Bob Baldwin (Paterson, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Tourism) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The mining boom, that began under the Howard government, has been hugely beneficial to Australia in a broad range of ways. It has provided royalties and payroll tax to state governments, company taxes to the federal government, employment to a generation and, in particular, addressed disadvantage amongst rural, remote and Indigenous Australians. It has provided training and skill development, and construction of multi-use ports, railroads and other significant infrastructure. The mining boom and superior economic management allowed the Howard government to pay off the $96 billion net debt left by their Labor predecessors and to turn it into a very healthy surplus.

Along with these benefits, Australia has been subjected to a number of difficulties born of Australia's two-speed economy. It has kept the Australian dollar at record highs, which has made Australia a comparatively expensive tourism destination, and the federal government has applied untimely and avoidable extra pressure in the following ways: the $750 million in accumulated travel taxes and charges over the next four years, which were added in the May 2012 budget; $500 million in further visa hikes announced in the MYEFO, including the 457 visa, which now costs $450—up from $350 per applicant; the working holiday visa, which is now $360, up from $280 per applicant; successive cuts to Customs staffing, lengthening customer processing times; passing on the cost of AFP security to airports, which is passed on to airlines and which is then passed on to the passengers; cutting regional aviation grants; and imposing multimillion dollar costs on aviation security upgrades at regional airports. And let us not forget one of the biggest impacts: the carbon tax. To quote an example, we only need to look at Virgin's recent fall in profit for the period because of the amount of carbon tax that they had to pay.

The two most significant problems that this Labor government has created include labour force pressures and Australia's record outbound tourism numbers. In fact, last year 132 million bed nights were spent overseas by Australians and this year it has skyrocketed to 139 million bed nights. To quote but one of the submissions—by the chairman of a coal company in January 2013—to the FIFO inquiry which led to the Cancer of the bush or salvation for our cities? Fly in, fly out and drive in, drive out workforce practices in regional Australia report:

Noting the importance of a profitable resources sector and a vibrant services sector for Australia’s future, and recognising there is no foreseeable end to growth for Australian coal exports (notwithstanding some recent softening of demand from China), the tourism and hospitality sector is taking the mature and sensible policy approach of looking for synergies and areas for mutual benefit.

The resources sector stands ready to work with the services sector.

I welcome these sentiments and I commend this approach.

It is not a winner-takes-all approach. As our Minister for Resources, Energy and Tourism, Martin Ferguson, has said, mining and tourism are compatible. Over the past week there has been much debate over the needs of the mining sector for staff, the pressure this has placed on other sectors that are bleeding staff to the mining industry and the need for properly thought-through labour force plans that include staff retention, school-leaver recruitment, assistance for unemployed Australians and, only after exhausting local labour supplies, recruitment from foreign sources.

This government must undertake a study to properly map out the economy's total skill needs across all of the sectors. This would assist the immigration minister in deciding the granting of skilled and semiskilled visas. It would also help the training minister in planning to train Australians in both the mining and tourism sectors. Australia needs a holistic and long-term planned approach to Australian skill needs, not just a short, stopgap measure.

A review of BHP Billiton's workforce supply and demand situation is telling. A total of 1,010 fly-in fly-out roles are required for BHP Billiton Mitsubishi Alliance's Caval Ridge and Daunia mines, with 250 to be recruited from Cairns and 760 from Brisbane. Of the 1,010 roles, there are approximately 530 operator roles, 185 trade roles and 295 functional roles—management, administration, professional engineering, health and safety officers et cetera. As at 8 March approximately 30,000 applications had been received for the 715 operator and trade roles, comprising 9,400 applications for the 250 ex-Cairns operator and trade roles and 20,600 applications for the 465 ex-Brisbane operator and trade roles. The 295 functional roles—in management, administration, professional engineering, health and safety et cetera—are ex-Brisbane and are advertised and recruited on a role-by-role basis. A recruitment target of 60 per cent new to coal mining is being applied to the operator and trade roles.

I do not need to remind the House of some facts—Australia's low labour force participation rate, Australia's 5.4 per cent unemployment rate and the tourism sector's 36,000 worker shortage that is expected to grow to 84,000 by 2020. I have been previously critical of the Minister for Resources and Energy and Minister for Tourism for not properly addressing the conflicts between mining and tourism. Speaking to a mining audience, Minister Martin Ferguson delivered a speech entitled 'A new age of energy' to the Sydney Institute in 2010. In answering a question on labour force supply the minister said that Cairns will not be in the future what it has been in the past for tourism and that unemployed tourism workers in Cairns will simply go to work in the mines.

In more recent times the minister has indicated he will bring a focus to these challenges. Despite the announcement in May last year, I have not seen anything concrete come from the other side. I do not intend to be overtly critical of the minister, because I know the difficulty he faces with an erratic Prime Minister. We have all seen her complete about-face on 457 visas in the past fortnight. Through the Senate estimates process I have finally obtained a proper assessment of the seasonal guest worker scheme and the government says:

Several reasons have been identified for the low number of workers recruited to date, including global economic conditions, a lack of flexibility in the regulations under which growers can recruit workers, a potential lack of economies of scale from piloting on such a small scale, and the existence of a pool of competing seasonal labor in Australia including illegal migrants …

I am not sure if it was an intentional typo in that Senate estimates report to point to 'competing seasonal labor', but I agree that the government has been as changeable as the seasons, racked with internal competition. It is a poorly kept secret that there has been competition between cabinet ministers for immigration, tourism and agriculture over the working holiday-maker program. It seems everyone in the ALP wanted additional foreign guest workers until the PM's announcement to appease the union movement.

It is interesting also to note that the government has highlighted the existence of illegal immigrants as one of its challenges. If only the government had retained the Howard government's sensible policies on border control we would not be faced with this problem. Putting aside the government's official line, the official assessment report into the seasonal guest worker program points to extra incentives to recruit foreign workers and states:

… recent modifications of the policy have changed slightly the cost-sharing arrangements, allowing employers to recover up to A$100 in costs of internal transfers to and from the airport in Australia …

The World Bank report cites the DEEWR interim study, but the government appears to have removed it from the department's website. I am not sure if the government removed this evidence after the CFMEU launched its television commercials that would have us believe that the government is determined to ensure Australian jobs for Australians.

Beyond the eminently sensible notion that there should be an economy-wide mapping of skills, as mentioned, other recommendations to the FIFO inquiry included: (1) creation of Indigenous tourism opportunities (2) creation of demand driven tourism opportunities (3) mining to create a legacy of accommodation stock (4) establishment of a regional and remote aviation bookings portal (5) a register of mining related CSI projects (6) creation of geological tourism opportunities, and (7) royalties for the regions. I do not have time to address all of these in the time allotted, so I shall focus on the concept of a regional and remote aviation bookings portal.

While many airports servicing regional mining communities saw increases in passenger movements over the past five years, many were flights solely servicing the mining industry rather than increasing scheduled capacity for leisure travellers. Indeed, some regional airlines have chosen to transfer some of their aircraft which previously operated scheduled services to service the more profitable FIFO market.

In 1997 there were 54 regional carriers operating 237 regional routes, and today that figure, I believe, is fewer than 20 who are flying around 125 routes. The coalition believes more effort should be made to foster some positive and mutually beneficial policy development. Innovative measures should be investigated so that the real benefits from the resources sector are clearly shared by our nation's tourism industry in these areas.

The coalition believes the resources sector stands ready to work with the services sector. Indeed, in many cases, they already are working together. Arrangements already exist where regional carriers whose aircraft have been designated as primarily for FIFO services are used for scheduled services at those times when they are not needed to transport workers to the mines.

It is no secret that carriers are finding it harder to obtain regional aircraft, which are no longer being built in the same numbers as they were in previous years. An obvious solution could be that regional carriers, through innovative financial measures, are encouraged to purchase larger aircraft with extra seats being used to stimulate tourism demand in rural, regional and remote communities. Private sector expertise should be utilised so that leisure travellers, either as individuals or through travel agents, have the greatest possible access to flights through the establishment of regional aviation and tourism bookings websites. Such a project should be led by the Regional Aviation Association of Australia, utilising the knowledge and expertise of individuals like Jayson Westbury, the CEO of Australian Federation of Travel Agents, and the Hon. John Sharpe, the former transport minister and current Chairman of Rex Airlines.

