Robert Oakeshott (Lyne, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I am sure she will be a valued member of his community.

When I first arrived in the parliament I had a difficult decision to make in my first couple of weeks: whether or not to spend $80 billion. It was a pretty big call for someone who I do not think had ever used the word ‘billion’ before. It was a challenging decision to make, and the tipping point for me was listening closely to the head of Treasury, Ken Henry, who is from the electorate of Lyne and still has a lot of family there. I listened to him argue the case quite clearly that we should hit the ‘Go’ button and hit it hard. His reasoning caused me to support that stimulus package. It seems like an age ago but it happened only 14 months ago, at the end of 2008.

With the Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2009-2010 and the cognate bill, we are seeing some of the results of those actions taken 14 months ago. They appear to contain some reallocation of funding to the various programs that are wrapped up in the ongoing workings of government and also some funding for many of the stimulus measures. As this proposed legislation is being debated in the Main Committee it is not opposed. I am sure no-one in this place would oppose these appropriation bills, so I will give a bit of a rundown of some of the issues from a local perspective contained in these appropriation bills.

I am pleased to say that, 14 months down the line, now that we are starting to see some of the results of the stimulus, we on the mid-North Coast have been incredibly resilient during what was supposed to be a year of economic storm clouds. The regional labour force figures, which are released about two weeks after the national figures, came out last week. They have us for the first time under the levels prior to the global financial crisis. Unemployment on the mid-North Coast is at record lows. The figures for the Port Macquarie-Hastings region are just extraordinary at 5.8 per cent. While they are still slightly higher than the national averages, for a regional community that has traditionally had an entrenched problem of higher than normal unemployment rates to be now just about at the national average is a pretty exciting thing for us on the mid-North Coast. Communities in the north and south, in the Macleay and Manning areas, are still about three or four per cent higher than national averages, but, as everyone knows with statistics, it is all about the trend lines, and the trend lines are down and those trend lines are good. So there will be exciting times on the mid-North Coast if we can keep those unemployment figures heading in that direction.

All the feedback throughout the end of last year and the start of this year is overwhelmingly of a sense of resilience within the small business community and within many households. Yes, lots of people with their personal savings—in particular those who were on fixed retirement incomes—took a real hit throughout 2009, but what we are seeing is that even some of that is now starting to swing around. I would hope that, regardless of your politics in this place, that is a shared sentiment of, hopefully, good times ahead for all. So things are good on the mid-North Coast. Yes, there is plenty to be done, but those unemployment figures last week, in particular, were pretty exciting, I think, for everyone involved in the process of community building and trying to make a better place.

Over the last 14 months we have seen record funding into the electorate of Lyne. It is the most Commonwealth money ever going into the seat, and it is largely based around the issue that hit us at the end of 2008 and the stimulus package response. Also linked in last year—which I think was helpful and did make a difference—was a two-day visit from the Prime Minister and a community cabinet. They are things that inject a bit of spunk into the local settings, and many people had the opportunity to put their issues directly to cabinet ministers and to the Prime Minister. We are all watching to see how some of those issues are responded to.

It is one of those that I want to lead with, and that is the issue of health services. There are some mentions in here in regard to some allocations, rollovers or reallocations in health. On the mid-North Coast, we are sweating, and in fact in many ways it is D-day for this government in regard to how it responds to the issues around the Commonwealth’s role in the delivery of health care in Australia. The Prime Minister, to his credit, visited a local hospital in my electorate that is under enormous physical strain and physical pressure. Its ED and ICU are operating at twice the capacity they were built for. Everyone is doing a marvellous job in clinical care, but the physical infrastructure remains a problem. To the Prime Minister’s credit, he came for an hour’s meeting and stayed for two. At his call, he extended the meeting with the clinicians to hear firsthand what their views are on health care not only on the mid-North Coast but for future plans in Australia.

We are now sweating for some feedback. We are looking for some significant and difficult decisions from the Commonwealth about the future direction, and I would hope that sooner rather than later—sometime in the next three or four months—we get that announcement from government and that it is a good and strong one. It needs to be, because business as usual is unacceptable. As a growth region—and we are no different to any other growth region—we are missing out on equity in the state’s own funding formulas that they use. Populations move and government decisions seem to be very slow in responding to that population movement. We on the North Coast of New South Wales are consistently anywhere between two and four per cent under equity on the state’s own funding formulas—which in percentage terms does not sound like much but in dollar terms is around $50 million a year that we are missing out on because of the lack of decision-making fortitude to take away from somewhere else to deliver equity across the board. That is where the Commonwealth now has to kick in and start to flex a bit of Commonwealth money, show a bit of care on where those Commonwealth taxes end up on the ground and make sure that there is equity.

Importantly as well, the other message that came out of our community is that efficiency is not rewarded at present, and efficiency should be rewarded. Those hospitals or those others within the system that deliver efficiently in their health care seem to be asked for more rather than supported by more. If anything, the current mantra within the health system seems to be not to come in under budget but to come in over budget because, if you come in under budget, you will lose your allocation next year. There is no incentive for efficiency built into the system at the moment. There should be, and I hope that is a significant part of where the Commonwealth comes in and starts to claim a bit of ownership for the flowthrough of their dollars. So we watch and wait in anticipation. I hope that the Prime Minister and the community cabinet heard the messages about the importance of upcoming health care announcements loud and clear, and I hope that they respond and respond strongly.

