Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to congratulate Wellsprings for Women on its 25th anniversary. Wellsprings for Women was started 25 years ago by the Kildare Ministries. It is a wonderful local community centre for women in Dandenong, in my electorate, almost a neighbourhood house. But perhaps the thing I value above all else is that in such a multicultural community, the most multicultural city in the whole of Australia, you do tend to see that people divide and commune, if you like, in different ethnicities and religions. The wonderful thing about Wellsprings is it actually brings women together from every part of the community, from every age, from every background, including those who have been here a long time and those who have been here a short time. The women there do such wonderful work connecting particularly newer Australians, many of whom may be socially isolated, through English classes, starting small businesses and so on. It is also a gateway to referral to other services, be they financial counselling, domestic violence support and so on.

I recently opened the Rose Room, a new computer classroom set up to provide computer literacy. It needed a new classroom because, some months ago, it was decided to close one of the old classrooms and turn it into a children's room, because that was identified as one of the great barriers for women to coming and participating and getting out of the house, so that's a wonderful thing in accordance with Wellsprings' values. Through a series of grants they managed to get together, they now have a computer lab.

I want to honour Rose Elias, who the room is named after. For 14 years, she was the community development coordinator, and she died suddenly in March this year, and the local community decided to honour her in that way. I secured a small amount of money towards the $117,000 from the Stronger Communities grants program, which was a good thing—there is $150,000 per electorate.

In the closing moments here, I want to record here that I have mixed feelings about that program. Like all members, you want to get the money for your constituency and for your electorate, which was particularly important for us given the government gave us zero specific election commitments, not one dollar in the second most disadvantaged municipality in Victoria—thanks for that, Liberals! I'm particularly worried about the emergence of similar programs, where funding is cut by electorate. The Local Schools Community Fund provides $200,000 and the Communities Environment Program provides $150,000 per electorate. I know I am kind of shooting Bambi to criticise these programs, because we all love handing out money, but I do believe they're flawed in design. They are more focused around providing photo opportunities for politicians than genuinely allocating scarce taxpayer funds according to community needs. And I do think that people should be very suspicious of programs where they are cut by electorate, because the deciding point, fundamentally, is a political unit. These are political programs. I can't believe that schools in my the electorate have the same needs as in the rich areas of Sydney or, indeed, in rural electorates where there are 200 schools and they would be lucky to get $1,000 each. So I do want to call out the government for these political programs.