Speeches

Roads to Recovery - Local Shire Priorities

Monday 15th September 2008

I rise to speak on the AusLink (National Land Transport) Amendment Bill 2008. The bill is intended to make technical amendments to the AusLink (National Land Transport) Act 2005. The changes seek to achieve a number of objectives. The first change, as you would know, Mr Deputy Speaker, extends the successful Roads to Recovery program for another five years until 30 June 2014. Roads to Recovery was one element of the former coalition government’s AusLink land transport funding program. It delivered road funding directly to local communities that were in need of assistance to fund transport infrastructure. The success of the Roads to Recovery program was achieved by bypassing the states and providing Commonwealth funding directly to local councils. Local government authorities were then in a position to nominate projects within their own communities based on local needs. The Australian Local Government Association has acknowledged the Roads to Recovery program as being an outstanding example of a partnership between national and local government to provide direct funding to local communities.

I looked forward to the opportunity to speak on this bill today because in the Roads to Recovery program we saw a genuine operation where tiers of government, particularly local and federal tiers of government, were working together. There is one tier of government that I believe is totally undervalued in this country, and that is the tier of local government. The way forward with local government is not just to provide some form of superficial recognition of its role but, more significantly, to look genuinely at the role of local government within our system of federalism and at the way in which real responsibilities and real revenue accountability can be attached to local government.

What we are seeing at the moment is a debate about federalism that focuses on federal and state government. We hear about the blame game and all these other issues that the government has raised in a bid to disperse accountability rather than actually assign accountability. But all the discussion of federalism tends to focus on these top two tiers of government: state and federal. The discussion about the transfer of responsibilities has not been about getting service delivery closer to where services are actually used and relied upon, at the local level; it has been all about trying to take it further up the chain. We talk about schools being transferred to federal responsibility; we talk about hospitals being transferred to federal responsibility; we talk about all of these critical social and public services being taken further up the chain, further away from the people who actually use them.

I am currently not filled with confidence in the ability of the government in my home state of New South Wales to deliver these services for my constituents in the Sutherland shire, but I do not think the answer in any of these areas is simply to transfer that power to the federal government so that a bureaucracy in Canberra, as opposed to a bureaucracy at the state level, can take it over. The discussion about many of these services needs to look at to what extent these services can be delivered locally. What we have in the Roads to Recovery program is a rolled gold example of what actually works—we have funding provided to local councils to fund roads that are necessary, funding that does not have to go through a whole other tier of bureaucracy, in terms of assessment, planning and processing, at the state level. It is a functional relationship.

What I like about this relationship is that it sees local, state and federal government sitting as three legs to a stool. In my maiden speech in this place I talked about the three legs to the stool of Federation. At the moment, I think, it is more commonly understood as being like a three-legged dog, because it is not working effectively. One of the reasons it is not working effectively is that we are not assigning responsibilities to these tiers of government and we are not resourcing these tiers of government to do the jobs with the appropriate accountability and then holding them to account. It is no good just to look the other way and to have fingers pointing every which way to avoid what should be competitive conflict, accountable conflict in ensuring value for taxpayers’ dollars.

I would very much commend the idea of our understanding the role that local government can play. On the weekend in my state of New South Wales people turned out and voted at local council elections. Those opposite, particularly in New South Wales, would be well aware of how the vast majority of them voted. A very common theme, while standing at polling booths on the weekend, was that people had very little understanding of what was done at a local council level. It seems to me that there needs to be a greater awareness of the accountabilities of local government. In some cases there were many things that they expected of local governments that were beyond their remit or that they were not funded to do. There is a need to clarify these things for local government. I think the Roads to Recovery program enabled us to go down this path and to start looking at alternatives to just simply saying, ‘Well, states can’t do it; we’ll hand it all the way up to Canberra.’ I think that is a very short-sighted view and not one that will serve our local communities well because, at the end of the day, the best accountability that you can have is for the person to sit across the desk or across the bed or in the schoolroom from someone who is consuming those services. Parents deal with principals all the time. Parents deal with their doctors who sit in hospitals. Far too much listening and attention is given to those who sit behind bureaucratic desks in our public services rather than to those who are actually working on the ground. Of course there is a need for bureaucracies, proper accountability and funding mechanisms, review processes and benchmarking, but none of that is a substitute for enabling local communities to have a greater say over how local money is spent on local services.

I think there are some improvements that can be made with Roads to Recovery. It is not only the federal government or the local government that spends money ...

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