Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Under standing order 74(5)(a), I seek an explanation from Senator Brandis, in his role representing the Prime Minister in this chamber, as to why questions 346, 347, 348, 349 and 350, which I placed on notice on 27 January, remain unanswered.

James McGrath (Queensland, Liberal National Party, Assistant Minister to the Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I will have to take that on notice.

Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the minister's failure to provide an answer or an explanation about these circumstances.

It is perhaps worth explaining to those listening what the content of those five questions were that I placed on notice back in January. They went to the announcement that was made during the election campaign about City Deals for the cities of Townsville, Launceston and Western Sydney. I specifically asked: Which stakeholders have been involved in the preparation of those City Deals prior to their announcement? What progress is being made on those City Deals? And what resources are available for City Deals. My questions also went to the State of Australian cities report and the decision to no longer produce that document.

I pursued this in the most recent estimates hearings, and when asking officials questions I noted that I was asking questions similar to ones I had previously placed on notice. I might be reading too much into this, but the PM&C officials looked a little surprise to be asked this. I wondered—although of course this was not confirmed—whether or not they had in fact prepared answers to these questions and those answers had simply not been provided to me. Indeed, in those last estimates we asked officials when those draft answers had been provided to the Prime Minister's office so that we could get an indication of whether these answers are there and are available to be provided to me but it is simply too embarrassing to do that.

I say that because all of the signs were that the City Deals announced during the election were policy just made up on the run, policy that was essentially rushed out to fill a gaping hole in the coalition's thinking. This is one of the great gaps between the way this side of the chamber does politics and the way the other side of the chamber does politics. We have a very long tradition, reaching back to Whitlam, of taking cities seriously, of seeing cities as being at the core or our urban fabric and at the core of our society. We understand that the Commonwealth has a role to play in cities. Successive coalition governments have taken completely the opposite approach. They have washed their hands of infrastructure; they have generally considered that these are questions for state governments; and they have been unwilling to accept that in a country like Australia, where the vast majority of our population lives in just a handful of quite large cities, getting cities right is absolutely essential for our economy and for our society. Cities are absolutely places where Commonwealth governments ought to be very active.

But of course this is not something that the coalition generally takes seriously. Nonetheless, they found themselves with a Prime Minister who had made quite a lot of enthusiastic noise about cities, and doubtless they had to scramble to come up with something to say about it in the heat of an election so they would not be embarrassed. What did they do? In the last weeks of the election, Malcolm Turnbull and the assistant minister, Angus Taylor, announced three so-called City Deals: one in Townsville, one in Launceston and one in Western Sydney.

I should say that City Deals are a concept pioneered in the United Kingdom. They are a very good idea. And they have a lot to offer Australia. What they propose is a deep collaboration and a very targeted, place-based, specific collaboration between, in the case of the UK, two tiers of government—in Australia, three tiers of government. But it is not something you can just announce on the fly. In the United Kingdom the deals that have worked well are deals that build on deep relationships that are built up over time between their national government and the administrations of their cities. No such relationship was present in any of the examples that were announced during the election.

There was no such possibility of a bottom-up approach. There were no leaders in those cities or towns coming to government with concrete proposals about specific things that could happen that would make their city function better. None of this was evident. We did not see any of this. In fact, instead what we saw was a situation where the coalition was, in the case of Townsville, merely seeking to emulate campaign commitments that had been made by the Labor Party many months earlier. So terrified were they of their electoral prospects in Townsville that they simply sought to replicate what we had committed. They wrapped it up in a new thing with 'City Deal' put around it. But of course it was nothing like a City Deal. There was nothing like the conceptual or policy underpinnings that make it work so well in the United Kingdom. Plainly none of the work at all had been done.

I followed this up during the estimates process. I asked: how is this City Deal process going? What did I learn? In terms of the next steps—apart from these three deals that they have announced—I learnt that every first minister has had a letter inviting them to engage in a process and nominate perhaps a city that they might like to have involved in this City Deal process, which is still terribly opaque. There is no detail of whether there is going to be any further expansion of the program beyond just the one capital city that first ministers have been asked to contribute about. In fact, we were told by officials that details of this process are still being worked through. I asked about the cities reference group, a reference group that had been announced by Mr Taylor some time earlier. But again I learnt from officials that, as at estimates—and I have not seen any media subsequently to suggest that anything has changed—this promised governance body, this 'cities reference group' has no members. The membership of the group is yet to be announced.

