Transcript - Minister McBain addresses the Western Australian Local Government Association Convention

KRISTY MCBAIN, MINISTER: Alright, I’ll try to be very candid. I’ll try to rise above the sound of ‘Frozen’ above us or next door or wherever it’s coming from. Clearly, I didn’t get the message about the dress code otherwise I would have been in some type of Elsa get-up. My daughter’s now 12 and I think we had ‘Frozen’ on a high rotation between the ages of about 8 to 9, maybe a bit earlier than that, but I can well and truly guarantee I would not fit into her outfit. So hence you’ve got me in business attire instead.

Thank you so much for that wonderful introduction, Karen. It’s really lovely to be here at the Western Australian Local Government Conference and I want to start by also acknowledging the traditional custodians of the lands on where we meet and pay my respects to Elders past and present and any other Aboriginal people that are here today. It’s so lovely to come along and once again thank you for the invite. I think it’s the first trip I’ve done to WA since being elected as a Minister in the Albanese Labor Government. So it’s lovely to actually make it to your conference. After a couple of years of Zoom meetings and seeing people on screens, it’s so nice to be back being able to see people face to face. There’s really nothing that does beat a face-to-face catch-up with people. I also know that after this there are drinks aplenty, so I will try my hardest to get through this because we do not want to get in the way of shire presidents, mayors, councillors, and CEOs attending their drinks and I know that first hand.

Can I also acknowledge Councillor Linda Scott from ALGA as well. Thank you so much for being here. I’m sure these guys really appreciate your advocacy over the last few years. Linda and I actually share an anniversary. We were both elected in 2012. So 10 years ago, in September we were both elected for the first time to our respective councils and what a ride it’s been since then.

I am a really strong and passionate supporter of local government for a whole range of reasons. One of them is that, it employs close to 200,000 people across 400 different occupations around the country. It’s the only level of government that has its tentacles in every town and village across this country and it is really important that we see local government as a sustained and significant partner of both Federal and State governments for a whole range of reasons.

In the lead-up to the Jobs and Skills Summit, I did a series of round tables and talked to almost 100 local governing authorities, peak bodies, joint organisations. There were some really consistent themes throughout. The jobs and skills issue was front and centre but so was housing, so was healthcare, so was a Regional Investment Framework that was transparent. And we are a government that believes wholeheartedly that our success also hinges on the success of our partnership with local governments.

So one of the first things that the Prime Minister did on 17^th of June was announce that ALGA will be invited back to the table of the National Cabinet and also include them in the Council of Federal Financial Relations annually. I didn’t even know that thing existed before we talked about it. But it’s effectively the Treasurer’s meeting of all State and Territory Treasurers with our Treasurer.

The Prime Minister also announced the re-establishment of the Australian Council of Local Governments, which he first introduced when he was the minister back in 2008 which will bring the Prime Minister, Commonwealth cabinet ministers, mayors, shire presidents, local government stakeholders to the table to have direct conversations with the Albanese Labor Government. I will also shortly reconvene the Local Government Minister’s Forum which is Commonwealth and State and Territory local government ministers along with ALGA to hear directly from each of them about what’s happening in all of our States and Territories, what can we learn from each other, what is working in some places that we need to implement in other places across the country.

As I said, Minister King and myself convened a whole series of round table discussions before the Jobs and Skills Summit and we heard some fantastic ideas, some fantastic solutions coming to us from the ground up. We heard about engaging older Australians back into the workforce. We’ve heard about how we can make sure that we are a migrant success story ongoing. We heard about developing a skilled workforce to deal with some of the challenges that we have in our local government sector. And I want to thank Karen Chapple for her contribution on behalf of ALGA at the Local Government Associations round table.

The Jobs and Skills Summit was attended by unions, by employers, by ALGA, by civil society, everybody there with a focus on our shared economic challenges going forward, especially given the skilled worker shortage across the country. But from every challenge there’s always opportunity and that’s how I choose to look at things. In the darkest days of the Black Summer bushfires, when we were talking about the threats that were in front of us, we were also talking about the opportunities that existed for us to help each other. And I think that we need to look at our problems also in the light of there are some great solutions and opportunities for us as well.

