Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern and Remote Australia) Share this | Hansard source

The Constitution Alteration (Local Government) 2013 is a very important bill and a very important matter. As someone who spent 11 years happily and proudly representing the people of my home town of Ayr on the Burdekin Shire Council, it is something that I have had a particular interest in for some time. I was also, for three years, the federal minister for local government. During that time, I had many discussions with the Australian Local Government Association and the Local Government Association of Queensland about this very issue. It is not a new issue; it has been around for a long time. There have been referenda in the past that have also touched on local government.

No-one in Australia would not applaud and accept the work that local authorities do in their own community. They are the sphere of government that is closest to the people, and because of that they are the most responsive. The councillors are people who are totally connected to their communities. They understand their communities and what their communities want. In my home state of Queensland, councils range from very small councils—for example, Croydon up in the Gulf of Carpentaria, with 300 or 400 people in the whole shire—to the Brisbane City Council, which represents some millions of people. It is a government that is, if not as big as, certainly better than Tasmania, with respect to my two Tasmanian colleagues the chamber. Although I think they would agree with me that, at the present time, the Brisbane City Council is far better run than the Tasmanian government is. Elsewhere in Queensland, there are a range of councils, all of which I have interacted with for many years, as you would have, Madam Acting Deputy President Moore. By and large, they are a very professional group of people. Their administrations are very efficient, as I have been saying to a number of local governments that I have visited in the last three or four weeks whilst campaigning for the Queensland LNP Senate team and also for Noeline Ikin, the LNP candidate for Kennedy. She is a woman who I think we will see a lot more of in this parliament in the future.

As I have been meeting with those councils, I have been impressed yet again with their professionalism. As they come up to the budget season, I say to them all, 'It's a pity you can't go to Canberra and teach the Canberra government how to run a budget. If you ran your finances as badly as the Gillard government runs its finances, you would have been sacked and an administrator appointed long ago.' They understand that you cannot just keep borrowing and, if you do, somewhere along the line the crunch comes. This applies very much to local government but equally to the federal government. So I have a high regard for local government generally.

I said to local government 10 or so years ago, when I was the minister, 'You come to me with the right wording, with the support of all the state governments, and I will get a bill through parliament and we'll win a referendum on the subject.' But I warned them 10 years ago, 'Unless you can convince all the states on the wording of your bill, you're going to have trouble'—in effect, 'Don't waste my time or yours.' Since those times, I know they have put a lot of work into it. Local governments, with a lot of effort, have come up with what they believed to be the right words, so we are at this situation at the moment.

This is not a bill where we have to declare whether we are supporting the referendum question or not, but, with my background and with my association with local government, I am quite happy to say that I will be voting yes in the referendum. But I have to say I believe this referendum has been set up by the Gillard government to fail, and I fear that it will fail. I know that this will distress a lot of people. I know Councillor Paul Bell, a past distinguished president of both the ALGA and the LGAQ, very well. He is a committed Queenslander, a committed Australian and, indeed, he is committed to local government. He has been fighting for years for this referendum and to get it passed. I feel for him because, I regret to say, I do not think it is going to get anywhere. Councillor Margaret de Wit, the current president of the LGAQ, is an old friend of mine and a very good councillor on the Brisbane City Council. She is determined to do everything she can to get this bill passed and the referendum adopted by the people of Australia. As other colleagues have mentioned, the Premier of Queensland, Campbell Newman, a member of the LNP—I say that very proudly—has been one of Brisbane's greatest lord mayors. Of course, he fought very much for the constitutional recognition of local government in his time as lord mayor of one of the biggest council areas in Australia. And I know that Councillor Graham Quirk, the current Lord Mayor of Brisbane, is also in favour of it. And I could go through the whole of North Queensland and Central Queensland and mention all the mayors I have spoken to as recently as the last couple of months and indicate that all of them are working very hard to make sure that this referendum question does pass.

As other colleagues have mentioned in this debate, and in some more technical detail than I, effectively what local government want is to be able to receive grants from the federal government without any constitutional question. That is what their desire is in this bill.

I am again proud to say that I was the Minister for Regional Services, Territories and Local Government who in this very chamber introduced the bill for Roads to Recovery, one of the most far-sighted and beneficial programs, if I do say so myself, ever to have been given to local government. It is a program that local governments love because the money comes straight from the federal government to local government. It is put straight to work. There is no shaving a bit off the top, as used to happen in the days of the Bligh Labor government in Queensland and, in fact, under other Labor governments around the states. Always they would take off anywhere between 25 per cent to 40 per cent as on-costs or project management costs. But Roads to Recovery funding went straight to the councils and it was used efficiently and effectively. There were more kilometres of roads built through the Roads to Recovery program than councils had been able to build for many years. I was told at the time that, provided the amount going to each council was set out in the bill, it was constitutionally proper. If you have a look at that original bill you will see that each council and the amount they received are contained in that bill that was passed first in this chamber and then by the House of Representatives.

