Nola Marino (Forrest, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In my contribution to this debate on Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2014-2015 and related bills I wish to talk about the coalition government's support for the Rural Financial Counselling Service announced by Minister Joyce only yesterday. The Rural Financial Counselling Service program provides grants to state and regional organisations to provide rural financial counselling to primary producers, fishers and small rural businesses suffering financial hardship and who have no alternative sources of impartial support. The critical part of that is the impartial support. That is exactly what those in extreme circumstances need. What they need is sound, realistic support from someone who has no vested interest in the outcome of the decisions needing to be made, no matter what those decisions are—the decision to stay in that business or not.

Having been through this with fellow farmers I know that there are times when you need these services. The time you need them most is when you are at your most vulnerable, when no matter what you do you cannot control what is actually happening to you. It may be because of a series of droughts or extreme weather events or it may be because of continuous years of low prices for your product, and you may be at the end of your tether after literally worked your guts out for years. You have tried everything within your power to stay in business, but there is no light at the end of the tunnel and your whole situation appears to be hopeless. It is when you are at your most distressed and your most stressed, often struggling to work your way through the business and family issues, that your personal family relationships are also under the most pressure. The whole community suffers as well. With so many small rural communities relying on the profitability of the agricultural and farming sector, when the farmers are struggling, the local small businesses, the local community service and sporting and emergency service organisations all suffer as well. Farmers and their families directly contribute to all of these. This is how our communities actually function in regional Australia.

When you have had to watch your partner and your family suffer immeasurably—those people you love most who have stood by you and worked by your side year after year on the land you love, the property you have worked on perhaps all your life, which could be the farm that you brought as that young couple seeking an opportunity on the land—these support services can be crucial. For some businesses in that situation, impartial, reliable advice will help them work their way through their financial issues—some however will not be able to. It is inevitable that some primary producers and businesses will have no choice but to make the toughest decision of all—to sell, if they can, and leave their rural area. It is how this process is managed that matters most.

The Rural Financial Counselling Service in WA has been operating with its current board and structure since 2008. The core business of this service is to help farming businesses, the individuals, to come to terms with their circumstances of declining profits, increased costs and more complex marketing systems in a rapidly changing environment. The service adopted a strategy to make sure that farmers who engage with the service are taken through a legitimate counselling and business evaluation and management process—that all-important impartial, reliable advice. It allows people to deal with their personal emotional issues as well as their business issues; to work through the grief, the sense of loss, the enormous frustration about their change in fortunes and the absolutely debilitating sense of failure often brought about by changes that often totally out of their control—this is the family and business is crisis; and ultimately come to terms with the reality of their situation, which can mean either structural change back to perhaps being a profitable business or a more managed, dignified exit from their industry.

To me, the key principles of the WA service are critical in these situations—the principles of not building dependency in the people they work with and to work in a way that increases people's ability to make informed decisions for their business and family and, really importantly, to make these decisions from a calm, focused and informed position. An equally important principle is to have a clear focus on the family's opportunities. That critical 'light at the end of the tunnel'—the hope, the way out, the way forward—is important to all of us. We all cope so much better when we have a plan and know what the first step is that we need to take. That is what the service provides. For those who need the help of these services, it is most important to seek them before they are left without choices—before having to walk away from their property, their business and their life with nothing left.

I know the WA Rural Financial Counselling Service takes take their role very seriously They know they need to bring lifelong benefits to the people who need their services—the farming families and their communities. I really wish they had been around during the deregulation of the Western Australian dairy industry experience for my friends and colleagues and those who did not have access to a service like this. There are those who, to this day, are still overcome with grief and find it very difficult to come to terms with the decisions that they were forced to make at that time, and to deal with their pain, their sense of failure and the sense of not being in control. Some of these people that I see still cry over what they have been through. The difference between a farming business family that can come to terms with their situation, including the loss, and the ones that do not is massive. It can have lifelong effects—as I know only too well. One feeds into depression, suicide, the failure and the no future and the other takes what they have with energy into a different future—that of contributing, building and learning from the difficulties they have experienced.

So, from my experience in dairy and rural communities, I see that the real job of services like RFCSWA is to help people manage their individual circumstances and the process they need to go through, and to help the family understand and work through the grieving for their losses—the loss of their property, the loss of their dreams, the loss of the hopes of the young couple or individual who started out so many years ago and worked themselves to the bone. There is also perhaps that dreadful thought that, throughout this process, they may have robbed their sons and daughters of a future—the future sometimes being an opportunity of an education or an opportunity in the business—and the thought that they have to leave their community, their lifelong friends. This is part of what they have to go through, but it is a process the WA RFCS uses that returns the all-important sense of control and urgency to the person, the individual. Once a farming family regains focus on the decisions that have to be made, they will create their own solutions. This type of government program should never be a part of delaying the process of people coming to terms with the absolute reality of their position. That is why this service is so valuable in Western Australia. I am so pleased that we are supporting this service and the continuation of it—of assisting rural businesses and all the people involved to regain focus and find solutions.

