TRANSCRIPT: SPEECH TO THE AUSTRALIAN LOCAL GOVERNMENT ASSOCIATION, 16 NOVEMBER 2020

E&OE

Subjects: Charles Sturt University; electronic logbooks; Road Safety Week; COVID-19; value of local government.

MICHAEL McCORMACK

Well, good morning to you all, and thank you very much, Linda, for that very kind introduction, and congratulations. Big step up, and I know you’ll be absolutely marvellous in the job. And we thank David O’Loughlin, too, for his service and commitment and dedication, and Linda and I swapped numbers some time ago and we communicate regularly. And I know her heart is very much in the right place. She is passionate about local government, as she should be, as you all are.

And you might notice this morning I’m wearing a maroon tie knowing full well that Matt Burnett was coming down from Gladstone Regional Council, your new deputy chair, and I thought I’d be kind and welcome him to New South Wales and, low and behold when I bumped into him he was wearing a blue tie. So, there you go. So, we’re both thinking on the same page.

And I know Tracey Roberts from the City of Wanneroo in Western Australia – not sure, Linda, whether she’s Zooming in? She’s Zooming in. Hello, how are you, Tracey.

I know this morning you were welcomed as well by Isabel Reid. Isabel – Aunty Is -- is one of our favourites here in Wagga Wagga. She has done so much for our community and acknowledged recently because she was awarded the New South Wales Senior Citizen of the Year, not just for her work for the Wiradjuri people but for her work for our community and beyond.

And I do acknowledge that we are on Wiradjuri country. I also acknowledge that we’re in Joyes Hall a Charles Sturt University. And I just got a little note from Fiona Nash, who is a former senator, former colleague of mine, who tells me – and I already knew it – that Charles Sturt University is number one for a regional university for getting a job when you complete your degree. And there was a great report done, in fact, by the Department of Education federally, that showed that if you go to a regional university you’ve got every opportunity to get a job when you finish your course. Almost, I’d say, a better opportunity than perhaps if you go to one of the city universities. So, there’s a bit of a plug for regional areas.

I also want to give a bit of a plug – you can probably see on your tables a Teletrac Navman bottle of water. This Teletrac is one of two companies that is now doing electronic logbooking. And we did a bit of an announcement last week, and I’m into plugs at the moment, because that is going to save our truckies so much time and effort. And truckies have been absolutely magnificent during the pandemic to get all sorts of things, not least of which were grocery supplies and toilet rolls across the country. You can only wipe your backside once every so often, but it seemed as though everybody needed ten times the amount of toilet paper, and our truckies were able to deliver it. Interesting start, Michael, going from wiping your backside, to talking about all the sorts of things that you obviously are here to listen to me about.

But there’s just one more plug I really want to give, and I’ve got the yellow badge. Today, yesterday and all week is Road Safety Week. Some of you would have driven here. Some of you would have travelled on our roads, and I appreciate that the theme of the conference, the theme of this is Roads, Regions and Resilience. This badge represents the Safer Australian Roads and Highways. That stands for SARAH. Sarah Frazer was a 23-year-old bright, bubbly beautiful girl. She was travelling back in 2012 to come here to Charles Sturt University from her home. And unfortunately, she had a breakdown, she pulled up on the side of the Hume Freeway, a tow truck driver pulled up on call, a bloke by the name of Geoff Clarke, and he and her were then both instantly killed when a truckie, slightly distracted, ran into them. Absolutely tragic.

Now her father, Peter, who will be in Wagga Wagga later today, he has been the most staunchest advocate for road safety initiatives that this country has probably ever seen. Peter has now dedicated his life to making sure that we are more aware of the need to be safe on our roads. And that is why – one of the reasons why – the federal government is partnering with state and particularly local governments for those road safety initiatives.

There was $2 billion set aside for just that – road safety initiatives – in the recent federal budget on October 6. There was another one and a half billion dollars, as Linda has so kindly enunciated this morning, for the Local Roads and Community Infrastructure, but sometimes those roads just don’t always get looked at when there’s road money being doled out, other than just the Roads to Recovery, which I have to say, I can proudly say, is one of the initiatives of my political party, the Nationals, way, way back when we knew that local governments who have a huge expanse of roads and not always enough money to look after them needed that extra cash. And that is why we are always as regional members wanting to provide that money.

Now I know tomorrow you’re going to hear from Mark Coulton, the local government minister, and he’ll be having more to say about all the things that are important to you and are important to the federal government. But I just wanted to touch on a few things, appreciating that time is money and you probably want to get on and ask me a few questions. So, I do want to give you some time for that. But I just want to talk about the demographer, Bernard Salt.

Now Bernard writing in The Australian has increased what is becoming a trend – that is called VESPAs. Now it’s Virus Escapees Seeking Provincial Australia. It sounds like some sort of bad movie that would be rated very poorly by Rotten Tomatoes. But in his piece Salt predicted that the 2020s may well usher in a new relationship between the city and the regions unlocked by the work from home movement, by broadband access kicked along by the summer rains and bushfire recovery spending and now hurried along by the cities’ new-found appreciation of the safety and quietude of a country lifestyle.