There is also the issue of education, and we are trying to have our own mini revolution on the mid-North Coast. We are trying to really fire up the aspirations for education within the households of the mid-North Coast. Traditionally we have been an area that comparatively does not get as involved in education as other areas. That is to our detriment and I think it is not too much of a leap to directly link that to issues of lower than comparison wages and higher than comparative unemployment rates. Therefore, this aspiration for education is a goal that many of us are really trying to push our regions on.

The work that government is doing helps in many ways. For example, on the issue of tertiary education, we are traditionally an area where about one-in-six school leavers go on to education at a tertiary level. That is a long way short of the government’s own target of 40 per cent of 25 to 34-year-olds having a bachelor degree or higher by 2020. We have a lot of work to do and we need government to assist us in that work. That is why issues such as the youth allowance debate need to be resolved. They are not assisting in building aspirational spirit within the homes of the mid-North Coast. If anything, they are causing confusion, and the lack of a resolution through this place is scaring people away from making choices for their future that they might otherwise have taken and which have broader community benefits—and that is going to tertiary education of some sort.

The removal of caps in 2012 is pretty exciting for universities, and I think that is one decision that really talks to our region. I would hope that we can get some greater assistance from government in this environment in regard to the consideration of a window of about a five-hour drive between Newcastle and Coffs Harbour for a population of roughly a quarter of a million people who have no bricks and mortar campus. We rely totally on universities coming in and delivering a low number of places or an online university and distance education in an area where telecommunications are not crash hot. We have natural barriers in place at the moment which I would hope the government, as part of their revolution, are willing and wanting to blow up, and that we do have an NBN rollout that makes a difference in the delivery of distance education and that we have consideration of regions of Australia that do not have a bricks and mortar campus.

There is therefore the choice of either providing that and providing a campus experience or working overtime to get the universities—many of them with inward-looking sandstone views of the world and as to how their institutions run—to deliver and deliver well to regions such as ours. To date, it has been piecemeal and it has been in many ways more about a marketing exercise than anything else. It really has not crossed that bridge of allowing someone to truly go to university but still live in the location they choose to. So I would hope that we are in an environment where that matters to government as well.

At a school level, I want to mention some of the stimulus packages. I had a message come through only today about some of the ones that are being completed, so this is an opportunity to put those on the record. I will just run through the six schools involved. I have just had a report that Upper Rolland Plains has been finished as a stimulus job. Byabarra is a week away. The Comboyne renovations are just being completed, so they are nearly finished. The Long Flat school is almost finished. The distance education centre at Port Macquarie Primary School—and I hope everyone in this place has a love of distance education; it does matter, so those centres are critical—has been completed. The nice one today is Beechwood Public School. They are moving into their new library as we speak. That is some good news on the record with regard to education.

There are two issues I wanted to touch on in the time left. There are some moneys, allegations—sorry, allocations—and partial offsets with regard to immigration and citizenship tied into this appropriation bill. It probably is a Freudian slip to say ‘allegations’, because it is a topic that in this place has a lot of allegations wrapped in it. It seems to be a continual political sore, incredibly sensitive in the eyes of many. I went to a breakfast this morning with Catholic Social Services. Many other MPs attended. There was Justice Brennan. I quite clearly remember some of his campaigns over the last years to get government to think more clearly about this topic rather than messing with Australian borders and including or excluding islands. The issue here for us, I would have thought, is how we meet our international obligations of justice and how we process in a timely way those who, for whatever reason, are coming to this country.

The benchmark that is used internationally is 90 days. I would have thought that was a very nice goal for us to try to meet in our processing requirements, for good or for bad: weed out those who are unwelcome, throw arms around those who are welcome and try to do it within that 90-day time frame. If we spend our resources and put our focus on that, I do not think the Australian communities, pubs I go into or barbecues I attend will have conversations focusing on Christmas Island, Nauru or whatever location in which this processing takes place. So long as the process is timely and just, the location is less important. But there seems to be a lack of focus on the process and meeting those processing deadlines in a timely manner. The focus in this place seems to be more about where, and I think that that is disappointing and, hopefully, something for us all to reflect on.

An anecdote: I ended up on an email list of Rural Australians for Refugees and had some refugees who had finally made it as Australian citizens staying in my house. They wanted a holiday after having two years in detention and being split from their families. It was extraordinary to hear from them what the Australian process is: essentially, splitting families and putting them in jail for a couple of years in an exercise that is disguised as processing. I think we can do better. I hope we can do better. If we are going to welcome people into this country in a way that tries to make a better place, we want to have the best possible Australians coming through that process. At the moment, if we delay this process too long, we mess with people’s heads. We do not make better Australians; we make worse Australians as a consequence. It is in our national and sovereign interest to make it a timely and just process. I would hope that it is considered by all those who want to make the allegations on this topic in the future, picking at the political sore that is immigration and citizenship.

The final issue I want to raise is in relation to aged-care funding. I make mention of some aged-care packages that have just been released on the mid-north coast. The Greater Taree region has just received 180 residential places. The Hastings and Great Lakes regions have received 62 community aged-care packages. Hastings and Kempsey have both received 10 extended aged-care in the home packages. Coffs Harbour, which is outside, my electorate, has also received six dementia-specific aged-care packages.

These aged-care packages are critical for the future of this country. We are an ageing population. Unless we nail this, we are going to have some substantial issues at a community level. These packages are welcome, but I urge government to spend more and focus more on these aged-care packages, and in particular on the community aged-care packages. Everyone seems to love delivering those. It is the way aged care needs to be delivered in the future—in the home as much as possible. I urge the government, therefore, to up the efforts to greater than what they already are in order to make sure we meet that ageing population bubble in Australia that is hitting us right now. So, with that, I do not oppose the bill, and I certainly hope the money is spent wisely.

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