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

Let me first congratulate the committee, and especially the previous speaker, who is a member of that committee, and the member on duty at the table for this excellent report, The cancer of the bush or the salvation of our cities? That is a very provocative title, as well it might be. When you go through the report, you realise that there are no simple answers to this. This is a very complex problem. In saying that it is a complex problem, that does not mean that we can just walk away from it, either.

I looked through a lot of the recommendations. One of them was that there is a requirement for accurate measurement of the fly-in fly-out numbers. I think that is a very important thing if we are talking about taxation, fringe benefits tax, quality of life, comparing one region with another, comparing the degree of remoteness and all those other things. You have to have accurate statistics because otherwise you are making guesses in the dark.

Another recommendation was the allocation of funding to reflect the resident and fly-in populations—in other words, those places with a residential population that have their services overstretched by fly-in fly-out or drive-in dry-out populations should be reimbursed in local government terms or at least the councils of those areas should be given some adequate readvertisement for the services that they have to provide.

The report goes on to call for an assessment of the consumption of local services. That is very important because, whether you like it or not, if you have a camp a kilometre or two out of town, it is going to use a very high proportion of the local services, especially in the smaller country towns. The report goes on to talk about medical services, because you might have one doctor looking after a reasonably small country town. It is another thing to have a doctor looking after a huge mining camp and a country town. It begs the question, although it is not touched on in the report in these terms, of whether or not it should be compulsory in granting status for these projects in the early days of their development to insist that for a population above a certain number of workers a permanent doctor has to be provided on the site. That would certainly relieve localised medical services of heavy responsibility, especially in those construction stages where say you are building a mine and you might be using 2,000, 3,000 or even 4,000 people to do that. When you come back to the operational stage you might drop back to 700, 800 or 1,000. There is a big difference.

Even if during that developmental phase the medical services were boosted by the companies carrying out those developments to take medical strain off the local hospital, that is not to say the local hospital will not be used for emergencies. That is not to say that the local doctor would not cooperate with the doctor on the site and all that sort of thing. All it says is that you would boost medical services to reflect the particular spikes in a very big development. I can think of a case in point. Take Gladstone at present, where you have three LNG plants being built simultaneously. Imagine what that does to services in Gladstone, whether they are civil services or medical services or whatever.

The report goes on to talk about fringe benefits tax exemptions and whether they should be removed where an accessible township exists or allowed in the operational phase of a project. Sure, you would allow perhaps the fringe benefit exemption to get people in there and get the project up and running, but would you allow it once it gets into operational mode? As the member for Durack just said, some of these camps have excellent services of catering, accommodation and the like. Fringe benefits tax could be one of the keys to encourage or discourage aspects of fly-in fly-out. The report talks about zonal taxation, as the previous speaker did. Should the zonal taxation arrangements only apply to the permanent workforce? That is a tricky one. Your natural instinct would be to say, 'Yes, we'd allow it for the permanent workforce'—or resident workforce; or the permanently resident workforce to be completely correct. But then we also have this dilemma going on in Australia at present of the alleged misuse of 457 visas. If you do not make it sufficiently attractive by way of things like fringe benefit tax and zonal tax for Australian workers to go out and take on these jobs in remote parts of Australia, especially in the west and the north, then are you not going to cut your own throat and find that you cannot get resident Australians to participate in that development? That too would be a tragedy.

Then you have the other thing to have zonal taxation of where, whether you are resident or not, would it be appropriate that it was paid. A case in point would be an oil rigger. You are remote when you are on an oil rig; you cannot get anything much more remote. Therefore, where you might say where there is a township and a permanent workforce there is no justification for fly-in fly-out, it is pretty hard to extend that argument when it comes to an oil rig.

As I said at the beginning of this contribution, this is a very difficult subject. But if you want to look at the history of the development of Australia, you need to have an appreciation of what were the driving things that took people into regional Australia and how communities developed. From time to time in this place we hear criticisms of the National Party leader of Queensland in the seventies and eighties, Jo Bjelke-Petersen. I, for one, am not a critic of his; I am a great admirer of his. What he did is he built railways and things by getting companies to participate, for example, by way of royalty or by way of doing special projects in the development of those railways. The other thing he did is he insisted the towns—

A division having been called in the House of Representatives—

Sitting suspended from 17:42 to 17 : 56

Before the suspension, not surprisingly I was talking about Joh Bjelke-Petersen. I was saying that one of the things he insisted on was that mining companies play a part in the development of railways and the development of settlements. While I am sure there has always been an element of fly-in fly-out, during the Joh era whole communities developed and have survived. A few have gone, like Mary Kathleen, but if you go to Central Queensland, in the hinterland of the member for Dawson, for example, all the towns that grew up in that era—Blackwater, Saraji, Moranbah, Dysart—are certainly towns that peaked. They went back a bit as the peak came off and certain mines closed, but then they serviced those communities as country towns. So fly-in fly-out is not the only answer. Where you can develop communities and make it a condition that homes have to be built—perhaps not at the construction phase but at the operational stage of a mining project—then you are doing what our early pioneers did in developing this country.

I think we should have a bipartisan attitude to fly-in fly-out. As I said before, there will always be parts of Australia where you will have to have fly-in fly-out: in remote parts of North Queensland, the Territory and Western Australia, where you would not want to build a town; where a mine has a life of only 20 years; where there is not going to be a cluster of mines; or where it is not going to be in an agricultural area—where it is going to be a solo operation for the purpose of mining. Certainly, there will always be a need for fly-in fly-out for operations like that, including, as I said before, things like oil rigs. But where we get closer to the coast or along railways, where transport routes exist, where there is prime agricultural land or potentially prime agricultural land that can be developed, we should take a longer view than just mining. We should take a view of how we develop our nation and then we can remove a lot of the problems I spoke about earlier. If fringe benefits tax exemptions were removed where towns exist, then you might have a better chance of making those sorts of things happen—during the operational phase, for example. If you made zonal taxation arrangements such that they applied to only the permanent workforce in a community, there would be an encouragement to build places like Moranbah, Dysart and Saraji. You would also see the expansion of towns, as has been the case, like Springshaw, Emerald, Capella and Clermont.

So I would recommend to honourable members that we look very hard at the Central Queensland experience of the development of those great coalfields of the seventies and eighties and not take fly-in fly-out as a given: where it is necessary, use it; but do not use it in areas where it is not necessarily required. We all know the price paid for that in broken marriages. That trickles down to pensions, child support and other things we see in our electorate offices every day. For young guys and for well-balanced families who are prepared to make some sacrifices in the early years to get a nest egg together, yes I think it is all okay. But to make it the be all and end all of the development of this country would be a great shame. So, while I commend this report, I think we have got a lot more work to do.

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