And a friend of yourself, a friend of mine, the wonderful Mayor of Albury, he tells me, Kevin Mack tells me that the amount of inquiry that he has been receiving – and I know Greg Conkey here in Wagga Wagga has been receiving as well through our wonderful real estate agents and through our information centres and through the initiatives that we put out there to get people to attract them from the big cities into our regions – is that people are making more inquiry because of COVID-19 to come and have that quiet country lifestyle.

But it’s not that quiet. There’s plenty to do out here. And there’s 45,600 jobs according to the Regional Australia Institute. Of course, it’s not always about the regions, and appreciating that many of you are probably capital city people, including your wonderful, wonderful president. But we do want to certainly as regional people push and promote and advocate for our regions, which I always say they’re large enough in which to get a good cup of coffee and they’re small enough to still care.

The 2020-21 budget articulates our economic recovery plan for Australia. And it has been such a challenging year, a year like no other. Started with bushfires. Some areas had floods. Of course, drought was ongoing and then, of course, COVID-19 hit. And it has been particularly hard especially for some of those regional communities which did not have a coronavirus for a long, long time – some of them didn’t have one at all, and yet they were still under the same restrictions that the capital cities were under. And, of course, that hits tourism hard. That hits regional businesses hard. That hits everybody hard.

But Australians have been magnificent. People in capital cities, people in the regions by and large have been magnificent, and that is why we have now had so many days in a row leading up until yesterday of no cases. Unfortunately, there’s a bit of an outbreak in South Australia this morning, but they’re trying as best to get on top of that. But for contact tracing and tracking, perhaps that might have got out of hand. But we’ll watch that situation, but the situation in Victoria has, of course, improved magnificently, and that is because of the discipline and the attitude of Australian people to do the right thing, to follow the health advice.

Last Wednesday when the world experienced its worst ever day as far as deaths are concerned – and America recorded 200,000 new cases – Australia had no cases. And so that says something not just about the federal government, not just about state governments, not just about your organisation and others who are doing their best as community leaders, but about the Australian people. About those people who’ve done the right thing to keep us relatively COVID free.

It’s come at a cost – a very large cost. Of course, with international travel shut down many travel agents have done it very tough. There’s any number of businesses, tourism related, that’s why we’ve put in another $200 million for the Building Better Regions Fund as part of the last round of the budget. I see Steve Loane down there and I know that Forbes has benefited from that particularly good campaign and funding initiative to help all those sorts of organisations attached to local governments and attached to local communities in the regions.

But there’s so much more than that. Of course, the federal government had funding for all manner of business and government-related purposes to try to get Australia as best we could through this pandemic. But local government as the first order of government and sometimes the only level of government to which people actually ever relate – of course when their bins get collected whatever day of the week it is, it happens to be mine today, when they talk about local road funding, when they just need that ability to be able to go into their local shire council chambers or whatever the case might be to find out some information about their community. It’s local government that fits the bill. It’s local government that stumps up. It’s local government that has that friendly face behind the counter that you know is caring and you know is going to service your community.

So, I say to you all: thank you very much for what you do. It takes a big effort to put your hand up for public life, and whether that’s as a councillor in a community, whether that’s as somebody who works for the council, because you are the public face many times of your community. And I know how difficult it is sometimes to be able to answer some of the criticism from those people who perhaps would never put their hand up for public office but rely on you to lead their communities.

So, I say to each and every one of you in this room, to each and every one of you who are watching this via Zoom: thank you very much for doing what you do. There are 537 councils throughout Australia, and we acknowledge each and every one of them. I would like to see, as I’m sure Linda would, council, local government, with in the constitution, and we’re working steadily towards that. And I know it is something that is important to you and I know as a regional member, as the National Party leader, as the Deputy Prime Minister, not quite Acting Prime Minister yet – if I was, I’d have AFP officers all around me. That comes in place a little later tonight when the Prime Minister is wheels up and on his way to Japan. But for the moment I’m just the good old Deputy Prime Minister. Happy with that role and happy to take on the role of Acting Prime Minister in the best country, of course, in which to live. And certainly, it is the best country in which to live because of people like you.

And I want you just to do one thing when you leave Wagga Wagga and go back to your communities – that is, to thank your staff. Because local government staff have done a magnificent job this year. They’ve been under a lot of pressure. Some of them have been working from home. Many of them have been at the frontline of your communities, and I know the efforts that they’ve gone to to keep the doors open, to keep the lights on and to keep the community informed. And it’s fallen upon them a lot of responsibility to do just that.

So, thank you for coming to Wagga Wagga. It is my hometown. I was born here. I love the place. It is like all your communities – it’s home, it’s a fantastic place in which to live, but because of the efforts and the role and the dedication that each and every one of you, each and every one of your places is wonderful in which to live, and that is because local government stumps up every day and every night of the week.

Thank you very much.