RFCS WA's success is built around the fact that it takes the farming family on a journey either assisting to restore profitability in that business or leaving the business and industry with dignity. The farmer gains and takes ownership of the reality of the situation. The person who does not go through an ownership process but is made to fit a simplistic predetermined proposal is likely to be distracted by useless goals and delays their necessary adjustment by years—again, a damaging process to the individual and the business—with an ongoing loss of equity, opportunity and sometimes life itself.

One very important statistic from the RFCS program in WA relates to suicide. This is a very real risk in the challenges facing farming families. With the current approach to rural readjustment, the WA service has dealt with over 1,000 farming businesses across most agricultural sectors. This is the best indication of the effectiveness of the service: there has not been one suicide by either a farmer or a related family member.

The business planning process, while it is not perfect, combines appropriate tailored counselling skills and takes people on an appropriate journey to understand their position. It allows either restructure of the business or exit, but it maintains people's dignity, because they own the process. They are part of the decision-making process.

The way forward for farming families in financial difficulty needs to include the integration of economic, social and environmental factors. Adaptation is a process requiring recognition and management of loss and change—change can be very hard for people to deal with.    Extreme care is needed, because each person has their own individual issues and a simple, one-dimensional analysis can be harmful. A sound business planning framework is the vehicle to help people understand their current situation and future possibilities. But, most of all, I know that for the WA RFCS, each person is valued and respected—something that we all want and need. The person matters. Their family matters. Their future matters.

The Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry in 2012 contracted PricewaterhouseCoopers to conduct a national performance audit of the fourteen Rural Financial Counselling Services in Australia. PWC said of the WA client engagement that it was 'better practice and/or innovation—delivering a higher level of service' when compared to other services across Australia. The report said:

Client services are well managed through the Organisation's Client Management Framework. This framework provides a one-page overview of the client management process and is an effective tool for ensuring that all key steps and decisions are made by the rural financial counsellors and for recording client decisions and outcomes.

It can be incorporated into client management files and used as a tool to review the performance of individual rural financial counsellors.

I have several reasons for having confidence in the WA service. Most importantly, I know that each person is valued and respected. The person matters, their family matters and their future matters.

Counsellors are meeting people often at the worst time in their lives. People like the chairman of the WA Rural Financial Counselling Service, Julian Krieg, take this particular personally. When we see families and businesses in such crisis, it is like dropping a stone in a bucket of water because of the ripple effect. It affects a whole lot of other businesses in that community. It affects a range of other families besides the individual family directly.

As I said earlier, during the time of such significant change in the dairy industry, there were many families who went through some very tough times. Many of them are no longer in the industry or in rural communities. I saw some small towns like Brunswick Junction lose some wonderful families who had contributed so much to that small community. We saw shops close. The ripple effect has a huge impact in our small regional communities.

I am very pleased that the coalition government is so committed to these types of services in rural and regional communities throughout Australia.

Gai Brodtmann (Canberra, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Defence) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The appropriations in these bills reflect changes made in last year's MYEFO update as well as several machinery-of-government changes. In the 2014-15 Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook, we saw more broken promises—endless broken promises and more of them last year. The government unveiled another write-down for revenue this year and in following years, and that is on top of the write-down back in May.

The federal Treasurer accused Labor of having a spending problem, not a revenue problem, when we were in government. Yet on the day of the mini budget he came out and told Australians that the government had a revenue problem.

This government promised to get the budget back under control— yet what the 2014-15 MYEFO showed was a $44 billion blowout in the budget deficit over the forward estimates compared to the 2014-15 budget. Let's really put this in perspective. Since the Abbott government was elected, the deficit in the 2014-15 financial year has blown out by $16.4 billion. Debt is higher in the 2014-15 MYEFO than it was in the 2014-15 budget, with gross debt over the forward estimates increasing by $100 billion and net debt increasing by $146.3 billion over the same period.

The news is grim across every other aspect of the economy too. Unemployment has jumped to 6.4 per cent in January, the highest it has been since 2002, when the Prime Minister was the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations. Consumer confidence is still low—nine per cent lower now than it was at the time of the 2013 federal election. And business confidence is still below long-run averages.

These are national statistics, and Canberra is not exempt. In fact, Canberra, as usual under coalition governments, has borne the full brunt of this government's decisions. According to CommSec's most recent State of the states report, the ACT has the third weakest economy in the country. Our retail sector was the worst in the country last year, a report by Deloitte Access Economics has found. Our housing market is also suffering, with Canberra posting a price decline over the past quarter and year.