The shared goal out of that summit was a bigger, better trained and more productive workforce. My department has engaged ALGA already in a survey of workforce skills and capability across the sector. It was last conducted five years ago and I want to thank all of the councils that participated in that survey. Reporting at the end of the year, the preliminary findings confirm long-standing issues of resourcing, organisational capacity, supply constraints, and cultural barriers. Other findings tell us that skilled work shortages are continuing in key occupations. There are recruitment and retention challenges. The corporate knowledge is being lost as employees retire or resign.

My discussions with stakeholders in the lead up to the Jobs and Skills Summit, echo those findings, adding specific concerns around a lack of housing, especially attracting and retaining employees in our regions. A lack of local training opportunities for younger people which was raised consistently in our round tables but really emphasised with a round table I had with a group called the Rural Youth Ambassadors which are a group of rural youth from across the country. We also heard the technical and digital connectivity was critical, not just for work and workers but for liveability and accessibility in our regions. These are all issues that the Government publicly committed to improving.

At the beginning of the Jobs and Skills Summit, the Prime Minister confirmed that 180,000 fee-free TAFE positions will be made available in 2023. That $1.1 billion cost to be shared between the Federal Government and our State and Territory governments.

Housing affordability, though, is a major challenge for all of us and we need to play a leadership role in this space. All three levels of government. Housing supply and affordability was part of our election platform. We will establish a National Housing Supply Affordability Council bringing key stakeholders together to develop practical solutions for homelessness, housing supply and affordability issues. We know that the lack of secure, reliable housing is now a national issue and it’s a major impediment on our ability to allow industries to grow. I expect that local governments will be an essential part of the solution going forward. The national rental vacancy rate is just 1.2 per cent and some towns in Western Australia have effectively a 0 per cent availability rate. And I have seen and heard first-hand the impact this has on communities right across our nation.

But housing is a really complex issue. An issue that requires, as I’ve said, all levels of government to work together to address this issue. At a National Jobs and Skills Summit in Canberra, we agree to widen the remit of the national housing infrastructure facility to make up the $575 million available for social and affordable housing and inevitably this will require partnership with local governments.

We’re also developing a fairer Regional Investment Framework that will deliver coherent regional architecture and approach these underpinned by honesty, transparency and integrity because investment in our regions shouldn’t be an electoral cycle. It shouldn’t be based on postcodes or boundaries of federal electorates. And I believe that our RBAs can be central to our implementation of this framework and I expect that they will work closely with their councils and regional bodies to ensure regions can maximise their investment.

I know from first-hand experience we need to be better prepared for natural disasters. The thing that Karen didn’t tell you was that in my four years of being a mayor I had nine declared natural disasters – three bushfires, an east coast low with 17-metre waves and a series of floods. The only thing that put out the Black Summer bushfire in my region was a flood. Crazy. So we had six out-of-control bushfires burning in a semicircle around us. So all of our – all of the major highways leading into my region had been cut by the bushfire – Princes Highway to the south and the north and the Snowy Mountains Highway to Canberra. It effectively was just making its way further and further in.

What we had to tell the community was we didn’t know how we were going to protect everybody, we were doing the best we could to make sure everyone was safe. But the only thing that was going to put out that fire was, as one firefighter put it, the great blue thing to the east of us, or a whole lot of rain. It actually became a whole lot of rain. So we lost our first home on 30 December 2019, we lost our last home on 13 February 2020. It was a sustained bushfire that just appeared to be never-ending.

And the thing about the flood was that we went from having close to no capacity in our dams to a dam overflowing but overflowing with silt and debris from a bushfire which meant that we were then trucking water to some of our towns at the cost of about $30,000 a day.

And when I talked to people about the importance of local government and the importance of local government employees, I continually tell people that you probably didn’t know that we had people on rotating 24-hours-a-day, 7-day-a-week rosters. We had people stationed within the fire area to make sure that the pumps to our water tanks didn’t go out. Then we had to make sure we were keeping sewage running. That we had people manning roadblocks so that homeowners and neighbours couldn’t get into the areas most affected. These are the things that the general public take for granted but we know that our local government employees provide day in and day out.

It’s really important to me that the emergency response fund becomes a disaster-ready fund because no community should have to go through those situations without being as best prepared as possible that they can be. So when the Labor Party committed to $200 million a year in mitigation and resilience funding, my community and many others who have been through similar situations, thought finally we’re being listened to.

So we will bring the necessary legislative instrument to Parliament very soon and I will be a very proud supporter of that because I know how much work local governments do in identifying how they can better prepare for disasters, how they can mitigate and how they can make sure that their infrastructure is much more resilient than it currently is.