At the end of the day, we need industries working together to provide the maximum benefit to all Australians. It should not be one industry at the expense of another. With a bit of forethought, planning, investment and creative working together, we can build all of these sectors and provide sustainability in town, profits for the mines, and benefits for all Australians.

Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I was part of the Standing Committee on Regional Australia, which produced the report Cancer of the bush or salvation for our cities? There was certainly some excellent work done by that committee. The final report had 21 recommendations, a similar number, in fact, to the report of the Murray-Darling Basin inquiry, which we conducted previously. Had those 21 recommendations of the Of droughts and flooding rains report been adopted by the government, I do not think that we would be in the mess that we are now in with water policy. I do hope that the government seriously looks at the 21 recommendations made by the Cancer of the bush or salvation for our cities? report of February 2013 into the fly-in fly-out workforce practices in regional Australia.

Interestingly, the first recommendation that the committee made—that the Commonwealth government fund the Australian Bureau of Statistics to establish a cross-jurisdictional working group to develop and implement a method for the accurate measurement of the extent of FIFO and DIDO workforce practices in the resource sector and service populations of resource communities—is perhaps the most important of all the recommendations. I hope earnestly that it is taken up by the government.

Sitting suspended from 13:00 to 16 : 00

During the report and getting all the information for the report, Cancer of the bush or salvation for our cities?, the regional Australia committee conducted 26 public hearings, from 2 November 2011 to 12 September 2012, and one of the things we heard the most concerned the health service aspects of fly-in fly-out, drive-in drive-out practices.

This morning I attended the Rural Doctors Association of Australia breakfast, at which we heard that at Kalgoorlie, where there is a population of 31,000, there are limited general practitioners available. I spoke to the member for O'Connor this afternoon, who told me that the city is 17 short of GPs. At nearby Kambalda they actually do not have any doctors at all. At Mount Isa there are only four GPs servicing a population of 22,000. This is in line with exactly what was told to us during these hearings.

It was certainly borne out this morning, when the Rural Doctors Association of Australia President, Dr Sheilagh Cronin, said that for two areas—and I notice the member for O'Connor has just joined us in the chamber—Kalgoorlie and Mount Isa have produced billions of dollars for this nation, and to have such limited access to doctors is nothing short of a disgrace.

The member for O'Connor told me that there was a three-week wait to get into a doctor in parts of his electorate. I know he is doing everything he can, but we as a parliament should be doing so much more. Somebody who is certainly doing his utmost is a man who I believe is the gutsiest politician in Australia at the moment, and that is the Hon. Brendon Grylls who on the weekend won the seat of Pilbara, a Labor stronghold. He went from a safe seat in the central wheatbelt—this 39-year-old politician—and stood for the Pilbara and won the seat.

I do not want to get to political, but Brendan Grylls was one of the architects and one of the promoters of Royalties for Regions. Certainly the Royalties for Regions program was mentioned at length. I notice that currently in this chamber we are all regional members. We all should be fighting for our fair share for our regions—and I know we all are—because far too often governments of all persuasions are too city-centric. They are too focused on coastal capital cities. Certainly so much of the wealth comes out of our regions. All of the food comes out of our regions and we are all in there fighting for our fairer share. Certainly Brendon Grylls, with his Royalties for Regions program, is transforming Western Australia, with more than 2,500 projects and programs initiated under this wonderful state government program.

In the progress report for Royalties for Regions for the financial year ending June 2012, Brendon Grylls said:

Royalties for Regions is addressing significant shortfalls in infrastructure and services across the state, giving those who live, work or invest in regional WA a renewed sense of optimism, enabling them to capitalise on opportunities for growth and plan for the future.

Certainly I know the member for O'Connor is very much in favour of what they are doing over there in the West—certainly what his WA Nationals colleague is doing for his state.

We heard some great evidence in the course of our inquiries. On 22 February 2012 at Moranbah in Queensland in the electorate of Capricornia—whose member Kirsten Livermore is sitting opposite—we heard some great evidence from Laura Terry from Moranbah Medical. She told us how her area was fighting to provide services. It has many fly-in fly-out workers coming and providing such a strain to the Moranbah Medical Service.

We also heard from Mark Crawley, the CEO of Isaac Regional Council, that has a really interesting program. The council actually built 45 units of accommodation which they call Isaac Views. The units are one, two and three bedroom and are available for service industry workers. They went to see the Anti-Discrimination Commission so that they would not allow mine workers. The union were given that exemption as part of their application so those units are only available to the non-mining workers. This is really important in these areas because people such as childcare workers, school teachers, police officers and any occupation other than mine workers cannot afford to live there. A three-bedroom weatherboard house that in some regional towns and cities in other parts of Australia would be battling to be $120,000 or $150,000 is getting upwards of $3,000 and $4,000 a week rent and places are valued at anywhere between $750,000 and $800,000. You are talking about these lonely outposts where in some cases, because they are so close to a mine, they are commanding prices equal to Toorak or Double Bay in Sydney, which is quite frankly amazing.

We heard from the students from Moranbah State High School. They were great kids. They all had great ambitions to go on and better themselves and to go to tertiary studies, but one of the worrying aspects was that they talked to us about the safety aspects of their town. Chantelle Winter said, 'I would never walk the streets even at 8 o'clock because there are so many guys driving around and things and it is a bit scary sometimes. I do not really go out at all because I do not feel safe.' A lot of the mine workers abide by the rules, abide by the laws of our land and all the rest, but it is sad that some of the kids that have grown up in these communities because of the absolute boom that their communities are having now no longer feel safe to walk the street at night. That is sad.

I spoke about the price of housing. At Port Hedland, where we took evidence on 29 March last year, Janet Ford, who has her own real estate firm, said that the median house price was $867,000. I asked her, 'What do you get for that?' She said:

Depends where you buy. If you go out onto the rural estate, which is about 20 kilometres from town, you would get a block of land and a shed.

She said that if you come into Port Hedland you get a little bit more but it is still nothing compared to what you would get in another regional town where there is not the mining activity.

Lynne Craigie, the President of the Shire of East Pilbara, said:

With the way the real estate has gone, people have to leave. If they are not in the resource industry, it would not be possible for a young couple to buy or rent a house in Newman. If I can give you an example, we had a house rented a few weeks ago for $3,500 or $3,300 per week. What happened was that not a resource company but a related industry, a contractor, rented the house and put five people in—a five-bedroom house, five people. It is cheap rent for him, but it ups the market to $3,000 a week.

These towns are just really struggling under the huge cost of real estate.

We had Mr Allen Cooper, the CEO of the Shire of East Pilbara, taking about the Royalties for Regions program. He was glowing in his praise for it. He said it:

… is a great state program. There is no doubt that country people benefit—to rewire a town hall, put a new roof in a town hall, put a new kitchen in a town hall. Things that were probably earmarked have been sped up so it improves the facilities in the smaller towns.

He could not speak highly enough of it.

When we went to Karratha, we spoke to Joanne Pritchard who is from the local Soroptimist branch, and she gave evidence on 28 March last year, and it was really telling evidence too. She said that:

Karratha was once a family town consisting of permanent residents in a family-friendly environment where parents were happy to commit to companies on a long-term basis. This has now changed to being a place, not a town, where people come to work, not live. Long-term residents feel their identity and lifestyle and the vitality of the Shire of Roebourne have changed considerably, with our once strong community spirit and community cohesion diminishing as fewer permanent people are living here.

I attended Soroptimist dinners in both Griffith and Coleambally in recent weeks in my electorate of Riverina. It is a wonderful organisation. These people are the heart and soul of their communities and they only want what is best for their communities. When you hear evidence like that from the local Soroptimist branch, it really does drive home to you the problems that they feel they have in their community.

As with so many of the other hearings that we conducted throughout this great land of ours, while we were at Karratha we also heard from students and teachers from Karratha Senior and Saint Luke's College high schools, and the sort of evidence that they gave married up and aligned with the sorts of evidence that we heard in other communities. One thing that I was really impressed with was that many of these young kids, despite the fact that there is so much money to be made in the mining industry, wanted to go out and experience a tertiary education elsewhere and to make the most of their high school certificate or equivalent and to go on and be the best that they could be, which is really impressive.

