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

I rise today to support the motion of the member for Cowper, which notes: 2012 is the International Year of Cooperatives; there are two million more cooperative members in Australia than retail share investors; cooperatives create diversity in the Australian economy; cooperatives play an important role in delivering services to regional and rural communities; some Australian government industry assistance is not available to enterprises with cooperative structure; it calls on the government to support the role of cooperatives in Australian communities and to continue working with the states and territories to implement nationally consistent laws governing the operation of cooperatives.

My electorate of Wannon has some wonderful cooperatives in it. For instance, we have the Murray Goulburn Co-operative, which has its largest processing plant in Koroit, in my electorate of Wannon. Murray Goulburn was established in 1950. It is 100 per cent controlled by Australian dairy farmers and is our No. 1 exporter of dairy products. Its plant in Koroit, which I have visited, is state-of-the-art and enables liquid milk to come into the plant straight from a dairy farm and, within 24 hours, that milk is on a truck and on its way to the Port of Melbourne to be exported. It is a very good cooperative.

Wannon also has the Terang Co-op, which was made famous a few years ago by the two students who stood up to Julia Gillard and the Labor government and said 'you should not take our jobs away from us' after they were stopped from working after school for an hour and a half. As history has shown they fought that in court and won, and we got the employment rules changed for students working after school. It employs 110 full-time people. It creates wealth for the local region and distributes the profits it gets to local organisations and clubs. The Terang Co-op does a wonderful job.

Wannon electorate has the Casterton Community Co-operative, which is being set up, hopefully, to get the hardware store back and operating in Casterton. The Casterton hardware store closed down, sadly, a year and a half or two or three years ago now and so a group of volunteers has set up a cooperative, which they hope will get the Casterton hardware store up and operating again. It would be very beneficial to the town of Casterton.

We also have the Bendigo Community Bank operating in the electorate of Wannon. It has some cooperative branches at Avoca, Beaufort, Cobden and district, Coleraine and district, Dunkeld and district, Heywood, Maryborough, Willaura and Lake Bolac. The Avoca branch of the Bendigo Community Bank was so successful that it enabled it to expand into Maryborough. Once again these Bendigo Bank community banks do wonderful work because the profits that are made from these banks are fed back into the local communities and help strengthen these local communities. On the whole these cooperatives are operating in smaller rural and regional towns and pay money back into those communities, which is absolutely important.

I would like to commend the member for Cowper because the one thing we do need when it comes to cooperatives is for the states and territories to implement nationally consistent laws governing their operation. We also have to make sure that we do not see the current government put more red tape on this sector because, as we have seen with their work of trying to reform not-for-profit organisations and charities, it is becoming a regulatory nightmare what those organisations are being confronted with. We do not want to see this government's penchant to overregulate every part of our society also creep into this area. That would be disastrous.

I would like to commend all the cooperatives in Wannon and also commend the member for Cowper for this excellent motion.

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