Paul Neville (Hinkler, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Tonight in this grievance debate I speak about regional development in Australia, or perhaps the lack of it. That will lead me into the old area consultative committees and the current RDA committees. Before we talk about regional development we need to define it. The greatest sins committed in regional development today are the sins of lack of definition. Governments of both political persuasions and particularly the current government have this trick of funding metropolitan capital city funding out of a regional development fund.

The very word 'regional' in itself denotes something outside our capital cities. We have in Australia a federal system. The centrepiece of the federal system is Canberra, as the national capital. Each of the states which up until 1901 were autonomous had a capital city, and out of that capital city came the organisation of that state. Then hubs built up. Queensland, for example, in its modern context has hubs around places like Cairns, Townsville, Mackay, Rockhampton, Gladstone, Bundaberg, the Fraser Coast down to the Sunshine Coast, west to the Darling Downs, the central west and the north-west.

To my way of thinking, what is not fairly described as regional is the capital city itself and those extensions of the capital city. For example, I would not define Brisbane, Ipswich, the Gold Coast, Newcastle, Sydney—some would even argue Wollongong—Melbourne, Geelong, Perth, Fremantle and so on as being regional because, clearly, they are not. In Queensland, depending on whose measure you use, we have 12 or 13 regions. Regional development should focus on those and on the interaction between the hub provincial city and its immediate hinterland, and between that hinterland and its hub city. There is variation—including the area you come from, Mr Deputy Speaker Scott—in the mid-west, the south-west and the north-west, where you do not necessarily have a provincial city but a network of provincial towns. Those to me are regions and that is where the government's focus should be. Clearly, it is not.

If we look at round 2 of the Regional Development Australia Fund we can see that in Queensland, where $33½ million was allocated, that $13 million went to near-metropolitan areas—that is over a third. In Victoria there were a number of major projects in and around Melbourne, and of the $66 million that was spent $23 million went to the capital city. Having said that, I do not want to be characterised as criticising projects in the capital cities. They are well and good and there is a place for them in government funding, but it should be defined as that. It should be defined as urban renewal, streetscape redevelopment and so on. Do not take it out of the bucket of regional development and leave the rest of the state poorer for that. That would be the first area that I would come from in trying to get a better concept of regional development.

I do not particularly want to politicise this, but it is quite clear, when you look at regional development moneys that have been spent and allied forms of regional money in things like health and infrastructure, that pet projects for the current government get a very good run. For example, the Auditor-General found that of the $200 million allocated through the RDA, 70 per cent was funnelled to Labor or Independent MPs' electorates. That is not just on the boundaries; that is a heavy bias. In fact, I could do everything I need to do in the electorate of Hinkler on one grant that has gone to New England or to Lyne or to Hobart, no doubt allocated in the name of the electorate of Denison. That is not how regional development should occur.

The system we have at present, which requires that you have a turnover of $1.5 million to qualify, pretty well limits the scheme to local authorities. In some areas that is well and good, and I am not criticising local authorities for administering those sorts of funds, but I just wonder who else can qualify. I racked my brain and could see only two other groups that might qualify. One would be large not-for-profit charities, which might have a $1.5 million turnover in a particular area, and the other would be large sporting clubs, and then you would argue: 'Why do you need to provide subsidies to large sporting clubs that have poker machines and the like?' So the number of people who can apply is very limited. Regarding local hockey clubs or normal football clubs—I am not talking about interstate football clubs or one of the national competitions; I am talking about the next tier down—there would be very few that would ever get up to $1.5 million, so they are excluded.

Senator Barnaby Joyce suggested in a speech recently to the ALGA that he would like to see a tiered type project for RDA funds. The first tier would be allocated to local government to fund development or improvements in social infrastructure within communities so that government areas could get some form of funding. The second-tier approach would be to have a competitive fund for the purpose of larger projects with real economic drivers for a particular area. I go along with that, but I would add two more. The third should be another fund for community organisations, other than the ones we have been talking about—the larger ones and the councils—where not-for-profit and charitable organisations and perhaps sporting bodies and civic bodies could apply for grants of up to, say, $100,000 or $150,000. At present, they are pretty much starved out of the picture. The fourth area—and I argued this point vehemently with the previous minister, Minister Albanese, in good spirit, I might add—is that we really need a seed fund for regional development where projects costing $2 million, $3 million, $4 million or up to perhaps $6 million can get seed funds of somewhere between $250,000 and $750,000, as was the case under the sugar package and the old ACC projects. You find that when government comes in at that level you get a more amenable reaction from the banks and you get projects building up in provincial areas that can employ 25, 50 or 100 people, so you put an economic impetus into the town. So regional development still has a long way to go. While I think there are some good points in the RDA program, I think it falls well short of what is required in regional Australia.