Justine Keay (Braddon, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is pleasing to hear that some areas of the country are receiving support through this program, but this program clearly demonstrates—and the subsequent election result in Tasmania clearly demonstrated—that the Abbott-Turnbull government has given up on my state of Tasmania. Out of a total of 229 projects over three rounds, Tasmania received funding for eight projects. Out of a total of $632 million expended so far, Tasmania received $17 million. I know there are a number of projects that went through Stronger Regions funding many times but were not funded.

In round 1, I welcomed the funding of the Devonport City Council's Living City project, which received $10 million. I was an alderman on the council from the inception of that project and so it was especially pleasing that that project received $10 million, but it was only one out of three projects in Tasmania to be funded. In round 2, my electorate received nothing. There were three projects in Tasmania which received $767,000 out of $293 million. In round 3 it was welcome news that the Circular Head Community Wellbeing Centre received funding. The only reason it was funded was, in my opinion, that, in the lead up to the federal election, federal Labor committed funding of $4 million towards that project; the coalition and that then Liberal member only came in behind us to fund it. That project is really important infrastructure for quite a remote regional community which had no assets—its pool had to close down.

Having said that, nothing, however, has been allocated to the electorates of Franklin and Denison. How many electorates have missed out? How many MPs on the other side were really fighting for their electorates? It is an incredibly disappointing result for Tasmania and particularly after the global financial crisis which hit Tasmania late and hard. Councils were doing all they could to ramp up projects to get them ready for funding to drive jobs in the economy. But this is all we got. I think it is absolutely deplorable that the government can freeze indexation on the financial assistance grants for councils—and that all so hit Tasmania particularly hard with a population of 500,000 and 29 councils. You have to ask: how serious is this government in looking after regional Tasmania? I really do have to question that—it is absolutely deplorable.

There was one project which went through the Stronger Regions funding three times—at every round they put in an application—and that was the Burnie Tennis Centre. The Burnie Tennis Club hosts the Burnie International every year, and they needed $400,000 from the federal government to help reseal their tennis courts so that they could keep the Burnie International Tennis Tournament. For a small city which lost so many jobs when Caterpillar moved some of its manufacturing overseas, it was really important that the million dollars of economic activity was retained through the funding. The club did receive some funding from the state government, the Burnie City Council and Tennis Australia, but the federal member at the time could not bring himself to support the project. He said that it was not the federal government's responsibility to fund a council-owned asset. I find that absolutely ridiculous. The project went through Stronger Regions three times. If you think about all the projects in Stronger Regions that were funded, 74 per cent of those were council-owned assets. So in Tasmania we had previous members who are no longer in this place but while they were they did not really fight for their regional communities through a program which is there for regional communities. The results speak for themselves.

What is going to happen now? It is good to see that Stronger Regions has expended $14 million or so in my electorate, but now that the program is changing cities will no longer be funded. I know the member for Denison will be pushing for funding for the City of Hobart which is now included in the next iteration of this program. I know people in my electoral will not be too happy about that. Nevertheless the process hopefully is based on merit and, hopefully, we will see more funding come to regional communities in Tasmania.

Debate adjourned.

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