Jon Sullivan (Longman, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise with pleasure to speak on the report entitled The global financial crisis and regional Australia, which I am proud to have been part of the development of. In doing so can I firstly apologise for the lack of speakers in relation to this report. Most of our committee members are tied up with other excitements occurring in this place today, so it is understandable that they are not here with us.

Can I pay my compliments to the committee chair, the member for Ballarat, Catherine King, and those committee members who have worked hard on this report. But also I would like to put on record the names of the people in the committee secretariat, who, far too often do not receive the credit that they deserve for helping members complete reports. We have had a change of committee secretary during this inquiry. Peter Keel was our original secretary and he has been replaced by Julia Morris. Fortunately, we have had one inquiry secretary, Michael Crawford, who has been constantly with us for a number of inquiries. I want to thank him for his always excellent work. In the committee secretariat we have had Sophia Nicolle and Adrienne Batts as research officers and Kane Moir and Alison Wardrop as administrative officers. As I started out by saying, their value is often underestimated and certainly undercommented on, but they are never underappreciated by those in the committees that they serve. In fact, we are very pleased that this report has already drawn some favourable comment from the tourism sector.

I had the pleasure of attending nine of the 13 public hearings that were undertaken in the course of this report. I was not able to travel to Western Australia with the committee, much to my chagrin. As it turned out, for reasons of local importance I was not able to attend the public hearing at Beenleigh, which was the most accessible for me of all of them. I learned two things from regional communities. One is about the quality and the nature of the people who live in regional Australia: they are not complainers. In fact, it was very difficult for us as a committee to get them to complain about the circumstances they were in. They are a generation and a style of people who just suck it up and get on with what they have to do. They certainly had plenty of advice for us on what government could do, not in respect of what they were experiencing at the time but in respect of how the government should be able to assist them—not do it for them—to bolster the regions and regional economies into the future.

I particularly mention the hearings we held at Burnie. I should mention here that the very hardworking member for Braddon was able to drop in to those hearings briefly. He has serious responsibilities there and it was great that he could come and spend some time with us. It was good to see that that community—led by that council, which I had never encountered before—understood from the previous downturn that the key for survival for them was to diversify their economy as much as they could. That is going to be the key for the survival of local economies throughout the country. I want to commend the council in that area for taking that step.

We also found, particularly in relation to the tourism industry, that there are variations within the industry. For example, the tourism industry in Northern Tasmania was going gang busters—but it had found a different market. Instead of the family market coming for a week on one of the ferries and driving around, it was people from Melbourne or Adelaide hopping across Bass Strait for a two- or three-day stay, going back to their jobs in Melbourne or Adelaide and then doing the same thing again six weeks later. They saw the place in little chunks. So that area was doing quite nicely out of tourism. Of course, there were some other things going quite well for them. There was a differentiation, if you like, between the effects the global financial crisis was having on domestic tourism and the effects it was having on international inbound tourism. The people who relied on international visitors were doing it a whole lot tougher—particularly North Queensland and the Northern Territory. As I said, Northern Tasmania and the Grampians in Victoria had a market for domestic tourism and did very well, with some of the longer holidays turning into shorter holidays.

As I said earlier, the recommendations that we made in relation to tourism—which were not rocket science—were to extend the quantum of money available to the tourism industry under the TQUAL Grants program. These grants help the industry develop innovative products, services and systems, to contribute directly to the long-term development of local communities and regions and to develop the support of high-quality visitor services. In 2009 that grants program opened early, and over 400 applications were received. The $8½ million on offer was countered by the fact that the bids were for many hundreds of millions of dollars.

There is a great deal of work that the tourist industry wants to do in regional Australia to assist those economies to be more resilient to economic downturns. I think that, as the industry is a major employer in the regions and particularly in the traditional tourist regions, we could be doing a little more to assist it. As I said, that recommendation has been well received. When we went to the most western part of Victoria that we travelled to, Ararat, it was really noticeable that the character of the people there was, ‘She’ll be right if she rains.’ They were not focusing on what was happening around the world; they understood that, if they could get some rain, their agricultural businesses could once again prosper.

