Anthony Chisholm (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Sadly, I have to follow a speech by Senator O'Neill highlighting the neglect of health by those opposite by focusing on another issue which those opposite have also been neglecting, and that is the matter of the Natural Disaster Relief and Recovery Arrangements, which are having a large impact, particularly on regional and rural councils in Queensland. I acknowledge the advocacy of the President of the Local Government Association of Queensland, the Mayor of the Sunshine Coast, Mr Jamieson, who has been in Canberra and has been meeting with Queensland senators and encouraging them to put pressure on the government to take action on an area where they have been neglectful. This is something that is very important to many small councils in Queensland, and many people in this chamber know that those councils have been severely affected by natural disasters over the last couple of years. It really has been a failure from this government to act and work with those councils to ensure that those councils can go about their clean-up, maintenance and recovery as quickly as possible.

How this impacts on the decentralised state that is Queensland, and on regional communities, is a very important point that the Labor Party, when we were last in government, had a very good record on, considering the number of natural disasters that we had to deal with. But what we are seeing from the Turnbull government is continued cost cutting and continued moving of the goalposts for the Natural Disaster Relief and Recovery Arrangements, which makes it so galling for Queenslanders to deal with.

Firstly, the government moved to prevent councils from hiring their own staff to do the reconstruction work. How silly is that? It is those local workers that understand their local communities and their local roads and are the people best placed to do that recovery work. This means that councils were forced to engage with outside contractors to do the work that council officers would normally do. My own union, the AWU, ran a very strong campaign of this on behalf of their members to ensure that that work was done by local councils. For remote and regional councils, this is obviously a ludicrous proposition, with few available contractors in many small communities to do the work on a cost-effective basis. This led to councils bizarrely contemplating whether they should swap workforces with other councils following disasters just to meet the guidelines that the government had implemented.

Luckily, common sense prevailed—albeit temporarily, and this is one of the problems that we have at the moment—with a trial model announced to allow councils to actually employ their own staff, with a new model apparently due to come into force from July 2018. However, the government's extension of this day labour trial is set to run out this year, so we have a whole 12 months before the new arrangements come in, which is just causing further uncertainty for those affected councils. This is on top of the Turnbull government's decision in their budget in 2016 to delay the billion dollars in recovery payments to the Queensland government, without warning, just to try to make their own balance sheet stack up better.

So what does this mean for some of those affected councils? This is something that is important, and I have a letter that I received from Rob Chandler, who is the Mayor of Barcaldine, but it is in his capacity as the chair of RAPAD, the Remote Area Planning and Development Board, which covers, amongst other areas, Longreach, Winton, Diamantina, Barcoo, Boulia, Barcaldine and Blackall-Tambo. The letter says:

The seven RAPAD councils … are reeling from the Government's failure to repay councils under the Natural Disaster Relief and Recovery Arrangements (NDRRA) for these plant and equipment costs, which they incurred in good faith. Some RAPAD councils are owed more than their annual general rates revenue, in one case more than 150% of their rates base.

The Government's refusal to repay councils is particularly distressing when the Government has called on councils to contribute to budget repair and then a value-for-money solution is rejected in favour of using more expensive contractors.

This is how ridiculous the situation is. We hear a lot in this chamber from the National Party, who come here and claim to speak for regional Queensland, but on this issue they have been found wanting. It is very disappointing, and I call on the government to act urgently to fix this problem.