Warren Truss (Wide Bay, National Party, Shadow Minister for Infrastructure and Transport and Local Government) Share this | Hansard source

For six months we have been listening to the Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government criticising the Regional Partnerships program. He has been calling hundreds of community groups with loyal hardworking volunteers ‘rorters’. He has suggested that the projects being put forward by these hundreds of groups are not worth while, that they are not worthy of funding. He has said that this program was delivering no benefits to rural and regional Australia and to areas in our country in particular need. When asked today what he had actually been doing in his own six months in the office, he said he has been reading the Auditor-General’s report. Even if he has read all 1,200 pages, that is six pages a day. We certainly need an education revolution if we have a minister of the Crown who can manage reading only six pages a day. However, if he is only going to read the critical pages of the Regional Partnerships program report, not those praising the program and what it has actually achieved over the years, that probably reduces his reading effort to about six paragraphs a day.

The reality is the minister has never studied that report, just as he admitted on Koch’s program on Channel 7 that he had not read the files of the projects that he had failed to fund. He admitted that he had not even read the files of the 116 projects approved by the previous government which he was refusing to fund. That is an extraordinary statement from the minister. In six months of constant criticism of the applicants for these projects, six months of tearing away at the social infrastructure of communities, he admits he had not even read the files. It took an embarrassing performance from him on the Sunrise program for him to start to realise that perhaps he had better look more seriously at these projects. Then in a late night telephone call to David Koch an embarrassed minister said:

... he didn’t realise how many community groups were affected, he said their understanding is that the whole partnerships program was a bit of a rort but there are some really good community projects in there so he is going to fast track the examination of all the applications and do it quickly ...

So, after six months of saying they were all rorts, suddenly he realised there are some good community projects amongst this and he was going to fast-track the consideration of these projects. It is interesting because shortly after the government was elected he said he was going to fast-track the consideration of these projects. Then that promise was repeated in the Senate estimates in February. They were going to fast-track the consideration of these projects.

Six months later the minister had not even read the files, yet he had the audacity to claim that all these projects were rorts. It was not just the minister’s own comments that damn him in this regard. He asked his parliamentary secretary, the Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Development and Northern Australia, who I note is now trying to brief him at the table. Maybe he did read some of the files, because he wrote to scores of applicants for the Regional Partnerships program and said:

We are aware that some projects are becoming time critical but we need time to consider projects in conjunction with a number of Government priorities.

So the parliamentary secretary knew that it was urgent to deal with these issues, but nothing was done until budget night. Then on budget night the projects were axed—100 per cent of them. The government said that they would not be funded—none of them was to be funded. It took an avalanche of complaints to Channel 7 and to members of parliament, including I have no doubt from some members who sit behind the minister, to draw his attention to the fact that there were actually some really good projects. There were some childcare centres. There were some respite centres. There were important things that needed to be done and maybe they should be funded. So, in an extraordinary and miraculous turnaround, the minister announced that all 116 would be offered funding.

It is interesting to note that amongst the 116 that he offered funding was the turtle interpretive centre in Bundaberg, the very project that the minister was criticising today at length. He actually offered it funding. He also said that they had originally asked for a smaller amount of money but that the previous government gave them twice as much as they had asked for. What he did not admit, probably because he has not read the file, was that the council actually asked for more money. They actually wrote a letter requesting an additional amount of money because the cost of the project had grown. The letter also reported that the Labor state government in Queensland had decided to give an additional amount to this project and asked the Commonwealth to provide extra assistance. So it was okay for the state Labor government to provide increased funding for the Bundaberg turtle interpretive centre, but when the coalition government provided additional money somehow or other that was a rort. This is a classic example of this minister having failed to even read the files.

Today we have the truth of the story coming to the front pages of the paper: ‘PM rolls out his own pork barrel’. During the election campaign the Prime Minister made it absolutely clear, and he repeated these words on several successive occasions, that if he were elected to government he would implement a three-step process for the approval of funds for regional projects. He said that applications would have to have support from the local council or local consultative committee or the state government; secondly, they would have to fall within the definition of local economic or community infrastructure; and, thirdly, they would have to pass federal departmental analysis. He said:

That is a three-step process for us if we win the next election—that’s how it would be applied in government under us.

He repeated the statements the next day. But what in fact was happening? Already, by that time, Labor had promised dozens, scores, perhaps even a hundred projects that they were going to fund under their new Better Regions Program. None of these projects were going to be subject to any kind of scrutiny. There was not going to be any kind of examination of their merits. Different rules were to apply to them than were expected by the minister to apply to Regional Partnerships. The Prime Minister laid down three clear conditions which he asserted time and time again would have to be met before any projects could be funded. But in reality Labor was preparing its own rorts list—a giant rorts list of 105 projects—and today we hear that all but one are in Labor electorates or in electorates Labor was trying to win. In fact, the one that was excluded from that list was actually in the electorate of the honourable member for Fisher. Labor was actually backing an Independent candidate to knock him off in that particular electorate. So I would argue that all of these projects were in Labor electorates or in electorates that Labor sought to win. What were the merits of these projects?

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