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

I welcome this opportunity to speak on this Constitutional Alteration (Local Government) 2013 or, as it has been popularly called today, the constitutional recognition of local government. I would just like to make a statement at the beginning to clear my conscience on this. I am not here to snarl or degrade the states. I am very much a states man. I think we have a unique Constitution. We had six colonies or states. They spent 10 years putting the Constitution together. It has worked very well and its bastardisation over time has been at the hands of non-constitutional measures that all of us politicians have had a hand in. Periodically, you have to go back to the public and get those things straightened out.

I do not want it said that Paul Neville was setting up something to denigrate the states; quite the contrary. I am an advocate for the removal of overlap and duplication, and we have heaps of it under governments of both political persuasions, state and federal, and it has been going on for far too long. As a young man in the National Party—it might even have been called the Country Party at the time—I saw Charles Cutler, the then Deputy Premier of New South Wales, and John McEwen have a blazing fight over, when it really got down to the short strokes, whether the corridors at the Dubbo high school should be four feet six inches or four feet nine inches wide. That was the sort of duplication that came into many of these measures.

I would quote my leader and colleague Warren Truss especially for those people who are seeing all sorts of devious people behind trees in this exercise. He said that in Australia local government authorities are created under state legislation and the proposed referendum in question will have no impact on this status. The wording of the proposed changes specifically restricts the Commonwealth to making payments only to local government bodies formed by the law of a state. I think that is critical; it nails it right from the beginning.

If you want to go back to earlier referenda, you will note back in 1974 the wording was different. It talked about the Commonwealth's powers to borrow money and make financial assistance grants to local government, which was quite a different proposition in 1974. In 1974, 46 per cent voted yes and only one state voted yes, so it did not get up. And when you come to the last time this was put before the Australian public, in 1988, the question was around the wording of 'full constitutional recognition of local government'. The public on that occasion were even more definitive. That referendum went down 66 per cent to 33 per cent, with no state giving the majority. So you can see the Australian public want to see local government empowered, but they do not want to create a third monster. They want local government to stay within the bounds of the laws of the states.

I would like to congratulate some members and some former colleagues—I see the member for New England with me here today, and elsewhere are the member for Ryan and the member for Braddon and former members Senator Bob Brown and Ross Cameron—who participated in the Spigelman report. I think the Spigelman report is a very interesting document and I recommend everyone, assuming this is passed today, to have a good look at it before this referendum. It is not going to be an easy ask because of those who put submissions to Spigelman, it was 53 to 45 in favour of doing this—53 to 45 is not a big majority.

Another interesting thing was that the capital cities were not all that terribly enamoured about it. You can understand why. Why would they want more power for local government? They have highways and expressways and motorways and opera houses and art galleries and beautiful harbours and all sorts of facilities—beautiful hospitals and tourist attractions, opera houses and the like. People in the country do not have that, and it is what their local councils provide that become the foundation for the quality of life in those towns. That is sometimes forgotten. So when you go back to Spigelman and look at what happened there, in submissions that came from regional areas about 60 per cent were in favour of this measure; in remote areas, which have even less still, up to 70 per cent were in favour.

But when you look at the submissions from the cities, the urban areas and the larger cities, only about 30 per cent were in favour. So you can see there is a cry out there from regional and remote Australia for a better quality of government, and you can understand that. Local government is dismissed sometimes as the third tier of government, but it is the form of government that is closest to the people. And if you go back in human history, it was the first form of government that regulated the tribes, that regulated the small communities, before nations even formed and played significant roles in the running of great nations of Europe, for example.

The other interesting thing, and parliament needs to be on its toes about this, is that if you again go back to Spigelman and look at the support state-by-state, you will find that Queensland and Victoria are not in favour—they are two big states not in favour—and the majority in Western Australia and Tasmania are not all that flash either. What you can assume from that is this is going to be no pushover. And I am somewhat critical of the government in that I think they did not recognise how important it is to get this thing launched earlier. It should have been launched three or perhaps even six months ago so that people would have a good chance to understand the dynamics of what was happening. A lot of people, and even members in this House, think that this is an erosion of states' rights, that we are doing it for the wrong reasons and it is not really financial, it is going to be other things.

But, again, we go back to Spigelman, and we find that overall 46 per cent of those who put in submissions said it should be recognised on the basis of financial matters; 30 per cent said for symbolic reasons; and 11 per cent said for democratic reasons. On taking the councils out it went up even higher: 64 per cent said financial; 21 per cent said symbolic; and 25 per cent said democratic. There is a dynamic there that could easily push this overboard. I think the government was unwise not to get into the explanation of this earlier.

We all know from the history of referenda in Australia that if the Australian public has the least doubt then they will not abide it. If one major party opposes it they will not abide it. If one or two states become virulently against it they will not abide it. And, as we see from the last two referenda on this subject, although the arguments were reasoned they went too far, and out of those two referenda only one state carried it in one referendum—not a very convincing result. That is the first thing I wanted to say.

There is adequate evidence that this could be brought in on a financial basis only and not to empower local government beyond that point. It will still be the child of the state government. What it will do is streamline the system of payments and since the Keating and Howard governments, in particular, a lot of money has supposedly gone directly to local governments. But when it has been filtered through the states it does not always get there in the best order.

I will tell you a little story: it is not quite on local government, but it illustrates a point I want to make. The federal government during the Howard years made a grant available to country high schools for assembly blocks. It was a great idea because a lot of these high schools developed over time; they were grade 10 high schools and then they became grade 12 high schools. This particular school got a full Commonwealth grant of half a million dollars. I was handed the paperwork for that. About $110,000 of that half-million dollars went into design and architecture and about $130,000 went into—would you believe—QBuild, which is effectively the Queensland state department of works. In other words, on that half-million-dollar job the state took $240,000. But the sad thing about it was that it was not something built in that town with local tradesmen; it was a prefabricated building that came off the shelf of a factory in Brisbane or the Gold Coast, travelled on the back of seven trucks, was put on a simple slab and was put together like a meccano set. The state government took $240,000 out of half a million dollars.

We come now to this local government thing. There is a facility for the Commonwealth to take moneys like this direct to local government. I think we can get a bigger bang for the taxpayers' bucks—

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