Ewen Jones (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to thank the employment minister, Michaelia Cash, for taking a meeting with me yesterday to discuss how we could get better value for money for (a) the taxpayer and (b) for regional economies from government infrastructure. The issue I am trying to propose here is that the tender process should be revisited. I will give an example of where the taxpayer is not being protected or getting best value. There was a stretch of road in the Flinders shire which the local council had advised me was worth about $9 million of their money to fix. Because it was above the $5 million threshold, it had to go to tender. The tender was won. The company that won it drove in their plant and equipment, drove in their camp, flew in their team and did the road. It cost the taxpayer $27 million and the local economy, not even the pie shop, got a lick out of it.

What we have to do here is recognise the role of government infrastructure. Yes, it is about the nice new shiny bit of road. Yes, it is about the nice new building or the university block. But in regional Australia it is also about making sure that federal government money washes through our economy more than once. There is nothing wrong with the tender process per se, but when we load it up with conditions and caveats that disallow any local contractors or any local subcontractors from having a go at that tender, there is a problem. Where the subcontractor then carries all the debt and all the risk in a government contract because only the person who has signed the contract with the government gets the money or gets any guarantee of money, we have a problem. When we have a system where our tender process has grown during the years in terms of workplace health and safety, investment grade and quality assurance—all of these things which make it harder and harder or make it more and more expensive for the local contractor to have a go—our regional communities are being disqualified.

When you have a situation—and we have all seen it—where the government tender comes in and it is a nice big thick document, they all turn it over and get to the back page and this one is $1 billion and this one is $990 million, that one gets the job. It is all done on price. What we have to do is get to the stage where we can break these tenders down from a regional perspective. The reason I am saying 'from a regional perspective' is that it does not matter where the profit goes when you are in the big cities. In the big cities, like Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, the companies are based there. All the work is based there and all the equipment is based there, so the profit does wash through that economy. When it comes to places in regional Australia, you find tier 1 organisations no longer build anything. They are project managers. They do not have their bags on, they do not have their tool kits, they do not have to drive a truck with a trailer; that is done by the subcontractors. We make sure money is set aside by the winning tenderer for training but, because they do not employ anyone who actually does any work, our local apprentices and local markets are not getting jobs. Your subcontractor, who is being squeezed for price because the profit is not staying in the town, is basically working for wages, and sometimes for less than wages. They are the ones that we need to bring on to give the apprentices jobs. This is why as a country we are continually seeing boom and bust periods where governments come along and say, 'Why don't we have any builders? Why don't we have any electricians and plumbers?' It is because the money that has been set aside for these things is not washing through.

Speaking for my city of Townsville, whilst national confidence may be up, local confidence is poor. It is very fragile. We are walking on eggs. We have massive youth unemployment problems and we are fighting the rest of Australia when it comes to getting our infrastructure and our jobs up. The Carmichael mine in the Galilee Basin is a case in point. In the same time as the Adani corporation has built a new port, two new power plants and three big factories in India, we still have not turned a sod at the Carmichael mine. With big jobs here, it is not about big business; it is not about exports to India. It is about the jobs from the port—the stevedore at the port, all the way to the roads and bridges that have to be fixed and built out to the mine and back along the standard gauge rail track to the port. That is where the jobs are sustained. That is where we can anchor our renewable energy programs. That is where we can do those things. But it starts with making sure that the profit stays in our regions and that the profit from these jobs becomes part of where we live. That means we buy our cars there, our kids go to school there and the profit is invested in property and those sorts of things in our city. It is an issue, and I thank Michaelia Cash for taking it seriously.

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