What I am saying here is not a slight on the mining industry, because I know that the mining industry has made this country great. There is no doubt that mining, and foreign investment in mining, has helped Australia to become the great nation that it is. B fairer share for the regions from which a lot of these minerals were extracted, such as is provided by the Royalties for Regions program, is admirable. In many instances we heard from mining companies who are doing a lot to ensure that they look after the local government areas they go into. They are doing their best, but they can do more. Many of them are accepting of that.

The inquiry that was conducted will be a bit of an eye opener not just for the MPs who were part of it but for the mining companies. It has been a ground-breaking inquiry in as much as I believe that more will be done to help assist those local communities from which a lot of the minerals are being extracted and where a lot of the mining is being done to help those communities to provide better infrastructure, local roads and other provisions that local governments provide, as well as to provide a wake-up call to provide better health services. If that pushes state governments along then so be it. I hope that it will ensure that the Commonwealth government does more to help these local communities which they rely upon so much to help our balance of trade figures.

If I can just speak once again on the Australian Bureau of Statistics, I believe that the census data that we collect has to reflect the numbers of people who actually live in the areas. We cannot have census data that says that 7,000 people live in a particular area such as Moranbah when indeed there are 14,000 people there who are relying on that local government infrastructure, relying on those local GPs, and representing such a strain to those communities in every which way. We did hear from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, from the census people, during the course of our deliberations, but we really need to make sure that recommendation No. 1 of the 21 recommendations in this report is followed through. I do hope, as I said earlier, that the 21 recommendations, similar in number to the Murray-Darling Basin report, will be viewed seriously by the government, as I know that they will. I do hope that they will follow through on the recommendations that have been made by the Regional Australia Committee. (Time expired)

Kirsten Livermore (Capricornia, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is a great pleasure to join with my colleagues the member for Riverina and the member for O'Connor, who are here, and of course all of the other members of the Regional Australia Committee who participated in this important inquiry.

It was an inquiry that I was very active in pursuing and initiating within the committee because I saw it was very necessary to respond to some of the concerns that communities in my electorate and other parts of Queensland have been expressing for some time.

Throughout 2010, and for a few years now, proposals have been put forward to expand mining operations in the Bowen Basin, and these have brought the questions of housing shortages, workforce shortages and the increased use of fly-in fly-out and drive-in drive-out workers to the fore. Existing mining communities like Moranbah, Dysart, Clermont, Collinsville, Blackwater et cetera have increasingly stood up in opposition to the loss of balance in those communities. As the local member, I was regularly being asked to come and attend meetings: to meet with the councils, attend public meetings and respond to inquiries in the media about this issue of fly-in fly-out/drive-in drive-out and what that means for the mining communities. And not just for mining communities but also those communities in Queensland that are situated on the coast—places like Mackay. That is the most obvious one, but there is also Rockhampton and others.

When I was being asked to respond to that as a local member I was up against the problem that this is not an area that the Commonwealth government has really been involved in and it is not an area where the Commonwealth government necessarily or obviously has many levers to work with on the face of it. So, as a local member, I was really in the position of responding to the phenomenon of fly-in fly-out workforces as they were impacting on the communities in my electorate very much from a perception or value judgement perspective. I thought, 'Well, that's just really not good enough when you are a member of parliament and part of the decision-making process.' There has to be a more rigorous, comprehensive and sound look at this whole issue. How big is it? What is the scale of it? How many people are involved? How many towns are involved? What are the consequences? What are the projections? Et cetera, et cetera. That is why I was very keen on this inquiry. I thought that a parliamentary inquiry was a mechanism not necessarily to provide answers but at least to scope out and to put on the agenda the issue of fly-in fly-out workers.

We tried to avoid making judgements about people's choices about where they live, what jobs they do and what companies do. Whatever you think about fly-in fly-out, if it is going to be a phenomenon of the scale that it is and that it is projected to be we need to understand what it means. What are the consequences? What are the costs? What are the opportunities? What does it all mean? I thought that it needed to be on the federal government's agenda and that the federal government needed to see where its policies intersected with fly-in fly-out, and that where problems were identified to measure and assess those problems and to be part of the solution.

One of the things that I really was hoping that the inquiry could shed some light on was the whole question of choice. Time and again when I was confronting this as a local member it would just be thrown back at me, 'Well, this is people's choice.' People choose to live on the coast or to live in a capital city and fly to take up work in the mining regions. You are always faced with that, and who can argue with people making that free choice?

On the other side, having talked to councils and people in the mining industry in places like Moranbah, Dysart and Blackwater, they say, 'But there's a waiting list for houses. If people are choosing not to live here and they all want to live on the coast, why is there a waiting list for housing in the town? Clearly, a greater number of people would choose to live here if it were possible.' Indeed, on the day that this report was released and we were fulfilling our media commitments around it, a quite significant article in my local newspaper referred to a developer at Clermont, which is in the heart of the Bowen Basin, who has completed 70 homes in that town and is turning the sod on another 80. Again, if no-one wants to live in the Bowen Basin, why is this developer putting his time and money into building 150 houses in the town of Clermont? I just wanted to pop the bubble of this choice argument.

You will see that a bit of a theme running through the recommendations is a desire to level the playing field. We made recommendations about the fringe benefits tax treatment of company housing, for example, as opposed to the FBT treatment of work camps, flights et cetera, and we recommended changes to the zone allowance. These recommendations are all about making it a genuine choice. When it comes to choice, the other important thing, as everyone in a mining town will tell you, is that there has to be housing. Housing has to be available and affordable in those towns.

One of the problems that I saw with this choice argument is that we were getting to a point where, while companies and state governments were constantly defending people's choice to fly-in fly-out, they were ignoring or completely devaluing the choice that people make to live in mining towns or regional inland centres. If you get to the point where fly-in fly-out becomes the norm and towns are overtaken by work camps, in defending one part of the population's right to choose to fly-in fly-out you are completely denying a genuine choice to people who want to live, make their lives and make communities in those inland mining towns. The towns would become so diminished by the lack of volunteers, pressure on infrastructure, pressure on services et cetera that you would no longer have a choice to live in those towns. So the theme of our recommendations was largely around trying to return choice to people.

The point made by the member for Riverina in his closing remarks about the ABS data goes to that as well. To have a fully functioning town with good services and good amenities, you must have accurate data about who lives in the town and who is seeking services and infrastructure from that town and really get an accurate grasp of what those figures are and how they should then be properly and fairly reflected in the funding that flows to communities. The example given by the member for Riverina is one that I know very well as the local member. The official population of Moranbah, according to census data, would be 8½ thousand. On any given night, there would be at least another 7,000 or 8,000 people, with that number growing by the day, living in work camps in that town. You no longer have a good quality of life in Moranbah if health, education, roads, sewerage, childcare services—you name it—cater for a population of 7½ thousand people when they are being stretched to about 15,000 or 16,000.

The other thing that really motivated me to pursue this inquiry was the question of planning. One of the big myths, as far as I can see, is choice. Another is the mismatch between what companies are ostensibly prepared to do in terms of infrastructure as distinct from what they are prepared to do in investing in communities, housing et cetera. Companies or state governments treat it like a gold rush—'Why would you invest in the town? Who knows how long it will last?'—and at the same time others say, 'Hang on, everyone is looking to invest in a $6 billion railway line.' Clearly, if people are investing in a railway line and a port, they would figure that it would last for more than three, four or five years. We are talking about 15 or 20 years, which is a whole generation. That is the other mismatch that I hoped this inquiry could get to the bottom of. It is all just go, go, go—build the infrastructure, get the minerals out of the ground and pretend it is all going to be over in four or five years—when communities are saying: 'Hang on, what about us in the meantime? You can build a railway line, but we cannot build a house.' There seems to be a real disconnect there.

