Barry Haase (Kalgoorlie, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Infrastructure, Roads and Transport) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My grievance this evening is substantial. In 2011 there will be a census. Prior to the new government coming into power there was an allocation of some additional $20 million to assist in the 2011 census, and $6 million of it was going to go towards the repair of some of the damages that we were made aware of in the 2006 census. I am speaking on this topic this evening because when it comes to the question of the ABS and the census it is a critical situation for me as the member for Kalgoorlie. All of my electorate is regional. The majority of the centres within my electorate are subject to the demon of the Kalgoorlie electorate and that is fly-in fly-out workers. Fly-in fly-out workers, bless their cotton socks, all come to my electorate to earn a quid. I do not mind them doing that; it is simply that when they earn that income for working reasonably hard and contributing to the great export value from this nation they take all they earn back to their city domestic situation where they spend it.

I do apologise to my colleagues who happen to represent those populations, but nevertheless it is true to say that fly-in fly-out workers contribute virtually nothing to the areas in which they work. They come in, they produce a product, they receive an income and then they leave and spend that income elsewhere. But all the time they have been in the area in which they are working they have been utilising, as required, situations such as community pools, libraries and rubbish collection services—all of those things provided by hardworking shire councils that have great difficulty in working through that whole protracted process of the Grants Commission, figures supplied by the ABS and figures obtained by the census to establish just what the population is of a local government area.

I have looked into this very carefully. It has been a great concern for me, in the last nine-plus years, that my local government areas are not being funded correctly because they have to in fact provide services for more people than are recognised at the time of the census as being resident in their particular local government area. I have been trying to have the census documents ask questions that will more accurately extract a figure of those persons residing, albeit temporarily and possibly only for the sake of employment, in those local government areas.

I have read the explanation of the methodology deployed by the Grants Commission to work out the allocation of funds to those local government areas. I think we must have had some graduates of Canberra arrive in Western Australia to write that particular methodology document! I do not have any great love of Canberra-speak; it makes it very difficult to read this methodology document—with all due respect to the very hard working staff of this chamber and others in the House. The fact is that, when it comes to allocating funds accurately to local government regions, to truly reflect the fact that there are a number of people working within that local government area—and who, therefore, local government has to provide services for—who are residents or who come in on a fly-in fly-out basis is extremely difficult.

Everyone can establish very quickly where people live because they give their residential address and that invariably is their enrolled address for voting in this democracy. But the question of where you work and where you earn your income is a vexed question because, of course, you can only give one answer. If you are a fly-in fly-out worker and you are working across many areas in my wonderful electorate, then you can determine one address. You might determine that on the basis of where you spend the majority of your time. It may be eight weeks a year because everywhere else you spend seven, but it is hardly a fair way of allocating funds.

I urge the ABS to look hard at the questions contained within the census. I look to this government to fund satisfactorily those responsible for the collection of the census forms to make sure that there are sufficient funds allocated for the deployment of staff to distribute and collect census forms. The anecdotal evidence I have from people that fly-into and out of my electorate to get their income is rather shocking, as viewed by ABS staff. When they are confronted by a census worker offering a census form, the common statement from fly-in fly-out workers is, ‘No, don’t worry about that. On census night my wife will fill that out for me back home.’ Well, I ask you, is there no reality to the census? The whole authenticity of the census document is to record where Australians and others who are visiting this country are on that night. If it is not done accurately then it destroys the authenticity and reliability of the statistics that are arrived at.

But, worse still, when the government takes $20 million out of the funds available to the department and then asks them to return reliable information, it creates a conundrum. If you cannot collect accurate data because you do not resource the ABS satisfactorily, how can you then rely on that data collected to fund local government and so many other things? ABS stats are held in high esteem by so many, unless they go to the number of people working in particular local government areas. Then they fall down because (a) the department has not been funded satisfactorily to distribute and then collect the census forms and (b) the wording of the questions on the census is not satisfactory to establish where people fly-into and out of to gain the majority of their income. That is compounded by the fact that you then gut financially the department. They were planning a review this year; they advertised and they called on agencies throughout the regions to get together to create a forum to establish what was wrong in 2006 and what might be done better in 2011. But, suddenly, there was a change of government. There was a change of heart as to the significance of those statistics. There was a change of heart as to whether or not we ought to fund the ABS, and the government ripped $20 million out of ABS—$6 million of that was to go towards a better collection of statistics of the population of Australia in 2011. All of those people in local government areas that were working to develop committees that were knowledgeable about the failures of the 2006 census were suddenly gutted, left stranded, with nowhere to go with the pieces of information that they had gleaned.

I got complaints from right across my electorate—from Broome, from all local government areas in the Pilbara and from the area of Derby, West Kimberley. The city of Kalgoorlie-Boulder was full of criticism of the collection of the 2006 census. It is a shame. This government is condemning Australian local government areas to a litany of miscalculated numbers for the funding of the hard work they do within their community for their community members.