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

As other speakers have said, this idea of area consultative committees had its genesis in the Hawke and Keating government. But when the Howard government came to power their role was expanded dramatically to take in not only social development but also some forms of medium size commercial development and larger community-type projects. It worked extraordinarily well in my electorate. I pushed the concept and I have pushed it hard. The member for Pearce put it quite well when she said that it was like a window into a district, and that it was. It was not so much a shop window but a two-sided window: it allowed government through this body to look into a community and see its needs; it allowed the community to look back through that window at government and to see how to handle those needs and how to fund those needs.

There were 54 area consultative committees. They were not-for-profit incorporated bodies and, as other speakers have said, they generally had a cap on their funding of about $300,000. The government had a measure of control in so much as it could appoint the chairs and deputy chairs of the committees, but that was never done to any excess, as I understand it. All I can say is that I had two ACCs in my area—the Central Queensland ACC and the Wide Bay Burnett ACC. They were exceptional, very successful bodies and their chairs, respectively Kym Mobbs and the then mayor of the Isis shire, Bill Trevor, were quite exceptional leaders. They were rich in human resources with people like doctors, engineers, lawyers, TAFE principals and executives, farmers and local government representatives on them—a rich resource of talent to advise the government.

I concentrated very heavily and unapologetically on commercial projects. Sure, I had some great social projects including the one that probably saw the new government turn around its decision not to fund the overhang of the community projects, the Lake Ellen project, where the television stations went to see this magnificent playground that had a big component of crippled children facilities to it. I think the minister saw that and said, ‘How can you deny projects like this.’ I congratulate the minister and the parliamentary secretary for their generosity of spirit. In addition, I got the Hinkler Hall of Aviation, which is a very important historic and community project in my electorate. I was working on a community centre for Hervey Bay at the time of the change of government.

But where I found the greatest help was in building up small industries. I did not have any dodgy ones in my electorate. Sure, not all succeeded. One or two failed. That is the nature of things when you are doing these sorts of projects. But what we had were projects that took local resources and products and turned them into other products and along the way created lots of jobs. I cite for example AusChilli, which is an outstanding project, and another one was Prime Fibre where I had the agriculture minister visit with me recently and I think he was very impressed with that project. Those things happened because there was a commercial aspect to them as well. I said to the owner of Prime Fibre as I was walking around with the minister, ‘Why was it so important, if this is such a big project, to have that bit of government money?’ He said that was the cement that sealed the banks into the project. The fact that the government would lead with this was incentive enough for the banks to want to come on board. That was a very important role.

In the remaining moments I would urge the government not just to merge these interstate organisations. We do not really have a system of integrated regional development in Australia, more is the pity. I think we could do a lot better by having these RDAs as freestanding bodies much on the ACC lines rather than organisations that I might say in time might end up being a cost-shift from the states to the Commonwealth. I urge the government to have a really good look at that.

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