Sue Boyce (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Despite not being a member of the class of 2004, may I add my support for Senator McEwen’s comments about your new position, Madam Acting Deputy President Fierravanti-Wells. I appreciate that people have other engagements and other places to be, but I wanted to speak as soon as I had the opportunity regarding a visit I made to the Torres Strait region during the winter recess. As a Queenslander and as an elected representative of Queensland, I am ashamed to say that I had never visited our Torres Strait islands until after my election nine months ago.

During the November 2007 election campaign, I first had the opportunity to spend a short time in the Torres Strait. But during the winter recess I made an opportunity to return to this very remote part of Australia. The Torres Strait islands are just five kilometres from Papua New Guinea waters and they are 80 kilometres from Indonesia. The islands are now administered by two councils: the Torres Strait Islands Regional Council, covering the 15 outer islands of the strait, and the Torres Shire Council, which covers the most populous islands—Thursday Island, Horne Island and Prince of Wales Island.

Almost 9,000 people call the Torres Strait islands home. It is one of the most geographically scattered and remote areas of Australia. Because of its position, the Torres Strait plays an important strategic and quarantine role for the rest of the country, but from the attention the Torres Strait receives from the Queensland state government and from the federal government you certainly would not know it. On one interisland ferry trip recently, a Victorian tourist, kicking back, basking in the wonderful warmth and the great views, commented: ‘You might as well be in another country.’ The trouble is the state and federal Labor governments seem to take the same view, that the Torres Strait is another country. There is chronic underfunding of services and training at almost every level.

The biggest scandal currently existing in the Torres Strait relates to the state government’s shameless use of CDEP—Community Development Employment Projects—funding to save on their wages bill for the Torres Strait. As senators would be aware, the CDEP is designed to assist unemployed Indigenous Australians transition to work and to undertake training that will assist them in working. But, in the Torres Strait, the Bligh state government are using CDEP funds to save themselves millions in wages. Of the 1,800 people employed by the two local councils of the Torres Strait, 417 receive CDEP funding with a top-up of their wages from the state government. This means that there are 417 Torres Strait workers doing the work of state government agencies and departments but their wages are being subsidised by CDEP funding. I was told by island leaders that, if an island community needs a full-time teacher’s aide, Education Queensland will say to them, ‘We’ll fund the position for two days a week, but tell the community to request CDEP funding for the other three days.’ I was told that CDEP funds subsidise the state government’s wages bill to the tune of $6 million a year.

Apart from this shameless approach, there are also the savings the government make by the fact that they do not pay superannuation costs and other on-costs associated with paying proper, full-time wages to these people undertaking state government work. CDEP employees in the Torres Strait who are providing basic services include teaching staff, health workers and community police—the only police on most islands. It is not a situation that would be countenanced in mainstream Queensland or the rest of Australia and it is a situation that I believe the Bligh state Labor government should be ashamed of. But, of course, the government seems to treat the Torres Strait as though it has a different set of rules, with a lower standard for the people of the Torres Strait.

Many of the people who are on the CDEP subsidised wages have been training for years without any chance of being given a real job by the state government unless they leave the Torres Strait. I was told that the police senior sergeant at Yorke Island had been in a CDEP position for more than 10 years and that he had been put in that position as part of a pilot program to look at improving policing on the island. A pilot program for 10 years—I think perhaps the state Labor government may have been able to work out by now whether that was successful and to pay and train properly and decently the people who serve the communities in the Torres Strait. Most of the island community police positions, as I said, are occupied by CDEP funded staff, with little opportunity for any one of them to gain real policing positions. Every island leader I spoke to raised the need for fully and appropriately trained police to deal with the issues that arise in the Torres Strait, but their requests fall constantly on deaf ears.

Despite the shocking neglect in this area, the most pressing issue of all that was raised by all the leaders I spoke to in the Torres Strait was the cost of living. On Thursday Island I did my own spot survey comparing the prices of a basket of groceries in August in the Thursday Island supermarket with the cost of that same basket of groceries in Cairns. I have a ShopSmart website that looks at prices in regional centres in Queensland. In Cairns the ShopSmart basket of groceries cost $64. On Thursday Island the cost for that same basket of groceries was $91. I think that is a small indication of the extreme costs that people in the Torres Strait bear. You cannot find out any of this, of course, by looking at the government’s GROCERYchoice website because they give you the average price of goods from Mount Isa to Cape York to Cairns. It does not tell you much about costs of living in other centres.

Broadband also is almost non-existent in the Torres Strait, strangling private business initiatives. At Horn Island the private aircraft enterprises told me that it sometimes takes them up to eight hours to download tenders that they need to apply for to keep their businesses going. The lack of broadband also undermines council attempts to introduce efficiencies. The councils have now, as I said, been merged. You have 15 councils using dial-up trying to get pays done on Thursday Island on the same day. What it means often is that people are paid up to two days late on some islands because of the time involved in processing the pays.

There are many other examples of contributions to the high cost of living in the Torres Strait. I will not speak of those here. Local leaders have asked me to push for an inquiry into the complex factors affecting the cost of living in the Torres Strait. They suggest that perhaps a freight and passenger subsidy similar to the one that delivers $140 million a year to Tasmania might assist. We are ignoring and neglecting these 9,000 people. It is at the hands of the state Labor government that this is primarily happening. This is 48,000 square kilometres, an area bigger than Tasmania. It is an important strategic and quarantine area. They deserve better than they are currently getting. (Time expired)