Robert Oakeshott (Lyne, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I rise tonight to report to the House, and also back to the electorate of Lyne, on some of the targeted strategic planning issues that several of us have been working on in the local area of the Mid-North Coast to try and achieve some real, long-term outcomes in both employment and education. I arrived 18 months ago in what could only be considered a changed environment in this place, with a vote being put to the House in the first fortnight of my coming here with regard to an $80 billion stimulus package. So it is an understatement to say there was both a lot happening normally within the role of the Commonwealth government and, at the time of the financial storms and the response from government in the form of a stimulus plan, that it was a particular time of Commonwealth swirl with regard to the amount of money and activity that the Commonwealth was engaging with the community on.

It was for that reason a few of us sat down early on in my time in federal politics and decided to try and be a bit strategic. The key areas that we focused on included trying to get Regional Development Australia up and running—I am really pleased to see that has now happened—and also the transition from area consultative committees across to RDAs.

There was and still is a great deal of interest in the education and training reforms that we are seeing in the post-Bradley environment, and all the key words—collaboration, pathways and pipelines—that we hear constantly in regard to the issues of change in the field of education. The third area was in relation to our region being identified as a priority region with regard to employment and accessing things such as a local employment coordinator and the development of a Jobs Plan. The strategic decisions we made were to focus in around those three general themes and to really hit 2009 as hard as we could, in an effort to maximise those and then to pop out the other side with a plan that hopefully incorporated all three of those general themes—and we are now at that point.

I will summarise some of the events of 2009 sitting underneath those three general areas. We established an education and skills forum. Our area was one that received two Australian technical colleges—

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