One of the things that we were really impressed by—and this is reflected in recommendation 18 in the report—is what we saw in Canada. There seems to be a very different attitude to mining development over there. Australia and Canada are both resource countries and the places that we are talking about are mining and resource communities. None of us are anti mining, and none of the people in Moranbah are anti mining, for goodness sake; they just want to be able to live a decent life while they work in the mining industry and live alongside the mining activity. In Canada we saw people with the same support for mining, but there seemed to be much more readiness for local governments and communities to stand up and say: 'Hang on, you want this out of the mine, Company X. Here's what we want out of the mine.' At every step of the way the local communities are fully supported by their state governments, which is not something that necessarily happens in Queensland. I will not speak for other states. In Canada we saw a different way. In some cases, the companies operating in Canada are the same that operate in Australia but with a quite different attitude. In Canada, companies are much more prepared to initiate engagement with communities and be very proactive, not just in engaging with communities, local governments and state governments but also in rounding up other companies that are active in a particular region.

Recommendation 18 goes to the notion that the federal government needs to mirror some of what we saw in Canada and take a much more active role in doing some of that planning, projection and collection of data so that we have the ability to map out, region by region, what the resource activity means for the region—for example, what are the time lines; what is the population projection? Instead of making those decisions proposal by proposal, we would have a much more comprehensive view about what is happening region by region, and planning around community needs could take place at the same time as approvals for projects.

This was a very important exercise in putting this issue on the national agenda and in urging the federal government to be proactive about this, because the bill comes back to us in one form or other, whether it is in social costs or infrastructure costs. We need to get on the front foot with this. (Time expired)

Tony Crook (O'Connor, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am pleased to speak in the chamber today, and particularly to follow the member for Capricornia and Michael McCormack from the electorate of Riverina, on this committee report into fly-in fly-out work practices. I acted as a supplementary member on this committee for the purposes of this inquiry due primarily to the prevalence of fly-in fly-out work practices in my electorate of O'Connor. I would like to thank the committee for allowing me the opportunity to act as a supplementary member.

In my opinion, the report has provided a balanced, honest and non-partisan assessment of the situation. That has been reflected in the two speeches that we have just heard from in this chamber. I would like to stress that the title of this report is a question. I believe many have overreacted to the title, which is 'Cancer of the bush or salvation of our cities?' It is clearly a question that poses both sides of this argument. I thank the Lord Mayor of Kalgoorlie, Mr Ron Yuryevich, who posed part of that question. It pricked everybody's ears up at the time. Thank you for that, Ron.

We must also not forget that this is a question that has not yet been answered. The recommendations put to the parliament are exactly that: recommendations. Therefore, I would like to take this opportunity to assure the mining industry in particular that they have nothing to fear from this report. The mining industry, particularly in Western Australia but across Australia, has every right to be a bit gun shy of this current government. But they certainly have nothing to fear from this report. In fact, they should be embracing it in my view and utilising it to help work positively towards making our regional communities far better places to live and work.

This report only reflects the evidence that the committee received through the consultation process. The recommendations are a direct response to that evidence. There is no doubt about that in my mind. Part of this evidence that I believe is worth noting is the lack of available information, including data and policies on FIFO workforce practices in particular. Both the member for Riverina and the member for Capricornia have stressed that there is a clearly fundamental problem when you have 7,000 people living in a town and 7,000 living on the outskirts. The pressure that that brings to bear on local services and the local community is quite overpowering. The evidence also displayed a number of tragic shortcomings in this government's ability to look out for regional Australia that I will touch on in more detail shortly.

Essentially, this inquiry highlighted two sides of the FIFO coin, the side that showed that FIFO workforces are having a devastating effect on local towns and the side that proved that FIFO can provide Australians with opportunity to access the wealth of the mining industry without uprooting their lives. But we also heard strong evidence that there are social impacts on families within the cities that are affected. When the chair, the member for New England, Tony Windsor, tabled this report in the House, he made particular note of Kalgoorlie, primarily because our lord mayor pretty much named the report. I have lived in Kalgoorlie now for 30 years and I second his comments that the Kalgoorlie people are extremely proud of their town. Going up and down the main street of Kalgoorlie—like in Bendigo and Ballarat—you can see the benefits of the mining boom at the turn of the century. We have wonderful historic buildings in those places. Unfortunately, that is not reflected in our new mining towns of the current era.

One company that I would like to mention is KCGM. If anybody is walking past suite R1 82, which is my suite, there is a fantastic photo of the super pit in Kalgoorlie with the city of Kalgoorlie in the background. That picture typifies how mining and regional communities are inextricably linked. KCGM runs the famous super pit. They have invested in the local community through their policy of employing a local workforce. KCGM should also be applauded for being fantastic community supporters. They are forever being hit up for social and community events and they very rarely knock people back. I fully commend them for that.

Under some of the recommendations, companies like KCGM will be rewarded for keeping a local workforce, whereas they are currently disadvantaged by the tax system. Whilst I congratulate companies like KCGM which only employ a local workforce, I acknowledge that people want choices in their lives. The member for Capricornia mentioned people's choice of where they want to live and work. The ability to choose where they live and where they work is something that many Australians probably take for granted. The sentiment of choice was something that the committee heard over and over again. However, I question whether choice should be the top priority when some regional communities are suffering from the mining industry. Where do we end up with that? Where, ultimately, are these regional towns that support mining communities if they are going to be left basically in the wilderness?

The committee also noted this point and noted the difference between isolated and remote projects, or projects in a construction phase compared to operations which exist near communities. I believe we should be making communities places where people want to live, meaning that, if there is a mine site next to a town, ensuring that people want to live in that town, in my view, is a no-brainer. I accept that there is not going to be a town next door to every mine site, and I certainly accept that in remote locations there will be little choice but to have fly-in fly-out operations. But, where there is, I would love to see a town with services and infrastructure, available housing, good schools and doctor services.

As the member for Riverina highlighted in his speech in this debate, regional Western Australia is somewhere between 80 and 85 doctors short currently. A provincial city like Kalgoorlie is down a number of doctors. A small place like Kambalda, 50- or 60-odd kilometres south of Kalgoorlie, a fantastic mining town through the late sixties, seventies and early eighties and still a town of 3,000 to 4,000 people, has no doctors at all. These sorts of things are the things that we need to highlight. It is these vital factors which make people want to stay in these regional towns. People do not leave the bush because the roads are no good; they leave the bush because there are not the services there that they expect.

The Nationals WA know this. They know that investing in the regions and making them better places to live and work is a worthwhile investment. I was very pleased to bring the committee to WA, including to my electorate as well as to the north of the state, to hear firsthand about the effects of fly-in fly-out and drive-in drive-out on regional Western Australia. The committee acknowledged the immense success of the WA Nationals Royalties for Regions policy, and I am very pleased to see it feature in this document—the Royalties for Regions policy is the envy of all other regional funding schemes; there can be no doubt about that—yet highlighted the abject failure of the federal government, particularly the Department of Regional Australia, Local Government, Arts and Sport, in managing their issues. To quote the report, the department's appearance before the committee demonstrated 'a fundamental lack of understanding regarding the impacts of FIFO workforce practices'. The report goes on to note that the department showed 'a lack of initiative and leadership' on the 'issue that is radically changing the social fabric of regional communities'.

The minister responsible for the department of regional Australia has heard from me time and time again about my feelings towards his department and particularly the Regional Development Australia Fund. When this fund is compared to the Royalties for Regions fund, the policy difference in the number of projects funded is thousands and the difference in the amount of money put towards regional communities is billions. The minister should be extremely embarrassed by his department's involvement in this inquiry, and I urge him to take steps to rectify this as a matter of urgency.

I have not gone and will not go into a lot of detail today about the specific recommendations. However, I want to note that some of these changes relate to the tax system and aim to remove the current disincentives for regional homeownership. I believe that these changes need to be considered very seriously by this parliament. I plan on working with my parliamentary colleagues to ensure that this report is acted on and the recommendations are examined in detail by both sides of the House. Brendon Grylls, as the member for Riverina said, is an outstanding young politician. He risked his political career on the weekend in his bid to stand for the seat of Pilbara. It is incredibly heartening to see his success, and I once again take the opportunity to congratulate him and the WA Nationals on their success in the last state election. Brendon took this risk because he is unashamedly passionate about regional WA, and the WA Nationals are willing to fight to ensure our regional communities are the best they can be.

I too want just that: I want regional communities to thrive, and our communities only thrive if they have people in them—living, working, visiting. I look forward to working with my parliamentary colleagues on the recommendations in this report, and I urge the government to do all it can to ensure we continue to have a thriving mining industry with local communities equally thriving alongside them.

