Kirsten Livermore (Capricornia, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a great pleasure to join with my colleagues the member for Riverina and the member for O'Connor, who are here, and of course all of the other members of the Regional Australia Committee who participated in this important inquiry.

It was an inquiry that I was very active in pursuing and initiating within the committee because I saw it was very necessary to respond to some of the concerns that communities in my electorate and other parts of Queensland have been expressing for some time.

Throughout 2010, and for a few years now, proposals have been put forward to expand mining operations in the Bowen Basin, and these have brought the questions of housing shortages, workforce shortages and the increased use of fly-in fly-out and drive-in drive-out workers to the fore. Existing mining communities like Moranbah, Dysart, Clermont, Collinsville, Blackwater et cetera have increasingly stood up in opposition to the loss of balance in those communities. As the local member, I was regularly being asked to come and attend meetings: to meet with the councils, attend public meetings and respond to inquiries in the media about this issue of fly-in fly-out/drive-in drive-out and what that means for the mining communities. And not just for mining communities but also those communities in Queensland that are situated on the coast—places like Mackay. That is the most obvious one, but there is also Rockhampton and others.

When I was being asked to respond to that as a local member I was up against the problem that this is not an area that the Commonwealth government has really been involved in and it is not an area where the Commonwealth government necessarily or obviously has many levers to work with on the face of it. So, as a local member, I was really in the position of responding to the phenomenon of fly-in fly-out workforces as they were impacting on the communities in my electorate very much from a perception or value judgement perspective. I thought, 'Well, that's just really not good enough when you are a member of parliament and part of the decision-making process.' There has to be a more rigorous, comprehensive and sound look at this whole issue. How big is it? What is the scale of it? How many people are involved? How many towns are involved? What are the consequences? What are the projections? Et cetera, et cetera. That is why I was very keen on this inquiry. I thought that a parliamentary inquiry was a mechanism not necessarily to provide answers but at least to scope out and to put on the agenda the issue of fly-in fly-out workers.

We tried to avoid making judgements about people's choices about where they live, what jobs they do and what companies do. Whatever you think about fly-in fly-out, if it is going to be a phenomenon of the scale that it is and that it is projected to be we need to understand what it means. What are the consequences? What are the costs? What are the opportunities? What does it all mean? I thought that it needed to be on the federal government's agenda and that the federal government needed to see where its policies intersected with fly-in fly-out, and that where problems were identified to measure and assess those problems and to be part of the solution.

One of the things that I really was hoping that the inquiry could shed some light on was the whole question of choice. Time and again when I was confronting this as a local member it would just be thrown back at me, 'Well, this is people's choice.' People choose to live on the coast or to live in a capital city and fly to take up work in the mining regions. You are always faced with that, and who can argue with people making that free choice?

On the other side, having talked to councils and people in the mining industry in places like Moranbah, Dysart and Blackwater, they say, 'But there's a waiting list for houses. If people are choosing not to live here and they all want to live on the coast, why is there a waiting list for housing in the town? Clearly, a greater number of people would choose to live here if it were possible.' Indeed, on the day that this report was released and we were fulfilling our media commitments around it, a quite significant article in my local newspaper referred to a developer at Clermont, which is in the heart of the Bowen Basin, who has completed 70 homes in that town and is turning the sod on another 80. Again, if no-one wants to live in the Bowen Basin, why is this developer putting his time and money into building 150 houses in the town of Clermont? I just wanted to pop the bubble of this choice argument.

You will see that a bit of a theme running through the recommendations is a desire to level the playing field. We made recommendations about the fringe benefits tax treatment of company housing, for example, as opposed to the FBT treatment of work camps, flights et cetera, and we recommended changes to the zone allowance. These recommendations are all about making it a genuine choice. When it comes to choice, the other important thing, as everyone in a mining town will tell you, is that there has to be housing. Housing has to be available and affordable in those towns.

