CORRECTED VERSION

RURAL AND REGIONAL COMMITTEE

Inquiry into extent and nature of disadvantage and inequity in rural and regional

Mildura — 2 March 2010

Members

Ms K. Darveniza Mr R. Northe Mr D. Drum Ms G. Tierney Ms W. Lovell Mr J. Vogels Mr D. Nardella

Chair: Mr D. Drum Deputy Chair: Ms G. Tierney

Staff

Executive Officer: Ms L. Topic Research Officer: Mr P. O’Brien

Witnesses

Mr M. Hawson, general manager, community and culture, Ms D. Gardner, manager, community development, and Ms L. Barham-Lomax, manager, community care, Rural City Council. The CHAIR — The Rural and Regional Committee welcomes you to give evidence at our inquiry into the extent and nature of disadvantage and inequity in rural and regional Victoria. All evidence given today is being captured by Hansard and is afforded parliamentary privilege. Before we get started, please give us your names and business addresses and the name of the organisation you are representing, and then we are happy to hear a presentation from you.

Mr HAWSON — I am Martin Hawson. I am general manager of community and culture at Mildura Rural City Council and my address is actually this building, which is on the corner of Ninth Street and Deakin Avenue, Mildura.

Ms BARHAM-LOMAX — I am Lisa Barham-Lomax. I am the manager of community care services here at Mildura Rural City Council and my address is the same.

Ms GARDNER — I am Donna Gardner, the manager of community development at Mildura Rural City Council and my address is the same as Lisa and Martin’s.

Mr HAWSON — Thank you, Chair, for the opportunity to present to the group today. I will just give you a bit of an overview — I am sure you may well have heard some of this stuff before — of our picture of what disadvantage exists within Mildura Rural City Council, then we will talk a little bit about some of the interventions and what we have been working on. We will try and keep that as reasonably brief as we can and then open it up for questions for you guys to probe into those strategies a bit more.

We are one of the top five localities of disadvantage in Victoria. We are well in the categories or ‘tick all the boxes’, if you like, with regard to the typical indicators of disadvantage such as income, level of education, number of single-parent families and so on. We tick a lot of the boxes of disadvantage.

We are the third-largest indigenous community in Victoria. I guess one of the important things to point out there is that we have a lot of transitory indigenous people who are within the community but do not show up so much on the census data. Obviously we can only act on what the census is telling us. We do have a lot of transitory indigenous cultures come into the community.

On top of that, we actually have 52 different cultures. This is probably one of the things that is emerging in our demographics. We are getting a lot of different types of cultures coming to the community. That is driven I guess through a whole lot of different policies and practices that are happening. We are having a lot of landed refugees come into the community. We have Sudanese, Afghanis, all the high-pressure or acute people, who are trying to find — refugees come straight from Christmas Island to Mildura. We have a lot of those coming. More recently our settlement issues have increased. That is an important changing, I guess, landscape, particularly in the last couple of years. That is certainly increasing.

We have a significant number of young people not engaged in education, training or employment. We estimate that this is around 450, so we actually have another school that is not engaged in mainstream education. That is a quite significant issue. There is a project, the youth engagement project, that has proclaimed those figures. They are very difficult to quantify, but that is the estimated number. We will cover this a bit more later on, but it is certainly something that we are very concerned about.

Twenty per cent of four-year-old children do not attend kindergarten. That is DEECD data as of 2009. Again, that is a quite acute issue for our community and probably something that has not been on the radar as much as it has been. It is certainly increasing from what it was. We used to have a reasonably good kindergarten rate but I think there are changes afoot in our community make-up that are probably indicating that that is increasing significantly.

Probably one of the major acute issues we have at the moment is with the change and the increase by 15 hours through the commonwealth for four-year-old kinder. That is really going to put the pressure on our infrastructure to house the increase in hours, but particularly it may put in jeopardy three-year-old kinder because we will not have enough room to have three-year-old kinder unless we build additional rooms.

As in most local governments, the kindergartens are on local government property and we own the buildings. They are run through the kindergarten committees and so forth, but it is a quite significant issue. We are obviously putting in for funding, but it is matching funding, so local government is going to be hit pretty hard with trying to support the infrastructure. That is mandatory, the additional 15 hours of kinder from the commonwealth for four-year-olds.