There has been a lot of money that has gone – that will be going to post-disaster resilience work in the Northern Rivers, Queensland and New South Wales, which was announced by the former government. We will honour that. We will continue to work closely with state and local representatives through the newly minted National Emergency Management Agency to focus on recovery. And we’re also investigating non-Defence options for recovery work. The Australian Defence Force has played an incredible role in disaster recovery and COVID situation but it’s not their core job.

We made an election commitment to fund Disaster Relief Australia, which is an organisation that deploys veterans to assist the disaster clean-up, and I have personally seen them work in action in the first bushfire where I was the mayor in the disaster in 2018 and the Black Summer disaster, and those veterans do an amazing job bringing their skills and knowledge of systems to help in recovery work.

As a former mayor I know Financial Assistance Grant money is really important. I have definitely been on the other side of this lobbying previous ministers for more assistance. In the current financially constrained environment, almost all parts of our economy are under pressure with the competing demands for additional funding far outstripping what could be prudently promised.

We also recognise that applying for funding and reporting on it can sometimes be more time-consuming and bureaucratic than it needs to be. The first budget will be a delicate balance of responding to short-term issues and laying the groundwork for a future regional investment strategy. There are always improvements that can be made in programs particularly around accountability, good governance, and stronger integrity. The Government is currently considering the architecture we use to invest in regions and in local governments.

I want to give a shout out to some of the WA Local Government initiatives that I’ve recently heard about and focus on those examples of leadership and innovation that we have seen over the last few years.

To the City of Mandurah, their entrepreneurial capacity building program, which was originally about becoming – how to become innovative in a high area of unemployment and limited educational opportunities. Their answer – an 8-week beginners’ program that helps you with starting a business and create a range of products for sale. It’s run consecutively since 2015, the City of Mandurah supports entrepreneurs to participate in the program, helps them establish their social media networks, and helps them with group mentoring sessions.

As of 2020, over 950 residents have participated in the 24 courses with around 65 per cent going on to register an ABN. The team estimates that more than 80 full-time jobs and around 300 part-time jobs have been created by course participants adding $6.51 million to Mandurah’s gross regional product. It was also the winner of the 2020 National Award for Local Government Contributing to Regional Growth Capacity. I say over and over and over again to my colleagues in Canberra, when I was the mayor I used to say to my state government, there are amazing locally led solutions if you just opened your ears and listened to us.

The My Home project for the City of Fremantle, the problem identified was how do we provide housing to the homeless and to those experiencing homeless when we have land that is so cost prohibitive? Well, what they did was enter into a public/private partnership model where the City of Fremantle, the Church, the private sector and the community housing providers shared responsibility for creating housing for homeless people. In 2021 the City of Fremantle approved a one-off grant to a pilot project. The construction method uses prefabricated materials that can be erected in a day making them extremely cost efficient. Again, a locally led solution listening to the people who you are there for day in, day out.

I really am interested wherever I go to any part of this country, whenever I talk to people in Local Government, about the ideas that you have because we will succeed if local government succeeds. And what we need to do is work together to make sure that we are listening to each other’s voices because I firmly believe that the key to maximising our economic potential, our liveability, is for our governments to work together, to share the vision of what success looks like, sharing ideas, sharing expertise, sharing resources, sharing innovation.

I know from experience how vulnerable our local councils are to achieving success, I’ve seen it happen in my own council, I’ve seen it happen in my joint organisation of councils, and now I’m seeing it happen on a much wider scale. And we want to empower you to continue to do those innovative, excellent things that you know are working in your own regions. I want to keep your ideas, I want you to help you deliver on your vision and I want to know what your region looks like in ten years because we really have to be thinking about that 10-year cycle and I think nobody does it better than local government. Don’t tell the Albanese Labor Government.

It is one of the best things about local government is every four years we do community strategic surveys. We come up with a plan, say what we’re going to do every year, we tell people what we’re going to deliver, we tell the people what the finances look like. Everything is so publicly available that no-one could ever accuse a local council of not knowing what they’re doing and I think it is the one thing that I value the most is that transparency, that integrity in local councils, that knowing your community drives you to succeed and I want to be part of that vision and I want to make sure that our Federal Labor Government is part of that vision and helping you to deliver for your communities.

I’m more than happy to answer questions and I won’t rabble on too long because I don’t want to get in the way of your drinks after this.