Jill Hall (Shortland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

In rising to speak, Madam Deputy Speaker Moylan, I congratulate you on bringing this motion to the parliament. I am not necessarily going to agree with everything you have in it, but I think it is important that we focus on regional development, and most of the members who are speaking on this debate come from regional Australia.

Madam Deputy Speaker, you make the point that the area consultative committees were established by the Hawke Labor government as regional advisory bodies to the federal government. Part of the problem that I have with the area consultative committees is that they moved from being those bodies that provided advice and had expertise in the area of regional development to bodies that really became bodies that assessed grants. I have to say that I would like to thank both the Hunter and the Central Coast area consultative boards. I worked very well with them, but there was some limit in the membership of those boards. I found that both of the boards failed to have representation from Shortland electorate, which to me was a problem. But I always found that they were responsive when I approached them about an issue.

There were some problems with those area consultative committees. They did not always have the power that they needed, their recommendations were not always followed by the government. On the Central Coast we had the issue of Tumbi Creek, where the area consultative committee made one recommendation and the previous government chose not to follow that recommendation. That shows that there was a problem in the operation of those area consultative committees and one that needed to be addressed.

The Rudd government is committed to building closer ties and developing partnerships between all levels of government, and I think that has been very apparent in a number of the decisions that have been made, and also working with local communities to make sure that local priorities are developed in a really inclusive way, so it is not some sectional interest pushing their own barrow. That is what we are hoping will happen and I am sure will happen with the new Regional Development Australia and the new committees that will be set up. I think it will improve cooperation across all levels of government by building better and by better aligning our resources to drive regional economic growth and investment. I am most hopeful that the electorate that I represent will actually have a greater input than under the previous board.

Regional Development Australia will bring together the three levels of government and give the regional community a direct line of communication with all levels of government in producing a new approach to cooperative regional development which builds on the successes of the area consultative committees. I want to emphasise that there were some really positive successes that the area consultative committees had, but unfortunately, as with everything, everything has a time and everything has its day. I think it is important to move on to new bodies that better reflect the needs and priorities of the current government.

This government is determined to work together with all arms of government to move away from what we had in the past. We constantly saw the previous federal government blaming the states when anything went wrong. Equally, the states could blame the federal government when things went wrong. Local government was just left out in the cold and was very much a poor cousin, yet local government is the arm of government that is actually closest to the people, closest to the community, and should be more responsive to community needs. I see the new organisations bringing all arms of government together, reflecting the needs of the community and stopping that blame game—stopping sectors blaming each other for the problems that exist and by doing that allowing the community to move forward. We will then have a better idea of what is best for the regions. (Time expired)

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