That is great, but the unintended consequence at a local level is possibly the erosion of three-year-old kinder and kindergartens use three-year-old kinder to supplement or make a business case to run their four-year-old kinder. So it is a bit of side issue, but we are worried about that in terms of an acute impact on our participation rates in kinder. We have a significant ageing population, and obviously we are well aware that populations everywhere are ageing. That is an issue we are grappling with.

The geographic size of Mildura has an impact. We have 22 000 square kilometres; we are the largest LGA in Victoria. The issues that creates include having a lot of satellite towns. The furthest 1 away is Murrayville which is some 2 ⁄2 hours drive which creates service delivery issues and economies of scale. For example, we are trying to do recycling along the Mallee Track which is a very costly exercise. If you can imagine it, we have a central base 250 kilometres away. The whole rate base has to bear that issue.

When you have high levels of disadvantage obviously anything we try to do has a far more acute impact than if you had a population of 150 000 people and we wanted to do an extra program. That would not be so much of an issue. But we do not, and so everything we do becomes a bit more acute.

We started working on trying to get the pulse of the community, and this goes back some 10 years. But more recently the work we have been doing with the development of our social indicators is really trying to do exactly what you guys are trying to do: actually get these things on the radar so there are some measurements. Ross alluded to the measurement and management concept, and really we have to do that because when you come into Mildura it is green, it is vibrant and there is a fair bit happening.

It is a tourist town, and there are lots of people having a lot of fun and so forth. The natural perception is that it is all bells and whistles here. But really once you scratch the surface there are a lot of layers of disadvantage within the community, and that is primarily due to our make up, our isolation, our primary industry dependency, and we are subject to a whole lot of other external forces with regard to that.

There is a lot of other stuff going on that is probably not in the mind’s eye, and that is why the social indicator study was important. We did that work in 2006. It took us three years to develop it and to get it credible. Then we did another run with the census in 2008, and we will run it every census. Every census feeds the data. It is not only census data, but it relies heavily on census data, and we cannot run it without that information. We have copies of the data — it has probably already been alluded to — and we can give you a copy. It is an important piece of work, and it guides a lot of things the council does.

The social indicators report is broken down into postcodes, which is really important for local government. A lot of the studies and stuff you do, and DEECD does stuff, is regionally based. It is no good for local area planning, and if you are going down a place-based approach to what you need to do with your community planning the measure is too coarse. You need to break it down to a postcode level which enables you to target smaller catchments within a community. That is why it is very important. You have to take it with a grain of salt with really small communities because they can throw out your data, and you need to be mindful that you might be only talking about 30 people in a postcode. You need to cluster it and manage that, which you can do at a local level. It is not as if we are trying to run it at arms length. We can do it.

Broadly, it is utilised by a number of agencies, and probably the biggest impact is that other community non-government organisations can use it to assist in lobbying for funding and for identifying key issues and working on them. The data is broken down into areas such as safety, education, economic and community engagement. It is a longitudinal study, and the social indicators hold the tiers of government accountable to the community which we use a lot at a local level. There is stuff in there that is not pleasant. I guess some of the stuff I will go into in a second is quite alarming. But it is really important that it is on the radar and is in the mind’s eye of local government and we are doing things to address it.

I will just go through some of the lowlights of the document with regard to some of the figures. The rate per 1000 psychiatric admissions across the state, just to give you an indication — and this is broken down into the postcodes — regional Victoria has a figure of 6.4 per 1000 people. In the worst area in council, we have 17.5, so it is quite a significant difference.

Ms DARVENIZA — It is in the worst area of your council. What about across the council generally?

Mr HAWSON — Mildura, 13.2; , 9.8; Irymple, 5; Merbein, 9.1; Mildura central, which is sort of the outlying areas, 13.6. You really need to go into the document to get your head around the figures, but it is just a comparative thing.

The other thing that it is important to understand with the indicators, is that it is only an indicator. It is a flag on the play to say, ‘Hey, you need to have a bit of a look at this’. If you held that up as a statistical argument across the board for a particular sector, you would probably get shot down because it does not delve into the issues enough. All it is saying is it is longitudinal and it is saying, ‘At this point in time this is what it was, and at this point in time, this is what it was, and now in the future, this is what it was’, and it is only an indicator of what needs to happen. I will talk a bit more about how we delve into that down the track, but that is just one of them.

As to child maltreatment, the Mildura figure — and we cannot publish it because basically we cannot reveal our sources, and it is very uncomfortable data that we do not want published, so there is no graph — but it is just on three times the figure of 7.2 instances per 1000 people, so you can work that out for yourself.

