when you give state governments money often it just seems to disappear, and that is the problem. I will take this opportunity to thank the member for Pearce for inviting me to second this motion. The reality is that I thank all those people for their good work, and I am terribly unhappy that they were sacked for their good work and hung out to dry when they were the good workers and the things they recommended and the help they gave were very important to individual people.

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