In closing, I would like to thank the secretariat, particularly Glenn Worthington and Siobhan Lane. They have done a fantastic job in pulling this report together and I sincerely thank them for their efforts. I would also like to congratulate the member for Riverina, Michael McCormack, for the cover photo; he takes great pride in telling everybody that it is his. I would also like to thank my fellow committee members, including the member for Wannon, who is alongside me here today. The member for Wannon did make some notes in the report which I acknowledge and totally agree with. We do not want this report to be a reflection on the mining industry. We do not want there to be more red tape and more costs for the mining industry. I totally endorse that, but I am also satisfied that this report, if handled properly, will not do that. As I have said previously, there is an opportunity for the mining industry to embrace this report, work with the communities, work with government, because there are opportunities, in my view, to embrace regional Australia further.

As I said, I would like to thank the committee members, and I would particularly like to thank Tony Windsor, who I think did an outstanding job in chairing the committee and—obviously with the support of the secretariat—producing this fantastic report. Also, once again I thank them for coming to regional Western Australia. So often we hear in this parliament about how Western Australia is going and that we are the saviour of this nation, but we do have a two-speed economy—the mining industry and elsewhere. At the minute the wheat belt in Western Australia is under an enormous amount of pressure and I think that needs to be reflected. We need to look at these things not in isolation; we need to look at them as a whole. When I argue for a greater return for Western Australia on things like GST, it is not just because we want more money. A 75 per cent floor in the GST will actually provide some equity and some future planning back into regional Western Australia, which I think is critical. I was very pleased to have them visit Western Australia, and very pleased to have them visit Kalgoorlie. I would urge you, one and all, to read this report and take it for what it is. It is a very strong reflection of the evidence we took and I thank the House for its time.

Dan Tehan (Wannon, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to endorse the comments of the previous speaker, the member for O'Connor, and acknowledge the work he contributed to our committee. He came on to the committee specifically to deal with these issues, and they are issues that are particularly relevant to his electorate, like they are to other members of the committee. I would like to acknowledge the role of the chair in ensuring that there was a very good balance in the way that the committee looked at these issues, the way this committee got to all of those regions that are being influenced by what is occurring with the mining boom, and for making sure that it got to not only those states and regions where mining is booming but also to smaller areas where there are impacts. I refer specifically to the town of Maryborough in my electorate, where there are issues around drive-in drive-out. It is not to do with the mining industry there. Where there are public services, we have people coming in, using those public services or working in those public services, but living outside those towns.

But these are very complex issues. They do, as the member for O'Connor mentioned, revolve around choice. I think we have to be extremely careful about how we go about telling people what their choices should or should not be. There is no doubt that there are infrastructure issues in regional Australia. In mining regions this has been exacerbated by what is occurring in the mining industry currently. But in other areas, where there is not a mining boom, there are also issues regarding doctor shortage, such as making sure housing is provided. We have to come up with the long-term and permanent solutions that will address these problems. As the member for O'Connor rightly noted, we have to ensure that rural and regional Australia gets its fair share of the funding pie. It contributes significantly to this nation, and we have to make sure that that contribution is reflected in how government addresses these areas. I note what has happened after the Prime Minister's visit to Western Sydney, where we have seen 19 applications for RDAF funding in round 4 progress to the next level, whereas every other region in Australia is only allowed to have three.

This is not the way to address these problems. This is what makes these problems worse, and this is what we need to get away from because—let's be honest—we do not have the population base in regional and rural Australia but we do make a significant economic contribution. My view is that, if we get government policies right and make sure that we share the pie around properly, then everyone can benefit, whether it be from resources, from agriculture, from manufacturing or from services. But it will not occur if we just continually focus on where the population base is and in particular where we think the important political population base is. This is something that all of us in this parliament need to seriously think about, because these issues will not be resolved if we do not. There are serious doctor shortages in a lot of these mining communities, just as there are serious issues about attracting doctors into regional and rural towns. And I have this problem in my electorate of Wannon.

Another point I would like to make regarding this report is that the—

A division having been called in the House of Representatives—

Sitting suspended from 16 : 47 to 17 : 05

As I was saying, another important aspect of the report that needs to be taken into consideration is the importance of the mining industry to host communities. I know that the member for McPherson has been a passionate supporter of the need to get the infrastructure right in her electorate because of the unemployment levels there so that people can benefit from what is occurring in the mining industry elsewhere. This is an important point that we need to take into consideration because there are some aspects of our community which make it difficult for people to move. They might include issues like stamp duty or family ties to regions. We have to ask ourselves: what is the best alternative here? Do we want to encourage these people to seek work wherever that work may be? Should we be saying, 'No, being prepared to move is the only way you will get access to this work'? It is an important point that needs to be examined as a whole, and I think we will need to do that. As globalisation takes place and there is a need for increased mobility in workforces, we are going to have to grapple with these issues.

In conducting this inquiry, we received telling evidence about the different phases that occur when mining projects are initiated. Obviously, the construction phase more heavily involves the need to put a lot more workers into these communities. This is creating significant challenges for those communities that are the beneficiaries of the mining operations in those regions. How communities deal with the construction phase of projects is one of the more complex aspects of what the committee needs to look at. It is incredibly difficult for communities to deal with the huge influx of people knowing that, over time, there will be a reduction in the population base. Once again, ensuring that we have the mobility to cope with that is very important. It might be that, especially for the construction phases of projects, we will need to look at ensuring that the services required for local communities in mining areas have the flexibility for fly-in fly-out or drive-in drive-out to cope with those construction phases. Obviously, when it comes to the operational phases, this is a slightly different perspective. If we can develop sensible policy for those operational stages to encourage a more permanent workforce into those communities, that is an important aspect that we need to take in consideration.

I would also like to raise the point that we should not see this issue purely in terms of an urban-rural or urban-regional divide, because we are seeing that some communities are benefiting from the growth that has occurred in the mining sector over the previous five to 10 years. For instance, I will point to two areas that are relevant to my own electorate of Wannon. We have a regional aviation provider which is also a trainer of pilots. It has been able to use the opportunities that have been brought about by the growth in the mining sector to service the mining communities. It has done wonders for its business. It is basically a commercial aviation business which services regional towns and provides access into urban areas. Being able to offer additional services has given a breadth to that aviation provider that has enabled it to continue to grow and, in very difficult times in the aviation industry, continue to provide very good services.

We are also seeing regional communities providing services and equipment to the miners and their operations wherever they may be occurring. This is supporting local communities in regional and rural areas who are facing difficult times at the moment due to the high Australian dollar and due to the carbon tax and other government policies that have done nothing to benefit them. The fact that they have been able to service and provide goods to the mining industry has enabled them to offer services not just in their local communities but across the nation. It is giving them the opportunity also to build important linkages to be able to service the mining industry across the globe. That is another important aspect that we need to take into account when we look at this issue.

In summary, this report deals with a series of issues which are problematic for the communities which are hosting the growth in the mining industry, which are seeing mines develop in and around their local communities. There are serious infrastructure issues, serious service issues and serious land release issues that need to be dealt with around these communities. There are other aspects that need to be taken into account as well. We have to make sure when we look at this issue that we get the balance right and that we view it as a challenge that has opportunities for the whole nation. We do not want to be dragging the mining sector down as a way of dealing with this issue. We have to be bright enough and have the breadth of vision to say: 'This industry is providing wealth to our nation. How can we ensure that that wealth is returned to those areas where there are serious issues as a result of population growth and as a result of infrastructure decline? What are the policies we need to get in place to address these issues?' Those are the big questions.

As I said in my dissenting report, we do not want additional bureaucracy, we do not want additional red tape and we do not want to add to the cost of doing business for mining companies at a time when they are facing increased international competitive pressures. These are not the things to address these problems. We need to have a breadth to our vision in how we deal with it. We have raised the issues in this report, and now our big challenge is to ensure that we look at the policies that will address these problems in a very sensible way which will allow our nation to continue to grow. That is our next challenge.

Karen Andrews (McPherson, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I welcome this opportunity to speak on the report by the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Regional Australia into fly-in fly-out and drive-in drive-out practices in regional Australia. Let me start by saying that I appreciate the work done by members of the committee and the secretariat. I am very aware of the site visits that were undertaken and of the submissions that were made during the inquiry. I do thank the committee for its work.