A real issue within the community, and it is very difficult to delve into it, but it is obviously a child protection issue and in the DHS realm, but it is something that is on our radar that is of concern.

Probably not far behind that is the proportion of 17 to 24-year-olds neither completing VCE nor undertaking further schooling, education and training, and that is based on the census data. You really need to see the graph as far as this goes, and I have to supply these to you, but basically what it says is that we are about a third behind regional and more than a third in metro, so one-third again, two-thirds behind on average with regard to our completion rates of year 12 or apprenticeships or equivalent.

We have classified them into the categories of ‘not attending or did not complete year 12, ‘not attending, completed year 12 or equivalent, ‘attending school, university, TAFE or other’, so whether they have got a job, or whatever.

The CHAIR — Could I just stop you for a second? This is a public hearing and our transcripts will become public in a matter of weeks. If you do not want that child maltreatment figure published, we would be happy to not publish that. Ms DARVENIZA — We have the press here.

The CHAIR — We would be happy to not publish that. I am just bringing that forward. We would be happy to ask the press not to print it, and we would be happy to make sure that it is taken off the record. The committee is now aware of it. We can use that as our own knowledge, that there is a issue here, so no-one is going to pretend it does not happen, but we are just asking you, if we do not do anything about it, it will become public knowledge, but if you want to take steps to take it away, we are offering you that opportunity.

You can have a think about that and you can take it back to your people, and you can have a talk about it and we can do something about it in a number of days.

Mr HAWSON — What I would be comfortable with, Chair, is that whatever appears in the document is what is public knowledge, and that is okay. If any words are swapped around or whatever, I have said that is not the same as what is in there, I would ask the press — they can print what is in here, because that is a public document, so that is basically the rule of thumb that we are comfortable with. Anything beyond that, we do not promote it.

Ms BARHAM-LOMAX — If we release the data on a local area like for Red Cliffs or Merbein or that kind of information, it is difficult to de-identify, so if it is 10 children and it goes up 10 children in a locality, then logically in a small community you can work it out, but I think broad-brush data is okay.

Mr HAWSON — That is the basis of the postcode stuff. This is why we do not publish it.

The CHAIR — I do not think anything that you have said is outside of what is in the report, but again I just bring that to your attention. If you want to keep your comments to what you want — this is a very public process — if you can keep your comments to what you are comfortable with being listed on our website, just as you are going through that area where it is touch and go for you as to what you want on the record and what you do not, just be aware of our processes.

Mr HAWSON — The 17 to 24-year-old stuff was pretty much spoken about, and there is a graph representation that is there for the committee to dissect the actual figures, but we are talking about a third less, I guess, is the best way to — —

The CHAIR — Seventeen to 24-year-olds in relation to what?

Mr HAWSON — Neither completing VCE nor undertaking further schooling, education and training.

The CHAIR — Twenty-four per cent?

Mr HAWSON — No, 17 to 24-year-olds neither completing VCE or undertaking further education and training. When you compare us against the regional average, we are about a third less, and when you compare us against the Melbourne average, there is a third again. That varies across the postcodes and the committee can take these as the information and dissect that.

Ms DARVENIZA — When is this at?

Mr HAWSON — This was done in 2006 first and then it was done again in 2008, and it really just lines up probably a year out from when the census information is available, and then it is compiled from there. Some of the financial disadvantage — a higher proportion of families who are on low income, less than $600 a week, 69 per cent of our new arrivals are low income; average taxable income is around $35 000. There is a significant increase in one-parent families, which is all again documented in the report. I guess I will touch a little bit on how we are responding to these approaches. One of the things that we have set up is a community engagement framework, which is basically a group that comes together of key agencies that are working on these types of issues that is able to develop strategies and interventions based on these. As I said before, the indicators are really just a flag on the play; they are not a dissected issue.

What happens once we have put a flag on the play, the group says, ‘What are our top five priorities?’, and then we set up operational groups to delve into those, and they will set up a whole range of interventions regarding whatever they believe is appropriate, and some of the more recent examples of that kicked off our whole community planning approach to small town plans in isolated communities — well, not so isolated, but our smaller catchment communities to really try and delve into the issues that are affecting that particular place, and that is a model that we have talked about.