As I said, coalition governments have form when it comes to Canberra. They have form when it comes to their complete disdain—their complete lack of respect—for Canberra and the public servants who serve our nation and our democracy. We have just seen the complete lack of respect for those servants of democracy in recent months, with the offers of below-inflation pay rises to our public servants—and not just the below-inflation pay rises but also the fact that many of the conditions that have been hard fought for over many years are facing possible erosion.

I have spoken in this House many, many, many times about what this coalition government is currently doing to Canberra but also the coalition's form. Its form was brought into stark reality in 1996, when a coalition government was elected on the promise that 2,500 public servants were going to lose their jobs through natural attrition. That ended up being 15,000 public servants here in Canberra—that is one five thousand public servants here in Canberra—and 30,000 public servants across the nation—that is three zero thousand.

What did losing 15,000 jobs mean for Canberra? It meant that business bankruptcies went up. It meant that non-business bankruptcies went up. It meant that house prices fell. It meant that local shops closed down; many of them have not reopened. It meant that our economy went into a slump for about five years. We did not see a crane on the horizon in this town for a very, very long time, because it had basically shut down. We also saw people leave town: our population fell. And we saw many, many people looking for work and only being able to find part-time work because of the loss of 15,000 jobs in this town. It took us a long time to get back up after that economic slump that the coalition government of 1996 foisted on Canberra as a result of its complete disregard for Canberra and its complete disregard and disrespect for the Public Service.

I have said it many, many times: Sir Robert Menzies would be turning in his grave if he saw what this coalition government was doing to his Canberra, his nation's capital, today and if he had seen what was happening in 1996—the denigration of this town. As I said, it took us years to get back up on our feet, and we are just going back to the future again with this government. It is absolutely outrageous. It just shows a complete disregard for the Public Service, servants of democracy. We have also seen the disregard and disrespect for the ADF, with the below-inflation pay offer for the ADF personnel. The coalition, as I said, has form in its contempt and disdain for the Public Service. We saw it nearly 20 years ago and we are seeing it again.

It is because the government just does not understand the impact its disastrous budget has had on my electorate—or it just chooses to ignore it, really. It just chooses to ignore the effect of taking out thousands and thousands of jobs. Already 8,000 jobs have gone, and we are looking at 16,500 across the Public Service. It is almost as if people on the other side of the chamber wear it as a badge of honour—the contempt and disdain for my electorate.

It is rather ironic that, 10 months after the fundamentally flawed budget was handed down, we are still talking about it. Everywhere I go in my mobile offices and my doorknocking, Canberrans are still talking about it, and I know Australians are too. The reason that they are still talking about it is that the budget cuts into our social fabric. The proposals in the budget cut into our social fabric. They cut against the grain of what we are as Australians and what we hold as dear, precious and fundamental to being an Australian. People across the nation and here in Canberra are rightly furious. They are furious because they realise that this budget is bad in so many ways, and it is especially bad for those who can least afford it: low- and middle-income families, single-income families and single parents.

I could really go on talking about the Abbott government's unfair budget for days, because I know that my electorate does, but I am going to focus on a few specific areas that I am very concerned about: the potential privatisation of Defence Housing Australia and the potential privatisation of the Royal Australian Mint. I would also like to talk about two front-line services in my electorate that have had their funding cut.

Both Defence Housing Australia and the Mint were earmarked for possible privatisation in last year's federal budget. The government announced a scoping study on the privatisation of DHA and, according to the Defence Force Welfare Association, the study is going to recommend its sale. We are still waiting to hear what the government has to say on that. In the words of the DFWA:

We fear that the so called independent report will, with the backing of blinkered civilian bureaucrats in the Department of Finance, recommend the selling of DHA for a one off financial windfall to the Government. This would effectively result with ADF families being thrown onto the private rental market and destroy the good work that DHA has done in providing ADF families with quality housing, in the areas where they are needed.

The Abbott government must explain how the privatisation of DHA will improve the effectiveness of the provision of housing to thousands of ADF personnel and their families. DHA has been an extremely successful part of defence support arrangements over many years, vastly improving the housing circumstances of Defence personnel and their families. Surveys show DHA has a customer satisfaction rating of 92 per cent, proving this is the sort of support the ADF wants. DHA is also continuing to achieve above 90 per cent for most of its key performance indicators.

During Senate estimates in October last year, DHA's managing director, Peter Howman, said:

We are achieving all of those KPIs, so we are providing an absolutely good product that helps with the retention and employment of Defence personnel.

I want to underscore that. According to DHA, it helps with the retention and employment of Defence personnel. So not only does DHA provide a key service to Defence personnel and their families; it has continued to be a reliable and increasing source of revenue for the government. Towards the end of last year the organisation posted a $90.1 million net profit, $5.8 million above the budget estimate. So, like many of its thought-bubble policies, the Abbott government has failed to justify its plan to sell DHA. Since the Abbott government outlined its intention to sell DHA, Defence personnel and their families have been left in a state of uncertainty. As long as the Abbott government refuses to make a case for the sale, we must assume this decision is purely ideological.

