Tony Pasin (Barker, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Well, it's a South Australian chapter, if you like. We're not about to take South Australian jobs into Victoria, but, nice try, Member for Indi.

Ms McGowan interjecting—

Well, this is the point: those opposite think this is a binary choice—that it's Canberra or Armidale, Canberra or Mount Gambier, or Canberra or Waikerie. This is not the case. This is about creating an environment where, yes, we can look at the most effective and efficient way to serve our community via our public sector, but, for me, a much more significant body of work here is about encouraging the private sector to take up opportunities in regional Australia.

It takes me five minutes to travel to my electorate office when I'm in Mount Gambier, and that's when I'm walking. If I took a car it would take longer to get in the car than to drive to my office. These are opportunities that present themselves to the private sector. Rent in my home town of Mount Gambier and throughout my electorate, I'm pretty sure, even in industrial settings, would be significantly cheaper than renting similar facilities in capital cities. You don't deal with the congestion issues and you don't deal with the other limitations that come with large capital centres.

So, when you look at this body of work which is being undertaken by the Select Committee on Regional Development and Decentralisation, don't quickly jump to the conclusion that it's all about taking jobs from Canberra and putting them somewhere in the regions. It might be about taking a job which is in Adelaide but would be much better placed at Murray Bridge, or it might be about identifying a business which is struggling to meet its overheads in Adelaide—because rent and other expenses are eating into its profit margin—and saying: 'Here's an opportunity in regional Australia. Here's a workforce that is ready, willing and able, and, potentially, more stable.'

I have the privilege of having three export abattoirs in my electorate, and from time to time they're approached to relocate, but on each occasion they say, 'No, we like the nature of the country workforce; we like employing people who live in the country because they're more stable, they're harder working in that capacity,' at least in that type of employment. So I would hate to see the work of this committee denigrated in any way when what it is looking at doing is establishing best practice. It is attempting to learn the lessons of previous attempts. This is not the first time a government has said, 'We want to be about decentralisation'—absolutely not. I think the committee is hearing evidence regularly from individuals who say: 'To do this you can't just make a statement. You need to create the environment. You need the appropriate building blocks in place so this can work sustainably and in the future for a long time.' What we don't want is to rush down the road of making announcements. What we want is a report and a body of work which establishes, as I said, learnt experience from the past leading to best practice.

I want to live in vibrant regional communities. I travel frequently to the cities. I struggle when I'm in the city, whether it's Adelaide, Canberra, Melbourne or Sydney. There are half the number of farmers in regional Australia than there were a generation ago. Every farmer I know and every farmer you know, Mr Deputy Speaker Coulton, is chasing scale. For these communities to survive they'll need to transition into services. They'll need to become more of manufacturing and production hubs, and to do that we need to find ways to encourage the uptake of opportunities in the regions, because, if we don't, the 10th, 11th, 12th member for Barker in this place will be bemoaning the closure of communities in their patch—and in your electorate there'll be the same story, and in other electorates.

It's all very well and good to say, 'But, look, we've got thriving capitals.' I live in the state that has the highest differential between the population of its capital city, with a million and change, versus Mount Gambier, my home town, with a population of 25,000. There's no other state in the world that has such a large differential between capital city and second-largest city. That's unhealthy. The South Australian Liberal Party, which has for a very long time controlled regional South Australia in an electoral sense—it's a very conservative part of the state and indeed the country—has suffered at the hands of a city-centric government, and that's why I say it's unhealthy. It's unhealthy because you create this great chasm, this great divide, and I think if anything marks the difference between Australia in 2018 and perhaps the Australia of 1918, or indeed of 1958, it's that the divide between the city and country is growing. And it is incredibly dangerous, because we will create an environment where we have cities that are thriving and doing well and regional centres that aren't. This report is about redressing that as best we can.

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