Some of the groups involved in that are from education, community safety, employment, economic development and environment, and they are the broad sector, so we have the hospital, the community health, the Mallee Family Care, NGOs. Probably most of the groups that are presenting here today are involved in that at a governance level to try and control and govern those investigations or taking those indicators a bit further to try and work out the interventions. That also is done in concert with government to some degree to try to get that communication happening about, ‘These are the priorities within our community, and this is what we need to address’.

There is a high level, I guess, in some of the areas. The Department of Justice is paying a lot of attention to this, and we have a number of funded projects that have happened through the Department of Justice. I guess the whole-of-government approach is really what we are talking about with trying to get those agencies and crossing over the boundaries to try to address some of these really acute issues.

There is the Sunraysia disengaged project, which is a project looking specifically at education. While that was started outside, it has tried to come in and say, ‘We want to be part of the community engagement framework, so we can use your resources and governance to assist with that’, and that is a good example; we do involve them.

More primary health club interventions — we work through the primary care partnerships. They lever off a lot of the stuff that we do as far as interventions with health promotion and physical activity and so forth are concerned. We have a safety group that levers off those things. They work on the CBD safety and infrastructure and the mall redevelopment. There is a whole raft of things they get their fingers stuck into to try to integrate what the issues are with actual concrete examples of where we need to do some work in those areas.

I have spoken about education. Economic development is another area that we touch on. We probably do not go into it as much, because, while they revolve around education, the top four indicators are not on the agenda. The top four operational groups are child wellbeing, safety, mental health and education. They are four that we are working on, and they will address a number of those indicators as they roll out their strategies.

Probably the major thing from a local government perspective that we are doing to try to address that is our community planning approach. We are working with DPCD to develop a model that we can work with and do some place-based planning. The issue we have got is we have to engage the community on these issues, but we need to do it in a way that is either non-threatening or does not label a particular community that has got all these issues, so it is quite a difficult process we need to go through.

That is why we are doing our planning approach the way we are doing it. We have a visioning session, we get people involved and we try to get a number of key projects up and running mainly to build capacity with the community so they can see they do have control over this decision making and they understand how they can influence different things in their community.

By far the most important thing is to develop leadership at that local level within those communities and build that capacity, because most of the time the issues that emerge are because there is a deficit of doing the things that are important that will make a difference. That is really at a local level where we need to focus on that. That is one of the major aims of the committee. It is a very difficult task, and we have probably not been as successful as we would have liked to be with regard to that, but that is one of the things that we really are trying to focus on with our capacity building.

I have some stats. We have 12 plans out in the various communities. We are not that prescriptive about how we break the communities up, because they naturally form their own sort of clusters. Some of them are joint between smaller communities and so on.

They really focus on social inclusion — given the information about the 52 cultures and the different things that are emerging there, that is going to be really important; engagement of the community, so people are listening to each other; capacity building, tyring to build social capital that Vernon alluded to; increased participation in everyday life; and address a social justice and unequal access; and trying to make sure that the community feel that they have some ownership about the decisions.

Council endorses the plan, but they are not prescriptive about ‘This is how you are going to do it’, I guess.

The CHAIR — Martin, do you have a list of those 12 towns?

Mr HAWSON — I have not got them listed. We will have to test my memory. They are Merbein, , Murrayville, Ouyen, Nangiloc, , , Red Cliffs; we have just started in Irymple; East Mildura is a significantly disadvantaged area.

Ms GARDNER — There will be two or three plans that come out of the whole Mildura area because it is so large. But we have also got Cardross, Irymple and Nichols Point to be completed as well.

Mr HAWSON — As I said, the community owns the document, and they are versed in it. Probably just to sum up the key issues, there are high levels of disadvantage within the community, and it is often in pockets within the community when you really drill down into it. Our community, because of that, is susceptible to external pressures. Commodity prices, drought, unemployment levels, all of those sort of things are touted as the acute thing that is impacting on the community, but really that has a multiplying effect when you go down into the disadvantage. That is what makes these things so difficult.

Drought, you could argue, is with us forever and a day. It is just: have we got enough capacity as a community to move forward and deal with whatever we need to deal with? That is our focus with our community planning. We need to build the capacity, so we can deal with whatever is around the corner — it could be blue-green algae; it could be a water shortage. It should not be prescriptive, to say, ‘We need drought in intervention’. We need assistance with that from time to time, but more often than not we need a community that is more able to deal with it.

