Damian Drum (Nicholls, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

This is a great opportunity to talk about regional development. Certainly the inquiry that was held that the member for Indi refers to was one that I had the honour of chairing at the end. It was also chaired by Dr McVeigh, now a minister, and Minister Darren Chester also had a role in it as well, but at the end it was left to me to present this report to the parliament. This committee has rolled over into the current parliament and is now chaired by Tony Pasin from South Australia, and the role that he is doing is very good. It's incredible.

Some of the big issues surrounding regional Australia and making sure that regional Australia gets its share of development funds are based solely on the concept that, if we just sit and look at the spend of government—not just the federal government but the spend of state governments as well—we see that the amount of money for infrastructure that is spent in the regions is absolutely dwarfed by the amount of money that is spent in the cities. For the member for Indi to come up and say she's going to be keeping an eye on making sure that not too much money gets spent in the regions—she just has to understand that the coalition tends to hold most of the seats in regional and rural Australia. If it weren't for funds like the Building Better Regions Fund then regional Australia would get even less. Here's a member representing a regional area, effectively holding the government to ransom saying, 'Make sure you don't give too much money to regional Australia.' This is really worrying.

The thing that we identified in the previous committee was the impact and the power of catalytic investments—investments that then lead to other investments. It's fine for governments to build a local town hall, but what's the town hall going to generate? What we saw throughout the previous inquiry were these projects that, once funded by government, then led to a whole string of private funding and then add-on projects that would all pile on. All of a sudden you could see where the benefits that started with some government support then led to a whole avalanche of private investment. We saw some of the power of the city deals. In particular, the best one that we got the opportunity to see was the one in Launceston, where we had university money and we had local government money mixed in with state government funding and then topped off with federal funding. That's the way to do a city deal where everybody gets involved, including the private sector. Again, these projects were all flushed out by the inquiry that produced Regions at the ready.

They were driven by the concept that in Australia we have more or less let the population live where they want to live, as we should in a First World country, but we've ended up with 40 per cent of our population in Australia living in two cities. This is not normal. This is not right. If we had an opportunity to plan better then we would have. With 40 per cent of our population living in two destinations, it's very difficult for any region based party such as the Nationals to make sure that they get their fair share of funding and make sure that the amenities, the facilities and the infrastructure that are available for the people who live in rural and regional Australia in some way match that which is given to the people who live in Melbourne and Sydney.

Recommendation 1 was predominantly about making sure that the federal government continues to invest, and increases its investment, in building enabling infrastructure, making sure that we connect those key services and amenities through coordinated regional plans. The work that Nola Marino has done in bringing the Regional Development Australia committees to another level of coordination and strategic project work has been incredibly consistent with recommendation 1. We have made sure that all of these strategic plans are, in fact, published and that there is this catalytic driver in amongst these plans that the RDAs are working through. The work that Nola Marino has been doing is really commendable. The first thing we had to do with the RDAs was take the politics out of them, because it was the politics that seeped into the Regional Development Australia committees that ruined them in the first place. The Regional Development Australia committees at the moment are continuing to do good work, and I commend the work that we've done in the last two parliaments. (Time expired)

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