Ms Catherine King (Ballarat, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On behalf of the Standing Committee on Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government, I present the committee’s report, incorporating a dissenting report, entitled Funding regional and local community infrastructure: principles for the development of a regional and local community infrastructure funding program, final report, together with the minutes of proceedings.

Ordered that the report be made a parliamentary paper.

Tonight, I am pleased to table the committee’s final report of its inquiry into funding regional and local community infrastructure. The tabling of this report is timely. Across the nation, regional Australia is struggling to cope with the impact of the global financial crisis. It has become even more difficult for communities which already lacked adequate or updated infrastructure to find the finances required to build the community infrastructure they need—infrastructure that will increase the liveability of the area and help to grow their communities into the future.

Government programs such as the Regional and Local Community Infrastructure Program should assist in this regard. Indeed, the Regional and Local Community Infrastructure Program has already provided substantial sums to local governments around Australia in the form of direct payments and grants. This is a good thing, and the committee supports continued funding for regional and local community infrastructure. However, more specifically, it is the development of a genuine accountable and ongoing grant system that has been the focus of the recommendations in the interim and final report. I stress ‘ongoing’ because local governments are struggling to provide sufficient levels of infrastructure for their communities. Community organisations have also been hit by a significant drop in donations and the capacity of their members or supporters to fund community facilities. This is evidenced by the enormous number of applications to the government’s first round of community infrastructure funding—strategic projects—and the some 3,000 applications to the first round of the Jobs Fund.

The committee understands this and, therefore, its first recommendation in this report is directed at ensuring that there continues to be ongoing funding support for community infrastructure beyond the direct payments already provided under the Regional and Local Community Infrastructure Program. Of equal importance is the need to ensure that non-profit organisations have access to funding of this nature. The committee does not oppose direct infrastructure funding for local government, as long as it is not at the expense of non-profit organisations.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that in some cases local governments have canvassed non-profit organisations in their communities for project recommendations, as part of their Regional and Local Community Infrastructure Program requests. Hopefully, this has been a common approach for local governments around the country, but to be sure the committee has recommended that the government examine this issue with the intention of ensuring that non-profit organisations continue to receive Commonwealth government funding through this program.

When tabling the interim report I stated that infrastructure is vital to a community’s wellbeing and sustainability and it was important that the government gets this new program right and gives regions across Australia access to infrastructure funding on a fair and transparent basis. The final report stresses, in simple terms, principles which the committee believes are fundamental to the development of a fair and transparent funding program. The principles espoused by the committee in this report have been grouped under three headings: availability, accessibility and accountability. Availability refers to a set of program guidelines which clearly establish what types of projects will be funded, who is eligible for funding and how the funds will be distributed. Specifically, the committee recommends that the government consider the need for clarity and simplicity when structuring program guidelines. This means that guidelines should clearly outline what constitutes an eligible application and how that application will be assessed and funds awarded. The principle of accessibility focuses on developing a simple, streamlined application process, supported by application development assistance. It is the committee’s recommendation that an accessible program is one which provides useful information to applicants through various sources. Furthermore, the application process will only be truly accessible if personal support is available to applicants.

Accountability stresses the importance of ensuring that decisions made throughout the funding program are well documented and can be adequately expressed. Accountability is vital. The Regional Partnerships program was heavily criticised by the Audit Office because it was not accountable, and we must learn from those lessons. To that end, the committee concludes with a recommendation supporting increased program accountability through the employment of a centralised assessment process administered with appropriate resources. This would be supplemented by an acquittal process which utilises well-structured funding agreements where expenditure is based on a thorough examination of project milestones. I would like to stress that these recommendations are not simply aspirational; they form the basis upon which the committee interim report recommendations should be considered and they reflect the views of many who spoke with the committee at its public hearings.

I am disappointed that the committee was not able to reach consensus on a number of key points, largely around the funding of private sector interests. I think that, given that members of the current government had an experience of the Regional Partnerships program that was quite vastly different from that of members of the current opposition and, in particular, the National Party, it was inevitably always going to be the case that we would have some dissent.

As I note in this report, the level of participation and assistance provided to the committee by regional Australia has been exceptional, and I would like once again to thank those who participated in the inquiry. I would like to thank the committee secretariat—in particular Michael Crawford for his work on this inquiry. When considered together, the interim and final reports of this inquiry present options for a wider framework which the government can utilise in developing an ongoing, fair and accountable funding program which meets the needs and expectations of regional Australia.

Paul Neville (Hinkler, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I regret that I have to lodge a dissenting report to this report, Funding regional and local community infrastructure: principles for the development of a regional and local community infrastructure funding program, final report. I have never done it before, and it is the only time in my 16 years experience of this committee that it has ever occurred—at least from the opposition side. I do so because I think it is important that this report have credibility based on the evidence. My mentor in this was the Hon. Peter Morris, a Labor Minister for Transport from this place and later chair of this committee. All his reports were driven by the evidence, even at times when it was not favourable to his government, and his reports had an authenticity about them that was recognised around the world. I think it is unfortunate that the emphasis on a lot of committees has changed so that the committee reports reflect the philosophical outlook of the government of the day backfilled with some of the evidence that might agree with that rather than what the evidence itself was. In saying that, I do not reflect on any of my colleagues—I am very fond of all of them—nor do I want to reflect on the hard work and professionalism of Michael Crawford, Sophia Nicolle and the people who worked on both the interim report and this final report.

The overwhelming evidence that we received at the hearings was that the witnesses had no beef with the ACCs themselves, nor for that matter their programs, nor for that matter their work. People saw them as being a very good organisation. They had plenty to say about the department, its slowness and its lack of appreciation of the projects. I know some projects went wrong; it is always the nature of these sorts of programs that, if they have a commercial aspect, some projects will fail. But all I can say is that I had a very positive outlook on it in my electorate and that most of my projects—not all of them but most of them—did have a commercial bent to them and played a significant part in bringing down unemployment.

If you are going to be a department of regional development and sponsor and spawn a new body called Regional Development Australia, how in the name of heaven can you step away from mentoring industry, including medium-sized industry, in regional Australia? It is a contradiction in terms not to do it. In addition to that, I am deeply concerned about the fact that, against even the government members’ recommendations, the government itself is rolling a lot of these regional development organisations into state regional development bodies. I think that that will in time be an invitation to state control—until some federal government gets sick of it and pulls its money—or, alternatively, an invitation to cost shifting.

There is no real integrated regional development in this country, and there has not been for 30 or 40 years. If you really want to see it done, and done well, go to Ireland, where the two major parties have a 10-year agreement not to fiddle with the regional development plan. That is the sort of thing we should be moving towards, not this pathetic picking at each other about whether your program is better than mine or not. We need to see our country develop and ensure that, especially, those areas in regional Australia which traditionally have had more trouble attracting industry receive some form of priority. In my dissenting report, I put a scale in place that honourable members can look at that says how I think money should be made available to the regions. I think that with grants of less than $50,000—and we saw this in evidence in Toowoomba—the RDA organisation should be able to allocate them on a simplified basis. That was the case with the particular state government department we saw in Toowoomba.

There are four levels of regional development: federal government, state government, local government and the community. The RDAs have to be part of that community and reflect that community. If they just become a pale reflection of the state government regional development organisation, I think they will be a failure and I would find that quite regrettable. I would recommend to the minister, who is settling this this week, that he really do something about it.

Dick Adams (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In accordance with standing order 39, the debate is adjourned and the resumption of the debate will be made an order of the day for the next sitting.