Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I will endeavour to be more diplomatic than the member for Dawson was. He is always adversarial in his approach. In this case that is a pity, because this motion does not necessarily have to be a partisan motion. It does not have to be a catalogue of partisan attacks. This motion goes to a debate that Australia has been having for a long time—the myths of Sunday Too Far Away and Clancy of the Overflow, which are about people living and working in Australia's very harsh interior, versus the reality, which is one of people living predominantly in coastal cities. Fly-in fly-out workers straddle those two extremes.

I was at Adelaide Airport this morning, as was the member for Perth. There were as many people in fluoro work gear heading out to work in the mines as there were people in suits and ties heading off to Melbourne, Canberra or Sydney. So it is obviously something that is having a big impact on our economy and a big impact on the way people live and work.

Only last week I was up in Moomba on a tour of the Santos gas plants with the member for Makin—thanks to Sam Crafter from Santos for organising that. It is quite clear that those plants do rely heavily on a fly-in fly-out workforce and will always do so. It is important that we do not demonise fly-in fly-out or drive-in drive-out workers. It is important that we recognise that people will want that choice—in particular, their families will want the choice of living in coastal cities. It is just one of those realities that we have to acknowledge and deal with. I think some of the previous speakers are just, to an extent, railing against the tide going in and out.

That said, Cancer of the bush or salvation for our cities? is an important report. I think it makes some pretty persuasive arguments about the effect of fly-in fly-out workforces on housing and healthcare services in regional communities. It covers the impact on some of those communities of having large workforces there. They impact on the local housing market by driving rents up, they lead to large, isolated work camps—isolated from those regional communities—and they impact on access to healthcare services in those areas. Those are all important impacts. These regional communities are wearing all of the costs of those operations but are seemingly not getting as much of the benefit.

I think there are some interesting references to tax in the report. It would be sensible to look at the taxation laws and see what sort of effect they are having on encouraging fly-in fly-out workforces and whether that is in the national interest or in the region's interests. It is interesting to see the interaction between fringe benefits tax and zonal rebates, particularly in relation to things like living away from home allowances and the like.

That said, we do have to acknowledge that fly-in fly-out workers spend a lot of time away in very harsh and remote places. That obviously will have an impact on their families and their family lives. At the home end of that arrangement we see the impact in various country towns in my electorate of fly-in fly-out workers not being able to participate in the things that they would normally do, for example, with the footy team in their own home town. They are not able to partake in the civic life of those towns. In all of this we have to balance the needs of regional communities with the needs of the nation—the need to develop the North and to develop the interior. But we have to do that with one eye on reality. The vast majority of those workers will always want the choice to fly in and fly out. Some will opt to live and work in regional Australia but predominantly most of those workers will want to exercise the choice to live in our large coastal cities.

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