Alan Tudge (Aston, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

There were 150 federal programs which were funded. If you went to any particular location you would likely find a similar number at the state level. What that has meant is a proliferation of individual activities and programs at a localised level, sometimes creating a whirlwind of activity of programs but very little progress being made. The Auditor-General looked this at the end of last year and did a case study on the community of Wilcannia. It is a typical community, predominantly Indigenous. He found that in this community of 474 Indigenous people there were 102 funded activities from 18 different agencies and a further 17 activities proposed. So in that place alone there was more than one program per five individuals.

If you listen to the member for Blair and, indeed, the opposition leader you would think that that is not enough, that we now need one program for one individual, possibly even more. We do not believe that is the case. In fact, what we have suggested through this budget process is that we need to sharpen the focus around a few core areas—school attendance, employment, community safety—and we have to streamline the activity so that as much as possible, from the Commonwealth's perspective, there is a single interface into a community rather than 15 or 30 or 50 interfaces into a community. So this budget does that. The first decision we made in order to facilitate that was to bring the programs from eight different departments into one department, the most important department: the Prime Minister's department. The second decision was to amalgamate 150 separate federal programs into five broad flexible programs. The third decision was that we will be devolving power to the local level so that a local empowered SES officer can negotiate with Indigenous community leaders over what is required in those communities against some of the national priorities which we have.

The effect of this will be to stop having that proliferation of activities of 100 programs in a community of 500 and instead have focused programs with empowered local leaders who can negotiate with a single Commonwealth officer over what is required in those communities. Of course in the process of doing that efficiencies can be made—of course they can because there is an overlap in activities. For example, the Smith Family has 10 individual contracts across Australia. Why do we need 10 contracts there instead of only one or two which could cover all activities? There are things which, frankly, are not working, and those things can be brought to a halt. As we go through these programs over the forward estimates, we will be stopping, evaluating initiatives, funding the ones which are working and halting the ones which are not.

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