One of the problems that I saw with this choice argument is that we were getting to a point where, while companies and state governments were constantly defending people's choice to fly-in fly-out, they were ignoring or completely devaluing the choice that people make to live in mining towns or regional inland centres. If you get to the point where fly-in fly-out becomes the norm and towns are overtaken by work camps, in defending one part of the population's right to choose to fly-in fly-out you are completely denying a genuine choice to people who want to live, make their lives and make communities in those inland mining towns. The towns would become so diminished by the lack of volunteers, pressure on infrastructure, pressure on services et cetera that you would no longer have a choice to live in those towns. So the theme of our recommendations was largely around trying to return choice to people.

The point made by the member for Riverina in his closing remarks about the ABS data goes to that as well. To have a fully functioning town with good services and good amenities, you must have accurate data about who lives in the town and who is seeking services and infrastructure from that town and really get an accurate grasp of what those figures are and how they should then be properly and fairly reflected in the funding that flows to communities. The example given by the member for Riverina is one that I know very well as the local member. The official population of Moranbah, according to census data, would be 8½ thousand. On any given night, there would be at least another 7,000 or 8,000 people, with that number growing by the day, living in work camps in that town. You no longer have a good quality of life in Moranbah if health, education, roads, sewerage, childcare services—you name it—cater for a population of 7½ thousand people when they are being stretched to about 15,000 or 16,000.

The other thing that really motivated me to pursue this inquiry was the question of planning. One of the big myths, as far as I can see, is choice. Another is the mismatch between what companies are ostensibly prepared to do in terms of infrastructure as distinct from what they are prepared to do in investing in communities, housing et cetera. Companies or state governments treat it like a gold rush—'Why would you invest in the town? Who knows how long it will last?'—and at the same time others say, 'Hang on, everyone is looking to invest in a $6 billion railway line.' Clearly, if people are investing in a railway line and a port, they would figure that it would last for more than three, four or five years. We are talking about 15 or 20 years, which is a whole generation. That is the other mismatch that I hoped this inquiry could get to the bottom of. It is all just go, go, go—build the infrastructure, get the minerals out of the ground and pretend it is all going to be over in four or five years—when communities are saying: 'Hang on, what about us in the meantime? You can build a railway line, but we cannot build a house.' There seems to be a real disconnect there.

One of the things that we were really impressed by—and this is reflected in recommendation 18 in the report—is what we saw in Canada. There seems to be a very different attitude to mining development over there. Australia and Canada are both resource countries and the places that we are talking about are mining and resource communities. None of us are anti mining, and none of the people in Moranbah are anti mining, for goodness sake; they just want to be able to live a decent life while they work in the mining industry and live alongside the mining activity. In Canada we saw people with the same support for mining, but there seemed to be much more readiness for local governments and communities to stand up and say: 'Hang on, you want this out of the mine, Company X. Here's what we want out of the mine.' At every step of the way the local communities are fully supported by their state governments, which is not something that necessarily happens in Queensland. I will not speak for other states. In Canada we saw a different way. In some cases, the companies operating in Canada are the same that operate in Australia but with a quite different attitude. In Canada, companies are much more prepared to initiate engagement with communities and be very proactive, not just in engaging with communities, local governments and state governments but also in rounding up other companies that are active in a particular region.

Recommendation 18 goes to the notion that the federal government needs to mirror some of what we saw in Canada and take a much more active role in doing some of that planning, projection and collection of data so that we have the ability to map out, region by region, what the resource activity means for the region—for example, what are the time lines; what is the population projection? Instead of making those decisions proposal by proposal, we would have a much more comprehensive view about what is happening region by region, and planning around community needs could take place at the same time as approvals for projects.

This was a very important exercise in putting this issue on the national agenda and in urging the federal government to be proactive about this, because the bill comes back to us in one form or other, whether it is in social costs or infrastructure costs. We need to get on the front foot with this. (Time expired)

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