E&OE TRANSCRIPT
RADIO INTERVIEW
ABC NEWS WA
WEDNESDAY, 29 JANUARY 2020
SUBJECT: Drought Communities Program
EMMA FIELD, JOURNALIST: Catherine
we’re speaking today about the Drought Communities grants program, another
round was announced yesterday. For the first time WA shires have been
included, but there are a lot of drought-affected areas particularly in
pastoral regions which have missed out. What do you make of the way the
Government has divvied up this program this time around?
CATHERINE KING, SHADOW MINISTER FOR INFRASTRUCTURE, TRANSPORT AND REGIONAL
DEVELOPMENT: Well, I think the way in which the Government has handled
the Drought Communities Program and the extension program it announced prior to
the last election really has lacked transparency. I think the decisions that
they’ve been making about councils have been based on spurious rainfall data
and agricultural workforce data that keeps shifting. What we saw,
unfortunately, before the last election was the then Regional Services
Minister, Senator McKenzie, making a decision about 14 councils, six of which,
in fact, didn’t even meet that criteria, but they got the drought funding. And,
you had the ridiculous circumstances in Victoria where you had Moyne Shire
saying well look, we’ve been told we’ve got the money but we’re not in drought,
and Moira Shire saying we are in drought but we’re not getting any money
because we don’t have enough agricultural workers by you know, by five. So
they’ve just not been transparent about it. It’s unclear to councils. So
there’s no application process, councils can’t come forward and say, look, we
want to dispute the data that you’ve got forward or this is, you know, the
impact on us. There’s no discussion with councils about, you know, is this
actually what’s happening on the ground, how will you use this money? It just
seems to me that they’re just picking and choosing, and on the basis of criteria
that is unclear to anyone other than someone either in the Minister’s office or
the Minister’s office and the department.
FIELD: Yes, it has been a little unclear and that is certainly what WA
councils have been asking over the last 24 hours. Something else that became
clear yesterday when the Minister and Prime Minister announced this Drought
Communities fund extension was that there was a review done by EY, were you
aware this was taking place and it was done within a month, is that too quickly
for something like this?
KING: Well, certainly when this first hit the media, Minister
Littleproud said that he was going to review the program. And it was pretty
clear that that was about, you know, spin over substance, and I think this EY
report being done so quickly, doesn’t go to the substance of how these
allocation decisions are being made? What’s the engagement with local councils
over these decisions? What transparency is around the process? Then, even
further to that, what’s the money actually been being used for? What we know is
that councils that are eligible get a million dollars. Getting that money then
is contingent on a whole lot of other things that they can then apply for.
There’s a Building Better Regions Fund program, it’s about $200 million, only
those councils that get have been declared for the million dollars, as my
understanding, can now actually apply for that, whereas it used to be a much
broader number of councils. There are other programs they then become eligible
for, so it’s actually really important for drought-affected communities. But,
there’s just a lack of clarity about that. It’s also a lack of clarity again
about what’s actually the money’s being spent on. In essence, what it’s meant
to do is help to stimulate the broader economy around agriculture. So, it might
be that you want to look at other employment opportunities for people, and,
again, we had cases come to us in council areas where the funding had been used
to fund a toilet block at a cemetery. Now, that might have provided some local
employment but there was no reporting on that. Did it actually have any local
employment, were there local components in that building or not? And what’s the
ongoing jobs of that? So, again, it just seems to me that they’ve not handled this
well, and they’ve certainly not handled it from local government‘s perspective
very well at all.
FIELD: Now the Federal Government has moved away from drought
declarations by exceptional circumstances, which effectively drew a line in the
sand, making declarations based on weather data for different shires. Yet we
seem to be back at the same king of decision making with this grants
scheme. Do you think drought support is being rolled out the right way or
could improvements be made?
KING: It clearly is not being rolled out the right way. And you’re
right, that whole notion around drought declaration, which was inconsistent
across the country meant ridiculous circumstances where you had literally a
road dividing whether a farmer or a pastoral property was in drought or not in
drought, and that really did cause enormous difficulties. But, what we haven’t
had from this government is a long term plan around how do we actually manage
drought, what are the mitigation measures that we need to put in place, how do
we look at developing proper long-term regional development plans for
communities that are in drought, and, obviously, the issue around our changing
climate has to be thought about when you starting to talk about drought. All of
these things, it seems that the Federal Government has just been asleep at the
wheel when it comes to drought funding, and obviously in the regional
development space, where you want to try and help these economies, again,
they’ve just been inconsistent in the way in which they have made decisions.
And it’s that lack of transparency that means councils can’t plan, can’t rely
on this money, because they don’t know whether they are going to be eligible or
not.
ENDS