Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I have a couple of questions for the minister on the not-for-profit reform agenda. I spent a number of years—in fact a couple of decades—of my life working in the not-for-profit sector and have extraordinary regard for the people that work in it, largely from firsthand experience. I got into it as a piano player—a repetiteur in the opera company, coaching singers in their roles—in my early 20s, and I spent the next nearly three decades in it before going into business on my own. It is filled with people who can start with a blank piece of paper and can identify some of the most extraordinarily large problems and chip away at them, on the smell of an oily rag. If you want to see efficiency, look at the not-for-profit sector. They achieve the most extraordinary things with very little money quite often.

But one of the things you also notice when you work in that sector is the amount of time you spend applying to government and, particularly, reporting to government. If you are a large organisation, you might apply for funding across six states and territories plus to the Commonwealth government and local councils, and you might apply to several departments in each of those places. So it is not unusual when you are reporting to have to provide anywhere from three to six copies of annual reports even three years back. In my office we had a shelf of annual reports each year for the last three years, a shelf of constitutions and a shelf of folders that contained things like certificates of cooperation. Several times a year you would send not an envelope off to a government department but a box of stuff.

When applying for grants there is also the need to continually establish your bona fides. There is an incredible amount of repetitive red tape to supply to different bodies and different levels of government. I was really pleased to see the work done by the Labor government in reducing that red tape. It started to rationalise how the not-for-profit sector relates to government, particularly with its exchange of information. I know that incredible work has been done, but I would really like an update on the progress of that reform agenda and the recent achievements in reducing red tape and simplifying Commonwealth grants programs for those who apply for them.

The second matter for me is the issue of gags. Between the years of 2004 and 2007 when I was representing Parramatta in opposition I saw first-hand some of the ramifications of the Howard government's gag clauses. In fact, I went to a forum in this house run by one of the members of the now opposition called 'Participatory democracy: a threat to democracy'. The forum was actually about a view that people in the not-for-profit sector who are representing a community but are not elected by the people are a corruption in democracy. It was actually quite scary. It was filled with Liberal members. I was the only one in the room who was not a Liberal member. I saw the impact of that view in my community when we had organisations representing some of the most vulnerable people in the community who did not feel that they had the right to speak on their behalf. It is my view, and I know it is the government's view, that a good government should be brave enough to feed the hand that bites it. It is the job of the not-for-profit sector to identify problems as they emerge at the coalface, make those well known and speak very, very loudly for those who are not able to speak for themselves.

I know that the Campbell Newman government has reintroduced gag clauses. I know that the Barry O'Farrell government is talking about reintroducing them. I know that the Labor government abolished Howard's gag clauses as one of its first actions in 2008. I would just like the minister to advise the chamber on recent announcements on the gag clauses both from the Commonwealth and from other governments and to inform the House about the impact of those announcements on the freedom of the not-for-profit sector to advocate for policy reform on behalf of some of the most vulnerable people in the community.

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