But there have been the Williams and Pape cases that have been mentioned by others which have thrown some doubt upon the ability of the Commonwealth to fund local government. I know Western Australia, Victoria and other states are bit cautious about this. I suspect even in Queensland at the moment there is caution. The Minister for Local Government, Community Recovery and Resilience is Mr David Crisafulli, who again I am very proud to say worked for me for some time when I was the federal minister for local government. David was the Deputy Mayor of the Townsville City Council. He is now the local government minister in Queensland. I know his heart is with recognition of local governments so that funding can flow. I know that he and most other state people these days are a fraction cautious because of legal advice that has been given that suggests that this bill is not appropriate and would in some way lessen the powers of the states. My understanding of the objection—and this is in very layman's terms; it is certainly not legal or constitutional terms—is that if the federal government can without restriction give grants to local government then perhaps a recalcitrant federal government in the future might decide that all money allocated by the Commonwealth government for, say, health, education or roads can go straight to local government. In Britain local governments run schools and hospitals. If that happened, the question would be: what would state health departments do on education, health and road matters? So by subterfuge a recalcitrant federal government of the future could abolish the states by starving them of significant Commonwealth funds for education, housing, schools, hospitals and roads and, in this way, make state governments irrelevant.

Some people would have said, particularly in the days when all state governments were held by Labor, that that would not have been a bad idea. But those of us who are federalists—and, of course, the Liberal Party and the Nationals are federal parties—believe there is benefit in Australia from having three levels of government. We support that. We think that state governments do have a role to play in the administration and delivery of services like health and education. We certainly do not accept or for a moment contemplate that all wisdom comes from Canberra. In fact, the more you travel around the remoter parts of our country, as I do regularly, you realise just how far away Canberra is—and I do not mean in kilometres.

As I say to many people in the regions, and in northern and remote Australia: Canberra is full of well-meaning and highly-educated people, but they simply have no understanding of what it is like to live and work in remote, regional or even urban northern and Western Australia and Queensland, or in other parts away from a capital city. And that is why having a system of government which represents people at closer levels is so important in Australia. That is why state governments are so important. I don't know what it is in other states, but in Queensland state members represent about 30,000 voters. Federally, of course, our lower house members represent about 90,000 or 100,000 voters. So, obviously, the connection between state members is far easier and greater than it is for my federal colleagues in the lower house. And, of course, local government, in many instances, is made of people who are your neighbours or your colleagues on the school committee, or fellow members in Lyons, Apex or Rotary, or in the swimming club or the various health committees around. So it is important.

So it is important to make sure local government can continue to receive funding direct from the federal government. It is also important, I think, that the ongoing role of the states is maintained. This is why I said earlier that, while I will be voting for this, I fear that this is not going to pass. My colleagues in this debate have made the very obvious, and I think irrefutable, argument about the imbalance in funding—and that is just unforgiveable in Australia. It does not matter what your view on anything is: in Australia, if you are having a referendum, both sides of the argument should be equally funded so that information gets out.

I am very concerned that the Gillard government, which is, typically, picking winners and losers and dividing Australia, as it always does, has effectively decided to fund one side of the argument and not the other. That is just unAustralian. It is unfair and it is not the sort of leadership we need from this federal parliament, or indeed the federal government.

Having said that, I am still fearful about the outcome of the referendum, because Australians will not really understand it—certainly people in local government and those of us in this room understand what it is all about, but the general public do not really care; they are not really interested. And in the couple of months that is going to be available for the proper campaign, the real facts and the real arguments are not going to get out. What Australians will think is: if in doubt, don't. I fear that is what is going to happen, in spite of the massive imbalance of funding for advertising.

This is why I said earlier that I think the Gillard government has set this up to fail. With so much of the Gillard government under the tutorship of Mr McTernan, it is all about the spin, it is all about the headlines in the paper, it is all about going to local government conferences and saying, 'Oh, fellas, we're all with you, vote for us—Ms Gillard's a great leader; we're with you.' But they do it in such a way that really limits the opportunities for local government to get this important piece of legislation passed by referendum.

We should have been having this debate 18 to 24 months ago. The debate should have been out there in the public. People should have been told what it is all about, how it will operate, what the facts and figures are, what the pros and cons are. That way, you would have had an informed group of people voting at the referendum. As it is, on 14 September most people in Australia, about 70 per cent of them, will be concentrating on one thing—and I say this with some confidence, because I too can read the opinion polls—and that is getting rid of the current government!

They are not too interested in whether local governments get funding or not. They want to look after Australia. They want decent leadership in the Australian parliament and in government. They are just waiting for that day not to get into some erudite argument about funding for local government and the Pape and Williams cases. That will not be foremost in their minds. Foremost in their minds will be, 'What can we do to rid Australia of perhaps the worst government Australia has ever seen and the worst Prime Minister that Australia has ever had?' That is what they will be concentrating on on 14 September.

To put this referendum on the same day is, I think, guaranteeing it to fail. That is why I think that, again as with so much that the Gillard government have done, it is all spin. It is all the fluff that you get the headline for. It is not a serious attempt to fix the proper channels between the three spheres of government in Australia. I fear for of those who have put so much effort into this. They have convinced me. As I said, I will be voting for it. But I think we will be in the minority for the reasons that I have mentioned. This will go down as yet another feature of the awful nature of this current government. It is just a bad government. This is another example of them building hopes and aspirations and then taking actions that will ensure that those things never have to be adopted. It just reminds me of the Prime Minister's promise—'There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead'—that was deliberately telling mistruths to the Australian public. This bill, I regret to say, will be the same.