Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern Australia) Share this | Hansard source

The Financial Assistance Legislation Amendment Bill 2009, dealing with financial assistance grants to local government, will be supported by the coalition, although we wonder why the legislation is being brought forward. We can only suspect that it has a lot to do with the semantics of the budget and, perhaps, Mr Rudd not wanting to confess to a deficit in excess of $58 billion.

What this bill is all about is bringing forward from the next financial year into this financial year an amount of $480 million going to local government. The government gives the explanation that it will allow local government to get on with job-creating works, but that does not seem to ring true. Our consultation with the Australian Local Government Association suggests that this was not sought by local governments throughout Australia; it is simply something the government is doing. As I say, we cannot quite understand why it is. It means that the quarterly payment that was due at the beginning of next financial year, $480 million, will be paid in this financial year. It means councils will have that additional money this financial year. They will not be able to spend it in the next couple of months, quite clearly, and it means they will have to hold it in reserve to spend next year.

So what is this all about? Perhaps whichever minister is dealing with this legislation in the Senate can give us a convincing reason why this is happening. We can only think that the Treasurer did not want to talk about a deficit of more than $58 billion. It is fudging the figures somewhere along the line. Local governments are certainly not getting any more money; they are getting the same amount of money, but it is just that the first quarterly payment is coming forward in this financial year. There is no sensible or believable explanation given by the government in the second reading speech or the explanatory memorandum. We are just curious as to why it has happened.

But it is good to see the Labor government continuing the financial assistance grants that the previous coalition government made to local government throughout Australia in recognition of the quite significant work that local government does in all aspects of the life of Australians. Certainly councils look after the old triple R—roads, rates and rubbish—but these days they look after a lot more than that. I know that in my state of Queensland, particularly in many of the smaller regional councils, they take on a real community leadership role and deal with a lot of infrastructure projects and many other works that benefit their communities.

Councils also get money under Roads to Recovery, another initiative of the Howard government which I am pleased to see the current government continuing—for the time being, at least. That is an initiative where roads money goes directly to councils, cutting out the middleman at state government level, so councils can do good works on local roads. Unfortunately, in Queensland we are finding that quite a number of local councils are using their R2R money on state roads, roads that should be maintained and improved by the Queensland state government but that the Queensland government are not at all interested in because they are outside the south-east corner of our state. We find the local authorities using the money given to them by the Commonwealth government for local roads on these state roads simply because nobody else is maintaining them.

But local governments play a much wider role in the community as well. I was interested the other day to see all of the mayors from local governments from Townsville out to Mount Isa—and there are five or six of them—indicating that, as the headline in the newspaper says, ‘Mayors support uranium’. The newspaper article says that:

Mayors in the seven shires between Mount Isa and Townsville have unanimously voted in favour of uranium mining in Queensland.

That is a very interesting aspect of the views of some community leaders in that particular area.

Their support for uranium mining simply mirrors the support given by Ms Betty Kiernan, the Labor member for the state seat of Mount Isa. It also mirrors the urgings of the former Labor member for Mount Isa, who was minister for mines in the Beattie government, who is very vocal in his support for uranium mining. I think one of Queensland’s leading union officials, Mr Bill Ludwig from the AWU—