This is a very significant inquiry for the resources sector, for our rural communities and for what are referred to in the report as the source communities—where the fly-in fly-out/drive-in drive-out workers live and where their families remain when they go to work. I was looking forward to this report. I put in a submission, as did a number of organisations from the Gold Coast, where my seat of McPherson is located.

My initial reaction, when I saw the report, was that surely there must have been a better title? I think that the title of a report is intended to, and does, reflect the contents of the report. Cancer of the bush or salvation for our cities? is quite simply just inflammatory. I think it really sets a poor scene for the inquiry and what the findings of that inquiry actually were. I am very disappointed with that.

But as the member for McPherson on the Gold Coast I am also very disappointed that there was only a very brief reference to the Gold Coast, at section 4.77, as part of the section headed 'Source communities'. This was a section of the report that comprised only 13 paragraphs, so it was really quite brief in terms of the overall report. I am disappointed that whilst there is considerable detail in the report about the impact of fly-in fly-out and drive-in drive-out on rural communities, there is significantly less detail about the source communities and the benefits for those communities and for the families of the workers who live there.

As a member of the federal parliament, I am a fly-in fly-out worker. I do not fly in and out of a mine site; I fly in and out of Canberra and to other parts of Australia. I am acutely aware of the impact that my choice of career has on my family and has on me as a worker. There is no argument from me that the ideal situation is for people to work close to where they live. But for many workers this is not possible, for a number of reasons. It may be that there is no accommodation nearby. It may be that the accommodation is not suitable for families. It may be that the family does not want to live there; it may be for any number of reasons.

What I think has been overlooked in this report is actually very simple: if you have the choice of a job across the road from where you live that pays a certain rate and a job away from home where you have to fly-in fly-out or drive-in drive-out that pays a different rate, then it is an economic and family decision about which job to take. If there is no job across the road then the job away from home may be a lifeline and is very much needed by the individual and by the family. I think that has been overlooked by the committee in its deliberations.

Being a fly-in fly-out worker is not something to be demonised for. The cities and towns that are establishing themselves as source communities should be applauded for the efforts that they are making: firstly, to actively source work for residents, many of whom are unemployed and with little immediate prospects of securing employment close to home; and, secondly, for providing the infrastructure and amenities to support the family of the fly-in fly-out worker.

Establishing these source communities in regional areas is a positive step. I include the Gold Coast as a regional area, and one where there is evidence that there are already many fly-in fly-out workers. I must add that there are many workers who base their families on the Gold Coast and fly-in fly-out of locations around the world. Scotland and the Middle East spring to mind immediately as destinations where there have been people travelling to work in the oil industry for many years, and they have based their families on the Gold Coast. They do that because their families are happy to live there; they have made friends, there are amenities and there is already infrastructure in place to support their families.

As part of this inquiry I did invite the committee to the Gold Coast to conduct part of their hearings there. Unfortunately, the committee was unable to attend due to time constraints. I subsequently found out—and I think this is almost beyond belief—that the committee could not travel to the Gold Coast but could travel to Mongolia and to Canada as part of their inquiry when there was ample opportunity on the Gold Coast for them to speak to some of the workers and to some of their families. I am very disappointed that my requests went unheeded. If they had been able to attend there and visit the Gold Coast they would have seen what the Gold Coast has to offer. I speak only about the Gold Coast but there are other source communities that similarly have a lot to offer for workers and their families.

I believe that the work of the parliament is not yet completed. There is more work that needs to be done. The additional work that needs to be done, and must be done, is to identify how to support fly-in fly-out workers and their families and how to put that support in place. I would respectfully put to the parliament that the work of the committee is not done and that it should be continued as a matter of urgency.

Barry Haase (Durack, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to this report and, in doing so, I would firstly like to acknowledge the secretariat for the magnificent job they did in guiding us through this report. The aspect of the report that I wish to specifically address is the issue of taxation zone rebates. Deputy Speaker Scott, you and I have shared discussions on this topic on numerous occasions. The taxation zone rebates boundaries were drawn in 1945 and have remained basically the same since that year. Over time—approximately every 20 years—there has been some rejigging of the rates, some rejigging of the boundaries in a new shape, but basically it remains the same. This rebate—in fact, it was not a rebate initially—was worth to a taxpayer who works for a year in a remote area, perhaps with a wife and small preschool age children, an amount of money equivalent to about six weeks extra wages per annum. It was a substantial amount of compensation paid each year to those persons who were prepared to do it tough and live in the bush. It was about the toughness of living in the bush. It was about the high cost of living dictated by distance, lack of choice, lack of competition and the general hardships of doing it tough.

In the case of the town that I know the example best applies to, Kalgoorlie in the Goldfields, if you spend 12 months working in the Goldfields these days, and you are a taxpayer, you are entitled to a rebate on your tax of the princely sum of $57 per annum. As many an accountant has said to me, it would almost cost more than the $57 in their time to claim it for you, because it is such a paltry sum.

The lack of equity in the payments from one area to another is incredibly striking. For instance, working in Broome or Port Hedland the amount that one is entitled to is the same amount that you would get if you were working in Marble Bar. Both Port Hedland and Broome, of course, are on the ocean. Marble Bar is not on the ocean. For anyone living in Marble Bar—bless their cotton socks; I love them all—Marble Bar is no Broome and it is no Port Hedland.

The reality is that it is high time something was done to create some equity in this taxation zone rebate system. That can only be done with a thorough analysis of the way that it impacts on those who are truly bone fide residents of remote areas and also of how it impacts on those who are not bona fide residents but are entitled to the taxation zone rebate simply because they spend 183 days in a year working in that particular area. The contrast between the conditions of working in those remote areas today and working in those remote areas in 1945 could not be more extreme. Workers that are entitled to this because they work in the area might live in the leafy suburbs of Perth or on the coast as a southern community, and many of them do. Rockingham and Mandurah are wonderful bastions of those that work in my electorate but do not live there. They rarely spend any money there. They enjoy their time living in, as I say, the leafier suburbs. They are entitled to the same amount of payment as if they were working and living in Marble Bar. The conditions that are enjoyed by the average FIFO or DIDO worker today are luxurious compared with 1945, but they are luxurious compared with almost any of the employment situations around the suburbs of our capital cities. They have air-conditioned transportation, they have serviced accommodation, they are presented with multiple choices of meals three times a day, their laundry is attended to in the camp—towels et cetera—and lot of people have to spend a lot of time in the gym, believe me, because the paddock is generally a good one and one of the major problems of being a FIFO worker these days is that weight is easily gained.

So something has to be done. It is time that this whole issue of the taxation zone rebate be addressed to create some equity, because it was designed initially to attract workers to the difficult areas, areas that were hard to populate, and it worked. After a few years of getting six weeks extra wages a year, couples could go back to the big smoke and pay for a house or at least put a very substantial deposit on a house. It gave them a leg up in life. When they did not have the amenities, and when their children became school age, they often left that remote area and moved to the amenities of the city and had those facilities that were required, whereas today all of these areas have pretty good facilities and the payments are abysmal. Therefore there is no hook, there is no lure and there is no financial incentive for people to go to and live and work in these remote areas.

I am the first to appreciate the politics of any policy and I know that, if we were to do the logical thing and change the system so that those who were not bona fide residents in the area were not entitled to it, there would be some hue and cry. But if the policy of paying it is to attract residents to country areas, remote areas and difficult-to-populate areas then I feel that we have to bite the bullet. There is also the case where a population was very low in particular areas when the system was brought in in 1945, and those same areas are now in excess of 100,000 population. It is hardly justification for a bonus to attract people to live there. Darwin immediately comes to mind. I face the reality that many people, especially my colleagues, will ask how dare I take away the taxation zone rebate for the residents of Darwin. It is a substantial amount of money. Not only is there an additional 50 per cent on family tax benefits paid but there is also about $1,130. To take that away is significant. But if we are to suggest that this money is paid as an incentive to populate hard to populate areas, why should we pay it to those who are living in a populous area where there is competition, amenity and public transport—all of those things that this money was paid to compensate for.

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

You have it at two levels.

