Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I want to talk directly to my community again about things we can do in our local community that will help us be better at being a city. I know there are a lot of people in my city who are unhappy with some of the changes that they're seeing. I know there are a whole stack of people—like me, for example—who see the kids riding their bicycles with the food delivery on their back. While we like getting food delivered, we're not really prepared to have food delivered in a system that rips off the drivers, so I've spoken to a few people and said, 'Why can't we, as a community, get together and try and work out whether we can develop a cooperative food delivery service that actually works with local restaurants?' Those things are locally based; it's not one of those services where you have to zip off to, say, Penrith. Delivery is based within the Parramatta region, so it's actually possible for us to do what other countries are calling 'online to offline' and change our online systems back to a local focus. That's just one example of the things we can do.

We can also start talking to each other about the shortage of NDIS services in Parramatta and whether we, as a community, can start working together to build the skill base and the businesses that operate locally and serve the local community, and then either scale up or scale out, as so many businesses do. For people who want to work with our community on developing local projects, we have a great need to improve our capacity to do it. I've been talking to a number of people recently about impact investing and the opportunity to tap into a completely new source of funds to achieve things in the community which provide a benefit to third parties. They either reduce cost to someone or improve revenue for someone else, so the system in which you're working isn't closed, but there is an overall benefit. The system is called impact investing. It was originally created by a guy called Les Hemm who worked for Tony Blair several years ago. The G8 had a task force for a number of years. There's an impact investing task force within the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. Most Western countries are doing it. The G20 has a task force. There's literally about $500 billion in funds around the world looking for projects.

It's an incredibly interesting source of new funds. The government tried it with the Try, Test and Learn Fund—their $120 million fund that was aimed at reducing long-term welfare costs. My understanding is that the government hasn't spent that yet, even though it should have been well and truly spent by now. This is essentially money chasing really good ideas that help communities function better—again, quite often for the benefit of other taxpayers. So, if you're one of those people who would like to get involved in how that works and become an expert, call my office, because we can do some forums on it. There are very good organisations in Australia, including a peak body that knows this system very well. It's not hard to get your head around the concept; it is quite hard to get your head around how it works. So, if you're interested, get in touch. I'd love to do some forums on it next year, and you could even help me do it. There's lots of stuff we can do as a community, and we really can't wait for government because, quite frankly, they're 10 years behind. So let's just get on with it and get done what we can, and hopefully the government will catch up eventually.

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