Capacity to respond is evolving, but it needs more effort to become resilient. We need to build that level of resilience within our community, and that is not a quick fix. It is about leadership, development, capacity, infrastructure. All those sorts of things need to be put into our local communities. We are saying we need to support and build capacity in the community, and there are no quick fixes about doing that. It is a long game, but we have well and truly started that and are on the way. I think it is important that the education component seems to be the common denominator in a lot of these issues when we get down to the nitty-gritty within the communities. It is the level of education and the participation and engagement. We are not saying that education means you have to go and get a university degree, but you need to actually ensure that people are engaged to the level so that they open up those opportunities if they become apparent.

Where we have high social disadvantage, there is a direct correlation with the level of participation in education. Whether that is three-year-old kindergarten, whether is pre-natal stuff, it is right through that early intervention and getting people on the right pathway is so critical.

The work we did with Tony Vinson really prescribes that. He can go into a grade 3 and work out how many prisons we are going to need — in a metro area obviously. His background is managing prisons as well. That is the sort of stuff that he is saying, that it is so critical to the wellbeing of the community.

I will leave it at that. Donna, our community development manager, has a lot of background in the work we are doing there. Lisa works in our community care in our service system area. We can talk about the mechanisms, and I am sure that will come out in your questions with regard to how government works and responds to the issues that we have outlined here. If I could preface that by saying we probably need a different model with regard to how government services are delivered.

There are a lot of services, but whether we are making the best use of those services in our interventions is questionable. A lot to do with that is how divorced a little bit from the decision making. A lot of government services, for example, do not really relate to community plan. They would not know what the priorities are in Merbein; what does that community believe is important?

Until that permeates up, you are not going to get the level, the big cogs turning, to make a change at that local level, because they will have regional plan, they will have a state government priorities, and that is basically what they will rely on.

Until we can bridge the gap between that mechanism and what is happening at a local level it is really hard. We are always pushing up. We will do funding submissions and whatever; we will build a new pool out at Merbein. A lot of work goes into doing that but it is always pushing up. It would be very easy to look at the community plan and say, ‘I know what the key priorities are in Merbein, I know what its needs are, and I know what this needs’. You do your due diligence and make sure it is right but it does not need the whole big movement to make it work. That tyranny of distance is understandable but it has a negative impact when we really need to get things going.

The CHAIR — Do Donna or Lisa want to add to that or are you just happy to take questions from the panel?

Ms BARHAM-LOMAX — I have just one comment. When Martin mentioned the size of the indigenous community he said it is the third-largest indigenous community in . That should be Victoria.

Mr HAWSON — Did I say Australia?

The CHAIR — Yes, it was in response to my first question.

Mr VOGELS — I noticed that this report, and Kaye mentioned it before, says unemployment is 3.9 per cent and on the next page it says unemployment is 8 per cent.

Mr HAWSON — What are you looking at. Mr VOGELS — I am looking at our reference notes. One says 3.9 per cent and then it says that ABS statistics for 2006 show that the unemployment rate in Mildura is 8 per cent. You guys would have a much better idea. Is it approximately 8 per cent?

Mr HAWSON — I think that question has been raised before. I would be reluctant to comment but I think it is a statistical difference for when you break the different communities down but I would have to go and have a look at it.

Mr VOGELS — What leads me to ask the next question is that you also said that there are a lot of refugees coming to Mildura. Who makes that decision? Is it the council saying, ‘We can handle refugees’ or is it government policy? If you look at it, you have 8 per cent unemployment; you are the fifth most disadvantaged local government area in the state — I presume that is what you are saying. Why would you bring more people who have their own problems into this environment?

Mr HAWSON — I would be reluctant to comment directly on the machinations of how it comes about but DIMIA has a lot to do with where refugees are placed and settled and really it is determined at that level that they come here. We are not recognised as a settlement area but we are attracting a lot of refugees. I guess in some ways we do not get the allowances that might be available to a designated settlement area, however we are absorbing a fair bit of that.

Mr VOGELS — That was going to be my next question. Does a funding stream come with that to help with resettlement, education and all of the other things that go with it? Is one of the reasons that there is housing available here that might not be available in other parts of the state?

Mr HAWSON — Housing availability goes up and down. As of today, as I understand it, it is not too bad but I guess it is seeing that people want to come here. We cannot stop people coming here or not coming here. I cannot really comment on whether it is a designated program that comes into the community but people want to come here because, I guess, it synergises with where they have come from.

