Ursula Stephens (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary Assisting the Prime Minister for Social Inclusion) Share this | Hansard source

This is a continuation of the debate of February this year. The context of the debate at the time was about concerns that the opposition had about the continuation of the Regional Partnerships program, which was a very flawed program of the previous government. I am very pleased to say that, since that debate occurred, things have moved on very quickly. When I was speaking I was talking about the Rudd government’s commitment to rural and regional Australia, and I am delighted to see that this commitment is now very much in action across the country. In the time since the debate, which was in February—so it is six months or so ago now—we have been building on our work to drive a whole-of-government approach dealing with the problems that are confronting our communities, particularly our rural and regional communities. We have undertaken a national review of drought policy, and this review has a three-pronged approach to ensure that we understand every aspect of the impacts of the drought. The national drought review includes an economic assessment by the Productivity Commission on a climatic report on future drought events which is being conducted by the Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO. While these two investigations are of critical importance as we take a balanced and measured approach to the way in which we help rural and regional communities through drought into the future, they only make up two parts of the pie. The review is also investigating the social impact of the drought: how the drought has affected families, friends and communities.

An expert panel was established to ensure that the social component of the drought is being considered as part of the review. This panel is in the very capable hands of the AgForce Queensland president, Mr Peter Kenny. Hundreds of people have spoken to the expert panel about just how the drought has affected them and their families socially and emotionally, and a number of issues have been raised. They include the impact of long-term drought on mental and physical health, the flow-on effects of farmers under pressure to other local businesses, the stresses on families, particularly how this stress is affecting children, and the impacts on local volunteering as people are forced to look for more work off-farm. The panel has been travelling around Australia and has heard from farming families and churches, counsellors, health organisations, representatives of farm organisations and many more, and their feedback will be considered with written submissions before the panel reports in September.

So the social impact component of the National Drought Review is very important. It is also very important to my work as Parliamentary Secretary for Social Inclusion and the Voluntary Sector. There is certainly a risk, we know, of growing disadvantage in our rural and regional communities as we face a likely future of longer, more severe and more frequent droughts, so we do need to get the policy settings right when it comes to addressing disadvantage and social exclusion in our country regions. We need to make sure that we can provide the right assistance and support to Australians in regions emerging from drought. How can we help them to recover from the devastating emotional toll and economic toll that come from living through prolonged drought? Unless you have actually experienced it, you really do not understand how deeply embedded that is.

That is why the Labor government has begun to articulate its nation-building agenda. Through the 2008-09 budget, the Rudd government delivered on its election commitments to rural and regional Australia, especially in the area of climate change, an issue that has been completely occupying us in this chamber for the last two weeks. It occupies the discussion everywhere and it is of critical importance. We all know that we need to look no further than the crisis that is the Murray-Darling Basin, for example, to witness the enormous costs that we are beginning to pay from the impacts of the changing climate and a lack of commitment to making serious decisions.

So the centrepiece of the plan, as Senator Wong has so wisely and widely articulated, is to tackle climate change through the $130 million Australia’s Farming Future initiative, which is going to be funded over four years, with the first allocation from the 2008-09 budget. Other areas where Labor is delivering on its commitments to rural and regional Australia include the ongoing support for the EC-declared regions, with $760.9 million for EC assistance in 2008-09, $20 million to help our forestry industries prepare for the challenges of the future, including climate change, and new measures to fight weeds, which are a huge drain on the national economy and are also part and parcel of the aftermath of long-term drought.

We are seriously involved in a broad, whole-of-government approach to support our rural and regional communities. We have a $2.2 billion Caring for Country program, providing a new coordinated approach to natural resource management, and we are certainly looking to invest in the infrastructure of rural and regional communities. That was where the debate was left last time: the criticism of our decisions to reconnect and test the robustness of the proposals that were put forward under the Regional Partnerships program. The parliamentary secretary responsible for that, Mr Gray, has certainly done so. Testing the robustness of those proposals and honouring the project funding where contracts had been signed so that those projects could actually go forward has been a very genuine process. But there were many, many projects, as we well know, mentioned in the Auditor-General’s report that did not stand up to a robust test, and those projects we did not support. We did support the projects that were brought forward in the latter part of the year and early this year which were part of major social projects in communities around Australia, and we will continue to do so. But we have something else that has happened since then. With the Building Australia Fund, the announcement by the Rudd government of a nation-building agenda, we have an opportunity now to fund some of the critical social infrastructure that will underpin rural and regional community development.

In terms of the work within my own portfolio area, which is so close to the issues that were raised earlier in this debate, this week we announced millions of dollars of voluntary grants for community organisations. We have heeded the call of community organisations about the rising cost of petrol, we have included a capacity for petrol to be part of the costs that are reimbursed to volunteers and we have simplified the application process as part of our commitment to reducing red tape and making it easier for community organisations to get on with the work that they do best.

As well as that, we have started a process of consulting our community organisations around Australia. We are talking to them about the way in which we can develop a national compact. In that regard, one of the major members of the expert group that I have established to advise the government is Mrs Lesley Young, who is the National President of the Country Women’s Association. I know that there are many people who appreciate the work that the Country Women’s Association does in supporting rural communities and families that have been doing it tough for such a long time. I share and support the commitment that the previous government had to using the networks of the Country Women’s Association to help deliver some emergency relief to some of those communities where people were doing it tough.

This government is totally committed to supporting rural and regional communities in Australia. We certainly know that we have much to do in that area. We know that there are ongoing impacts—that is, the economic, social and environmental impacts of economic change. We know we need to do something about investing in regional economic development, which is something that the previous government gave up on a long time ago.

We have a new Building Australia Fund, which we have been calling for expressions of interest in. It is, as I say, a national infrastructure program. And what are we finding? We are finding that there is a great interest among the members of the opposition in this fund. The member for Flinders, for example, has put in proposals for $266.9 million for projects in his electorate. The member for Paterson has put in for projects to the tune of $20 million for what he identified in his submission as a coalition government election commitment, bless him! Also in this process, the member for Gippsland, who has only been in the parliament five minutes, has just asked the government for $140 million for projects in his own electorate.

We know that what is happening here is that the government is having to pick up the pieces of an opposition that really has not committed to community infrastructure for a very long time. We are now dealing with opportunistic opposition members who are desperately pleading with this government to support proposals to the Building Australia Fund.

We know that we have a range—millions and millions, billions—of projects that people want to have funded. This is in a climate where, on the one hand, we have the opposition desperately pleading for projects that they believe are genuinely worthy in their electorates and support their rural and regional communities and, on the other hand, we have an opposition that are prepared to do whatever it takes to undermine the government’s budget surplus—to undermine the budget measures that are going to actually deliver some of the funding that we want to put into this infrastructure fund.

We have a long-term infrastructure agenda, we have a commitment to rural and regional Australia and what we really need from the opposition is a commitment to travel down this path, talk the talk and walk the walk with us to invest in our regional communities. That is what we really need, and I expect that we will be talking much more about it in the future, because we know that spoiling the budget surplus for political gain is going to be to the disadvantage of our rural and regional communities in Australia.