Mark Butler (Port Adelaide, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Mental Health and Ageing) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Parramatta for her question and for reminding us of her piano skills. I remember walking past the Great Hall when she was rehearsing Rachmaninoff's piano concerto No. 2, which is an extraordinarily difficult piece.

Honourable member interjecting—

No—a drummer. I have no particular musical sense. I have some vague sense of rhythm but no sense of tune!

I thank the member for Parramatta. I also thank her for hosting me on a number of occasions in the electorate of Parramatta to meet with some fantastic not-for-profit organisations, the latest of which was when we met with the Evolve Housing organisation, which is a wonderful community housing organisation in the west of Sydney.

I also want to place on record my thanks to the member for Parramatta for her chairing of the House Standing Committee on Economics inquiry into the ACNC, the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission, which is a centrepiece of the government's not-for-profit reform agenda. We have a very strong and firm view that not-for-profit reform is one of the outstanding pieces of microeconomic reform. By 'outstanding' I mean that it is one of those pieces of microeconomic reform that is still to be done. In many respects the ACNC reforms, and a number of other reforms associated with them, mirror the reforms that the Hawke government drove in the late 1980s, in the corporations sector, to do away with the myriad of reporting obligations that corporations back then had to comply with at Commonwealth and state levels.

The not-for-profit reform sector constitutes about 600,000 organisations. It is responsible for, or employs, about eight per cent of Australia's workforce. It engages about five million, or five-sixths, of the entire Australian volunteer workforce. It contributes—at last count, which is a little bit out of date—about $43 billion to Australia's GDP, which makes it a larger economic contributor to Australia than agriculture and tourism, just to name a couple of other industries. This is a very substantial part of Australia's economy and workforce.

But perhaps even more importantly, its value is inestimable in terms of its social contribution. All of us as local members of parliament and as members of the Australian community, come across, every day, NFP NGO organisations working with paid staff and with volunteers who are teaching young kids to play footie or engage in surf lifesaving, or delivering some of the most important social services to support some of the most vulnerable members of our community.

In addition to establishing the ACNC we recognise the government's role as a good citizen—as an organisation which contracts with many tens of thousands of not-for-profit organisations who, as I have said, deliver some of these incredibly important services to the Australian community. And I think we have an obligation to be a good citizen in that respect.

It concerned me, as a line agency minister to a number of departments, the number of contracts that we have with the NFP sector that run for only 12 months; the number of contracts which are renewed only very late in the financial year, which creates great uncertainty for those organisations and their staff; and the number of contracts which do not see timely acquittals. I think we have a very important obligation, regardless of the political flavour of the party in government at the time, to ensure that we are a good purchaser of services from these NGOs.

A division having been called in the House of Representatives—

Sitting suspended from 11:42 to 11:55

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