Barry Haase (Durack, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Indeed, we have in fact four levels of payment for the taxation zone rebate. We have zone A in the northern portion of Australia, zone B in the southern portion and then we have special zone A and special zone B. A special zone is determined by whether or not a location is more than 250 kilometres from a population centre with a minimum population of 2,500. It is very specific. But even though it is very specific and the Taxation Act clearly outlines what the rules and regulations are and what towns are in and what towns are out, the figures that the taxation department work on are inaccurate and totally out of date and abysmal. Kununurra is listed as being entitled and yet Kununurra has a population well in excess of 2,500. The figures and the facts that the taxation department works on are wrong. Their assumption that this is in some way equitable is wrong, because there are towns in western New South Wales that have far less amenity than places like Darwin and yet they are not in any of the zones in relation to the taxation zone rebate.

The examples are numerous. It is referred to in our report. It is one of the recommendations that I have been concerned with for all of my time in this place. It is well and truly past time now to look at this. When you look at the average period of time that has elapsed for attention to and revision of this taxation zone rebate system, that has well and truly gone. Time was up about 10 years ago. It is time that something was done. It is time that some equity was introduced. Every aspect of this needs to be attended to, including the amount of compensation. Frankly, I believe that it would be embarrassing for members of the taxation department to try and defend why such an outstanding opportunity to get money compensating you from the government amounted to $57 per annum. Anyone who could keep a straight face arguing that I would suggest would have to be brain dead. It is time that something was done.

With those few words on that very specific subject, I seek leave to table a document in relation to the boundaries of the taxation zone rebate at present.

Leave granted.

Thank you.

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

Let me first congratulate the committee, and especially the previous speaker, who is a member of that committee, and the member on duty at the table for this excellent report, The cancer of the bush or the salvation of our cities? That is a very provocative title, as well it might be. When you go through the report, you realise that there are no simple answers to this. This is a very complex problem. In saying that it is a complex problem, that does not mean that we can just walk away from it, either.

I looked through a lot of the recommendations. One of them was that there is a requirement for accurate measurement of the fly-in fly-out numbers. I think that is a very important thing if we are talking about taxation, fringe benefits tax, quality of life, comparing one region with another, comparing the degree of remoteness and all those other things. You have to have accurate statistics because otherwise you are making guesses in the dark.

Another recommendation was the allocation of funding to reflect the resident and fly-in populations—in other words, those places with a residential population that have their services overstretched by fly-in fly-out or drive-in dry-out populations should be reimbursed in local government terms or at least the councils of those areas should be given some adequate readvertisement for the services that they have to provide.

The report goes on to call for an assessment of the consumption of local services. That is very important because, whether you like it or not, if you have a camp a kilometre or two out of town, it is going to use a very high proportion of the local services, especially in the smaller country towns. The report goes on to talk about medical services, because you might have one doctor looking after a reasonably small country town. It is another thing to have a doctor looking after a huge mining camp and a country town. It begs the question, although it is not touched on in the report in these terms, of whether or not it should be compulsory in granting status for these projects in the early days of their development to insist that for a population above a certain number of workers a permanent doctor has to be provided on the site. That would certainly relieve localised medical services of heavy responsibility, especially in those construction stages where say you are building a mine and you might be using 2,000, 3,000 or even 4,000 people to do that. When you come back to the operational stage you might drop back to 700, 800 or 1,000. There is a big difference.

Even if during that developmental phase the medical services were boosted by the companies carrying out those developments to take medical strain off the local hospital, that is not to say the local hospital will not be used for emergencies. That is not to say that the local doctor would not cooperate with the doctor on the site and all that sort of thing. All it says is that you would boost medical services to reflect the particular spikes in a very big development. I can think of a case in point. Take Gladstone at present, where you have three LNG plants being built simultaneously. Imagine what that does to services in Gladstone, whether they are civil services or medical services or whatever.

The report goes on to talk about fringe benefits tax exemptions and whether they should be removed where an accessible township exists or allowed in the operational phase of a project. Sure, you would allow perhaps the fringe benefit exemption to get people in there and get the project up and running, but would you allow it once it gets into operational mode? As the member for Durack just said, some of these camps have excellent services of catering, accommodation and the like. Fringe benefits tax could be one of the keys to encourage or discourage aspects of fly-in fly-out. The report talks about zonal taxation, as the previous speaker did. Should the zonal taxation arrangements only apply to the permanent workforce? That is a tricky one. Your natural instinct would be to say, 'Yes, we'd allow it for the permanent workforce'—or resident workforce; or the permanently resident workforce to be completely correct. But then we also have this dilemma going on in Australia at present of the alleged misuse of 457 visas. If you do not make it sufficiently attractive by way of things like fringe benefit tax and zonal tax for Australian workers to go out and take on these jobs in remote parts of Australia, especially in the west and the north, then are you not going to cut your own throat and find that you cannot get resident Australians to participate in that development? That too would be a tragedy.

Then you have the other thing to have zonal taxation of where, whether you are resident or not, would it be appropriate that it was paid. A case in point would be an oil rigger. You are remote when you are on an oil rig; you cannot get anything much more remote. Therefore, where you might say where there is a township and a permanent workforce there is no justification for fly-in fly-out, it is pretty hard to extend that argument when it comes to an oil rig.

As I said at the beginning of this contribution, this is a very difficult subject. But if you want to look at the history of the development of Australia, you need to have an appreciation of what were the driving things that took people into regional Australia and how communities developed. From time to time in this place we hear criticisms of the National Party leader of Queensland in the seventies and eighties, Jo Bjelke-Petersen. I, for one, am not a critic of his; I am a great admirer of his. What he did is he built railways and things by getting companies to participate, for example, by way of royalty or by way of doing special projects in the development of those railways. The other thing he did is he insisted the towns—

A division having been called in the House of Representatives—

Sitting suspended from 17:42 to 17 : 56

Before the suspension, not surprisingly I was talking about Joh Bjelke-Petersen. I was saying that one of the things he insisted on was that mining companies play a part in the development of railways and the development of settlements. While I am sure there has always been an element of fly-in fly-out, during the Joh era whole communities developed and have survived. A few have gone, like Mary Kathleen, but if you go to Central Queensland, in the hinterland of the member for Dawson, for example, all the towns that grew up in that era—Blackwater, Saraji, Moranbah, Dysart—are certainly towns that peaked. They went back a bit as the peak came off and certain mines closed, but then they serviced those communities as country towns. So fly-in fly-out is not the only answer. Where you can develop communities and make it a condition that homes have to be built—perhaps not at the construction phase but at the operational stage of a mining project—then you are doing what our early pioneers did in developing this country.

I think we should have a bipartisan attitude to fly-in fly-out. As I said before, there will always be parts of Australia where you will have to have fly-in fly-out: in remote parts of North Queensland, the Territory and Western Australia, where you would not want to build a town; where a mine has a life of only 20 years; where there is not going to be a cluster of mines; or where it is not going to be in an agricultural area—where it is going to be a solo operation for the purpose of mining. Certainly, there will always be a need for fly-in fly-out for operations like that, including, as I said before, things like oil rigs. But where we get closer to the coast or along railways, where transport routes exist, where there is prime agricultural land or potentially prime agricultural land that can be developed, we should take a longer view than just mining. We should take a view of how we develop our nation and then we can remove a lot of the problems I spoke about earlier. If fringe benefits tax exemptions were removed where towns exist, then you might have a better chance of making those sorts of things happen—during the operational phase, for example. If you made zonal taxation arrangements such that they applied to only the permanent workforce in a community, there would be an encouragement to build places like Moranbah, Dysart and Saraji. You would also see the expansion of towns, as has been the case, like Springshaw, Emerald, Capella and Clermont.

So I would recommend to honourable members that we look very hard at the Central Queensland experience of the development of those great coalfields of the seventies and eighties and not take fly-in fly-out as a given: where it is necessary, use it; but do not use it in areas where it is not necessarily required. We all know the price paid for that in broken marriages. That trickles down to pensions, child support and other things we see in our electorate offices every day. For young guys and for well-balanced families who are prepared to make some sacrifices in the early years to get a nest egg together, yes I think it is all okay. But to make it the be all and end all of the development of this country would be a great shame. So, while I commend this report, I think we have got a lot more work to do.