I complimented the member for Braddon earlier, and I now want to compliment the member for Wannon, the Hon. David Hawker, who spent a considerable amount of time with us on that day. Having mentioned those two examples—and having come to this place from a state government situation—I say that what really is noticeable is the number of local members who do not turn up when a parliamentary committee is in town. I do not think that when I was a member of a committee in the Queensland parliament there was a local member who would allow a committee to come into town without spying on them so that they knew what was happening in their towns.

A very important aspect of what we heard from people was that they were concerned about their access to credit. In one particular case—I will not mention the name of the firm—it looked like the loss of about 186 jobs in Geelong was because their long-term banker had declined to assist them through the global financial crisis. There are probably a couple of explanations for that. But let me say that when we talked to the banks in Sydney they put their hands on their hearts and said that they had not changed their lending policies whatsoever, and when we were out in the bush talking to people who were trying to get money to survive they told a different story. Some of it, as we have mentioned in the report, could well be due to the fact that a number of regional businesses, whether they be farm businesses or town businesses, rely not on banks as we understand them but on non-bank financial institutions, who were much harder hit by the global financial crisis than the banks. Nevertheless, credit is vital to the establishment and maintenance of a business and we need to be sure that, in the event of another downturn, regional businesses of whatever nature are able to get access to credit.

The issue of job losses takes on particular importance in a region. I can recall that at Broken Hill we were talking to them about mine closures and what happened to those workers. Substantially, those workers left town. We have all seen stories of what happens to towns that lose workers: the next thing they do is lose a teacher at the school because there are not enough kids to keep the school going. Then, at the end of it all, the mine reopens and they haven’t got any people to do the jobs. So we need to come up with systems—and the report has quoted a couple of ways—to ensure that people who lose jobs in the regions are able to go forward by staying in their communities, retaining skills in the communities and keeping services available. I have just noticed that I am rapidly running out of time. Can I get an extension?

Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Laming interjecting

Jon Sullivan (Longman, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Would you offer me one of your side’s 15 minutes? Life has never been easy for the people who choose to live, raise their families and run their businesses in regional Australia. There have been times, when wool was a pound a pound, when the regions were reasonably wealthy. It has never been easy, but I notice that people out there do not want us to make it easy, they want us to make it a little bit easier. I think they are very proud of the fact that they are seriously self-sufficient, or as self-sufficient as they can be. We need to be aware that all of the actions the government took as a consequence of the global financial crisis were beneficial, but in regional Australia some of those actions have been particularly important. The cash payments portion of the stimulus of course assisted the retail sectors in regional Australia. In small towns, shops that really needed to be open were able to stay open because people had money to spend in them. One of the interesting figures that came out of the December payments was that the usual January spike in missed mortgage payments did not occur, so people were able to have their Christmas and keep the house. The regional community infrastructure program has been well received out there, as has the Jobs Fund, which is a very important scheme. I know that in all sorts of regions of Australia, including on the Gold Coast, the Jobs Fund is hopefully helping a large number of people, including through the Broadbeach Surf Life Saving Club, whose deputy president is in the chamber today.

Those reactions of the government are typical—to pick up a thread from a previous speaker and a previous report—Keynesian responses. If the bush is vital, if the regions are vital to this country, we need to ensure that we keep people there and, in the absence of investment by private industry, private investors, we also need to ensure that the government is doing its bit to assist those areas to continue to operate in a way that we would like. It would be wonderful, although very difficult, if government jobs, be they in sections of departmental offices, could be moved into the regions. That would be an excellent thing. Canberra is virtually recession proof because of the number of public servants who live here, yet we do not have that in the regions.

There is not an area that I went to that is not looking forward to better broadband infrastructure. What we as a government are doing in relation to providing national broadband will certainly create enormous benefits for those living in the regions. I am pleased to be able to speak today in support of this program, and I thank the House for the opportunity.

Debate (on motion by Mr Laming) adjourned.

Ordered that the resumption of the debate be made an order of the day for the next sitting.