Just recently I was at a Hearts of Valour event that a dear friend of mine, Richard Rolfe, organised. There were multiple VCs and Cross of Valour recipients, and it was quite an extraordinary achievement to get all these awarded and honoured individuals in one room. I had a number of people coming up to me and saying, 'Please, Gai, keep fighting the good fight to ensure that DHA is not privatised.'

We are also seeing a similar situation play out with the Royal Australian Mint. The Mint was also earmarked for privatisation in last year's budget. The uncertainty of the Mint's future has placed the 200 employees who work there under stress as they are constantly living in a state of limbo. They have been living in a state of limbo since the Mint was earmarked as a potential privatisation in the budget last year—the last 10 months. So again I call on the government to explain what impact selling the Mint will have on the budget bottom line. I also call on the government to answer questions like: how will it ensure the integrity and security of the Mint if a private company takes over? What kind of regulations will accompany the sale if it goes ahead?

Due to time, I now turn very briefly to look at some decisions that were made in last year's Mid-year Economic and Fiscal Outlook update that have caused some concern in my community. I have been very vocal about my outrage and disappointment over the cuts made in the latest funding round of the Department of Social Services, and two organisations in my electorate have been adversely affected by these funding cuts. The first is Karralika.

The government announced an end to its funding of the centre's family program just two days before Christmas, when everyone is heading off for their holidays and gearing up for spending time with their family and friends. This incredible organisation that provides an extraordinary community service not just to Canberra but also to the capital region was told two days beforehand that they were facing funding cuts. On 23 December Karralika received a letter from the Department of Social Services informing the centre that funding for its child and family program will cease as at 28 February 2015. That is this week. The funding cut means the region's only residential drug and alcohol rehabilitation service for families affected by addiction will be forced to close. Eight families, including nine adults, 14 children and one pregnant mother are currently in the program, and there are seven families on the waiting list. In the words of the centre's CEO, Camilla Rowland:

Some of our families will be homeless because they don't have accommodation to go to … of course there's been cuts to housing funding as well.

After huge outcry across the country as thousands of front-line services received funding cuts, the government announced bridging funding to a number—just a number of them. Fortunately, Karralika was included in this bridging funding, which will assist with client transition plans until the end of June this year. But there is no commitment past June this year, and I know staff and clients at the centre are very concerned about the program's future. I have written to the Minister for Social Services, urging him not to carry out these cuts, and I will continue to campaign against this short-sighted and unfair decision.

I cannot talk about the other service, because I have run out of time; but, in concluding, these are just some of the measures outlined in last year's budget or minibudget that have or could have a devastating impact on my electorate. This is still a budget that has the biggest impact on those who can afford it least: low- and middle-income earners, the sick and their carers, pensioners, the unemployed, the young, the people who are battling with addiction, parents who are battling with addiction and trying to improve their lot in life. It is a budget that will both entrench and widen the gap between rich and poor in this country. It is a budget Australians will not stand for and it is a budget that Labor will not stand for.

Darren Chester (Gippsland, National Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Defence) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In the brief time I have available this afternoon I want to put on record my complete support and confidence in the future of an iconic Gippsland company called Patties Foods. Patties was started by the Rijs family about 50 years ago. It started as a small cake shop in my home town of Lakes Entrance, but now it has grown enormously to employ up to 500 staff at its Bairnsdale factory. It is a world-class food production business. I have visited the production facility in Bairnsdale on many occasions; in fact, it is probably the first place I take visiting ministers and other members. I have had the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister and the Minister for Agriculture all visit the plant, and they have been impressed by the facilities on offer.

As most people would know, Patties has been caught up in a product recall associated with an outbreak of hepatitis A and an alleged link to frozen imported berries. It is important to say that that link is yet to be scientifically established, as the testing does continue. This has been a very tough week for Patties management and for Patties staff. Of course there are concerns about people whose health has been impacted, and the possibility of a link to the berry products is something that should be taken seriously and is the No. 1 priority for the company. But I do urge consumers to continue to support this great Australian company.

I enjoyed a FOUR'N TWENTY pie for breakfast today, as members can tell from the pie missing from this pack! I join my state colleague, Tim Bull, and the member for Riverina and the member for Rankin, who are also very keen to support the pastry products that are made in Bairnsdale. I urge the Australian community to host their own family pie night and support Australian jobs. We do not want to make a bad situation any worse.

Bruce Scott (Maranoa, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you. I remember—what was it:

Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie …

Were they meat pies or blackbirds? That is a little fairytale I had as a child.

The debate is interrupted in accordance with standing order 43. The debate may be resumed at a later hour. The Parliamentary Secretary may have leave to continue his remarks.