Perhaps to reassure people that there had been some thinking, some policy work, done about cities, there is a public commitment that the government will publish a generic City Deal process document. 'Where is that up to?' I asked the officials. 'Well, Senator, that's something we hope to publish shortly,' was essentially the answer. I asked what other policy work was going on, and the officials explained that they were working with states and territories to establish a pipeline. And I said to them, 'But aren't you establishing a competitive bid process? Isn't that what the earlier document we were talking about was going to be?' And they said, 'Well, we're doing both things at the same time.' I asked, 'Well, it seems unusual. Normally a competitive bid process is what happens at the start, and then a pipeline is established, and then you select.' They explained to me that these were two things that were going on simultaneously.

I asked them when the promised national cities performance framework would be published, and they said it would be published in the second half of 2017. All I can conclude from that sorry exchange—and anyone who is listening might want to go and check out the estimates hearing with Prime Minister and Cabinet on that Monday night the last time we met and just have a look at how little detail there is about how this so-called City Deal is going to work and how little progress has been made since the election.

It is absolutely shocking. It is scandalous because this was a policy announced with great fanfare during the election, and yet there is absolutely nothing behind it. I am confident that the officials who are working on this are very, very capable, skilful public servants, and I am sure they are putting their all into crafting something that will work, that will deliver for cities. But isn't it a terrible shame that this is something that is being done after the announcement by the Prime Minister and the assistant minister? Isn't this work that you might want to do before you went out? It just convinces me, as so many things do with this government, that the person who has most influence in the Prime Minister's office is not the policy adviser; it is the press officer. It is the media advisers who are telling the Prime Minister, 'This would be a good thing to go out and talk about,' but there is so little thought given to the actual policy that underpins the media release, and this is a case par excellence. This is an absolute debacle.

It is a great shame, because we talk a lot in this chamber about the imperatives to restore productivity to the Australian economy. We had a long discussion about how industrial relations reform in just one sector of the Australian economy, the construction sector, was the thing—'the thing'. It was said at the time that we had the debate about the ABCC that this reform would be the thing to unlock productivity. We are having a discussion now about how cutting penalty rates on Sundays will be the thing to unlock productivity in the Australian economy. What nonsense, because some of the things that really would unlock productivity are sitting right in front of us, but they get no attention; no weight is given to them by the government.

Cities are absolutely essential to Australian productivity. Four out of every five Australians live in a big city, and by 2031 our four largest capitals, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth, will have increased in size by 46 per cent. Adelaide, Canberra, Hobart and Darwin are expected to grow by nearly 30 per cent. Australian cities produce 80 per cent of our GDP. In 2015-16, Sydney's GDP alone was $400.9 billion, and it represented 24.1 per cent of our national GDP. The truth is that our transformation, our involvement in the knowledge economy, sees the CBDs in our cities right at the heart of national productivity, but there are real barriers to realising this productivity.

Urban congestion is not just an annoyance. I know that there are many people listening who really do find it very, very annoying, but the truth is that it is also expensive. Infrastructure Australia says that urban congestion will cost the nation $53 billion in lost productivity by 2031 if left unchecked. We hear the calls again and again from some of our most senior policymakers for government to address this. The Governor of the Reserve Bank, Philip Lowe, called on Australia to lift infrastructure investment to boost the national economy and address traffic congestion. Mr Lowe said that improving the state of the budget should not preclude investing in rail and roads to meet community needs, to lift productivity but also to address that incredible irritation that so many of our city dwellers experience in terms of congestion. Mr Lowe said that increased investment in transport infrastructure would help housing affordability.

This is such an important point because housing affordability and the location of suitable housing linked to jobs are just essential for employment. We often talk about the increased benefits of connectivity, but transport is not an end to itself. It is a link between the places we are and the places we want to be and the things we want to do. It has an oversized impact on quality of life, and it has surprising flow-on effects.

In some suburbs, when you think about employment, only 14 per cent of all the jobs available in my home city of Sydney can be accessed even if you drive for 45 minutes. Take that in for a minute. People are living in suburbs where, if they are seeking work and they are willing to sit in a car for 45 minutes to reach that place of employment, still only 14 per cent of all of the available jobs can be found. This is disgraceful. The situation is worse if you are reliant on public transport. Many outer suburbs of Sydney offer access to fewer than one in 10 of the city's jobs within an hour on public transport. You are willing to travel on a bus or a train for an hour, and still you can only get access to one in 10 of the city's jobs.

These are completely unacceptable statistics, and they go to the heart of why a serious cities policy is absolutely essential for dealing with unemployment and for dealing with productivity. But that is not what we see from the government. Instead what we see is a completely incoherent process. And—back to the starting point of this conversation—when we ask questions about it, when we place questions on notice, they are not answered. We are well beyond the deadline, and the minister really ought to provide an explanation as to what is going on with the City Deals and why it is that he has taken so very long to answer my question.

Question agreed to.