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

Travelling around the local government areas affected by floods in my electorate of Wannon—including in Northern Grampians shire, Ararat rural city, Pyrenees shire, Corangamite shire and Moyne shire—the massive scale of the disruption to daily life is plain to see. While the flooding experiences showed the strength of local communities, I genuinely fear that the devastation to road and bridge infrastructure in all of these local government areas will prove to be a lasting legacy of these floods unless swift government action is taken. The devastation to the road and bridge network has a major impact on these local communities. People are prevented from directly accessing their workplaces. Access of schoolchildren to bus services is hampered. If we add to this the difficulty of accessing fire and emergency services and farm and freight transport, we see the desperate need that some communities in my electorate and elsewhere, particularly in Queensland, face.

These are not just roads and bridges but key economic assets, connecting local communities to the broader road network and getting people to work and from school. Prior to the floods, some councils were already struggling to afford maintenance and upgrades on these assets. This is reflected in a recent Australian Local Government Association report which found that local councils’ asset bases to be maintained had almost doubled during the decade following 1999-2000. Coupled with other expenditure outside this road infrastructure, the increase in local government revenue has been insufficient to meet its demands. This has resulted in a gap now totalling some $1.2 billion per annum between actual local government expenditure and the expenditure necessary to maintain roads at their current standard.

Having been impacted by the recent floods, in some cases for the second time in four months, ratepayers are not in a position to face further rate hikes. This fact is made even clearer when the capacity of ratepayers to afford increased rate payments is considered. The Whelan report on Local government financial sustainability, produced by Merv and Rohan Whelan of Cobden in my electorate, paints a stark picture of local councils’ financial sustainability. Under the Whelan model, the sustainability of small rural councils is rated negative or very negative in 14 of the 15 councils of this size considered. All but one of the local councils in my electorate that I have mentioned belong to this group. The recent flood damage places local councils in my electorate in an even more precarious position.

To assist local government areas across Australia, including Wannon, I support a one-off federal government ‘roads and bridges to recovery’ payment paid directly to flood affected local government areas to assist councils with the necessary and urgent road and bridge infrastructure repairs. This is not a case of throwing money at one project over another but a recognition that communities can only start to get back to normality when life as normal is possible. I urge the government to give favourable consideration to this proposal, which has the support of all the mayors I have spoken to affected by floods in Wannon—and, I understand, of all the mayors affected by floods in Mallee and in Murray. This is an opportunity for the government to show real leadership in the reconstruction following the hardship of recent times. I urge the government to embrace the opportunity. This is why I have written to the Prime Minister outlining this proposal, and I look forward to her response, which I hope will be a positive one. This will have an enormous impact not only in Victoria—and western Victoria in particular—but in Queensland, because local government otherwise will become a victim, like the communities that have suffered at the devastating hands of the floodwaters that we have seen over the last four to six months.