George Christensen (Dawson, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is good to follow the member for Hinkler, who is marking 20 years in this place today. His contribution here just shows that in 20 years he has not lost it; it is only getting better, like fine wine.

In addressing this report, can I first say that I think language and how we describe things is very important. I am not too happy with the title of the report, 'Cancer of the bush or salvation for our cities?' FIFO is not a cancer; it is not a saviour, either; it is a work practice. That view is shared by a lot of people in my electorate. In fact, we have got a miner who writes an article in the local Mackay newspaper every week. To quote him, he says: 'Everyone is talking about FIFO, or fly-in fly-out—and DIDO, or drive-in drive-out—as if it is a dirty word. To put it bluntly, I find that insulting. The fact that myself and a substantial number of my workmates don't live permanently in small communities near the mines we work at should not be construed as having no regard for these townships and their permanent residents.' Globally in this whole debate we need to step back and accept that that is a reality for most miners.

There are a lot of strident critics of fly-in fly-out practices. I am a critic of 100 per cent fly-in fly-out—and I will get to that. Even the Moranbah Retailers Association President, Peter Finlay, who probably agrees with the cancer comment, is on record as saying nobody is against FIFO per se but to make it compulsory would have a detrimental impact on businesses and the community. And therein lies the rub: having 100 per cent FIFO—and businesses such as BMA have made it compulsory at some of their mines—really does go against the spirit of choice. It is not about the practice itself, but how it is used by the companies.

The former Bligh Labor government in Queensland gave approval for BMA to have a 100 per cent fly-in fly-out workforce at its Caval Ridge mine near Moranbah,. That was opposed by me in this place at the time. It was opposed by the community, by all of the local governments and certainly by the residents of the Moranbah township. They were not listened to, they were simply ridden over, and now we have a 100 per cent fly-in fly-out operation.

I hear stories, through the press mainly, that when a local goes to apply for a job at this mining operation they are told, 'Sorry, you have to have permanent place of residence in Brisbane.' That is a terrible thing. That to me is geographic discrimination. I would say it should be outlawed. There should be no ability for a company to not hire someone because they do not live in a particular place. Unless it is going to affect the work practices, it should be illegal to do that. I say shame on the state government at the time, the Bligh Labor government, for allowing this to happen and shame on BMA as well for actually proposing it and for having it in action. I am against 100 per cent FIFO and I want that on the record.

There are quite a number of recommendations in this report and a lot that I do agree with. The first recommendation regards the ABS and getting the correct data. Local councils have told me they feel the data is not correct at this point in time because of the manner in which the ABS goes about collecting census data. If we have underrepresentation of population in certain areas because of the data then that needs to be addressed. Quite a few other recommendations go to research that needs to be done so government can have the facts. They include commissioning some research on the actual economic impact of FIFO and DIDO workforces, and on the demand for and the consumption of local government services and infrastructure by FIFO and DIDO workforces.

The report recommends commissioning a study into the health effects of FIFO and DIDO work and lifestyle to develop a comprehensive health policy. The committee also recommends the commissioning of research on the effect of children and family relationships of having a long-term FIFO or DIDO parent. Also, there is a recommendation to commission research into the economic and social impacts of establishing regional centres as FIFO source communities. All of those research requests, I think, are very good.

There is one university that is well placed to do that research, CQ University, which is right on the doorstep of the Bowen Basin. It has looked into a lot of these issues already. I will be writing to the Minister for Regional Australia asking him, given this committee comes under his purview, to consider the university when it comes to doing this research that has been recommended if that is the way the government indeed wishes to go with this.

Another thing I really want to say is we need to be careful with language when we refer to FIFO and DIDO like they are interchangeable. They certainly are not. Statistics from the Queensland government statistician show that 61 per cent of non-resident workers engaged in the Bowen Basin actually reside in the Mackay and Whitsunday local government areas. That is because it is in the same region as them. They can drive to work in less than half a day in most cases and it is convenient. We need to get away from lumping FIFO and DIDO into the same basket. That certainly was the recommendation of the Regional Economic Development Corporation of Mackay, Isaac, Whitsunday which represents the economic development interests of those three local government areas. Isaac Regional Council is where the Bowen Basin actually is. They say that the terms FIFO and DIDO should be treated as mutually exclusive, so they are not the same thing. Page 7 of their submission to the inquiry states:

The long term issue is the allocation of services and infrastructure to communities where the FIFO/DIDO workforces are not counted as resident population although they may spend more than 50% of their life in those communities.

That goes back to one of the recommendations before about local government and ensuring that the figures that the ABS provides are accurate. The issue also extends to DIDO workers, but they do say here:

The interrelationships between regional communities can potentially marginalise these effects. Having large centres such as Mackay, and large tourism destinations such as the Whitsundays in close proximity to the resource communities improves liveability, as it provides residents with options. By having the DIDO workforce reside in adjacent communities, the provision of services and facilities which can be utilised by the direct mining communities’ increases.

So there are benefits from having drive-in drive-out workforce practices. It is very different to FIFO and we need to recognise that.

I go onto the Regional Social Development Centre, an organisation which I was once vice-president of and which does a lot of good work in the Mackay region. They go on to talk about drive-in drive-out workers, as differentiated from FIFO workers, saying:

DIDO workers originate from a larger regional centre within approximately 2.5 hours of their place of work …

I have to say that that is what is said here, but in some cases it might be four hours.

The impacts of DIDO work arrangements for the region differ from FIFO in that:

Again, I urge caution on saying that DIDO and FIFO are the same thing; they clearly are not.

Going to another item out of the RSDC's—the Regional Social Development Centre's—submission to the inquiry: it talks about family relationships. I think this is one of the things where we often look at the economic impacts, and all the rest of that, but we do not look at the impact on families enough. There is some movement in this report on that, and that is good, but the RSDC submission says that there are difficulties in maintaining family relationships amongst FIFO and DIDO workers, as stated by workers who actively participated in an initiative that the RSDC came up with—the Adaptive Communities Initiative. One of them stated:

It was pretty rocky. I missed out on how my son was going at school and my wife was working as well and she had dramas at work and she couldn't talk to me. When you are together day to day you work through it but when you are apart, the other family members feel that they are alone, that there is no help.

I have to say, that is a reaction that I get from a lot of families who are engaged in drive-in drive-out and fly-in fly-out. The Whitsunday Industrial Workforce Development group, which is doing a lot of good work in trying to connect local businesses and local jobseekers with the mining industry in that e Whitsundays, also raises this issue:

Social impacts for FIFO/DIDO workers and families—social support to families of FIFO workers is out of the scope of WIWD however it is believed that there could potentially be a lack of support services for families who relocate to the region—

that is, regions where there is mining. What they are looking for is:

… attraction, infrastructure and environment for workers to the region there will be various strategies which will be developed to respond to some of the issues associated with retention of workers and their families to the region.

One of the things that is missing from this report which I think should have been in it is a strategy to transfer fly-in fly-out workers to actual residents. Wouldn't it be great if you could actually develop a program where that would happen. That is something WIWD has brought up.

Going back to the issue of the impact on families, I also made a submission to the inquiry here, and it was largely around that issue. I remember being in a country pub in Mackay and having a big burly bloke, who was bigger than me both horizontally and vertically, come up and have a bit of a yarn—he broke down crying actually. All it was about was how long he has to spend away from his family and the toll it puts on him. He went to the bathroom and came out and found his son tucked in the corner next to the door because he did not want to see his daddy go again. Stories like that are heartbreaking.

Something has to be done to help families in these situations. I put a proposal to the committee that we look at the federal government supporting the establishment of community trusts in local government areas where there is mining activity or workforces and give tax deductible status to donations to such trusts in order to support children and families. There is more of that in my report.

I want to quote two organisations. The CFMEU said:

We are not saying that FIFO must or ought to be banned. It is recognised that there are times when there is not a realistic alternative, such as remotely based construction projects. And there are times when a combination of resident based and FIFO may be necessary …

The Chamber of Commerce and Industry also said:

Implemented appropriately, the FIFO and DIDO workforce can deliver significant benefits to regional and State economies, local communities and businesses.

It is finding the balance. That is what it is all about: getting the balance right in terms of relationships and workforce make-up.

Debate adjourned.