Mr VOGELS — For my benefit, kindergartens, it is the first time I have heard this mentioned — could you run through that?

The CHAIR — The 15-hours?

Mr VOGELS — The 15-hours deal.

Mr HAWSON — Typically, kindergartens in our area have two rooms. That is a sort of a generalisation but more often than not there are two main rooms. If they increase the hours of the four-year-old kinder, they are going to spill over into the other area because they are going to be there for longer, and that is where they would be having three-year-old kinder, if you like.

We need to build capacity so they can cater for the additional 15 hours. That is the dilemma. As you know, kindergartens are run by committees of management. There are a couple that are in a cluster arrangement where they are managed by an organisation but more often than not they are stand-alone kindergartens with parents on committees and they are grappling with the issue of how we are going to have change to accommodate that.

Because we own all the kinders it is basically bricks and mortar we are looking at or they change their approach to the model for three-year-old kindergartens. It depends on the particular kinder but more often than not that is going to be a dilemma for them.

Ms BARHAM-LOMAX — Can I just add to that? We know for three-year old kindergarten that the issue around losing three-year old places is that some of the children in child protection and indigenous children are offered free kindergarten at the three-year-old level. When we lose some of those places we might potentially lose the engagement in the early education system for those children. That is why three-year olds are a big concern for us. Three-year old kinder is not funded by the government; it is user pays except for those two particular groups. Four-year old kinder is subsidised by the government, and the commonwealth is stipulating the change to 15 hours for programs which have run anywhere between 6 and 10 hours, so it is taking up that extra space. The concern for us is the loss of the three-year old kinder places.

The CHAIR — Can you just expand on the funding arrangements? If I took the kids along to four-year old kinder, I would obviously contribute as a parent as well, would I?

Ms BARHAM-LOMAX — Yes, you pay a fee as a parent and then there is some funding that comes in from the state government which supports — —

The CHAIR — From the state as well for four-year old kinder?

Ms BARHAM-LOMAX — Yes.

The CHAIR — And the feds?

Ms BARHAM-LOMAX — I do not actually know that. I think it is a joint funding program. The commonwealth may put some funding in and so does the state, but the state administers it. That is my understanding.

The CHAIR — Sure. And local government chips in as well?

Ms BARHAM-LOMAX — Local government in Mildura does not operate or fund kindergartens. It is always a state responsibility, with possibly a contribution from commonwealth government funding. Local governments may cross-subsidise where they run a kinder. We have literally got a landlord relationship with the kindergartens in the municipality. We own the bricks and mortar but they are run by kindergarten committees of management and are funded and operated by the state government and those committees of management.

Our work with kindergartens here is primarily more or less as a local area planner, providing the bricks and mortar and support through advocacy. That is our role, which has made it somewhat difficult to work with kindergartens in a way. We spend a lot of time going out and working with kindergarten committees of management to raise those issues as they have raised them with us as a local area planner around their concerns about what happens when these new regulations are brought in.

The CHAIR — As the additional percentage of teaching kids at four-year old kinder increases by — let us pluck a figure — 20 per cent, if there is a 20 per cent additional workload on the system, would the funding cover that increase? Is that increase going to be wholly funded by the state and federal package or 50-50?

Ms BARHAM-LOMAX — No, we have had no response from the government in terms of how the funding is going to change in response to the new regulatory requirements. We are waiting with bated breath to hear that.

The CHAIR — But there has not been any capital funding for additional — —

Ms BARHAM-LOMAX — Yes, there is capital funding around. It is a highly competitive process. There is a capital funding round which closes in March. There are 25 grants of $200 000 available but there are 79 municipalities in Victoria. We are working in partnership with kindergartens to put in two capital grant applications to support two kindergartens. It is a highly competitive round for 25 grants. Ms TIERNEY — I have a couple of things. I am really interested in that cohort of 17 to 24-year-olds, but I will get back to that. I just wanted to check with you about the partnership arrangements that your council may have with the state government. As I understood it, the state government provided $300 000 to the council for its community planning project. It also provided over $68 000 for a community planning project piloting community engagement for one of your towns as well.

Mr HAWSON — Yes, Merbein.

Ms TIERNEY — And then of course there was the Roxy Theatre redevelopment, and we all know about that. In addition to that I am wanting to get a sense of whether you have Transport Connections projects in the shire.

Mr HAWSON — Yes.

Ms TIERNEY — That is state government-funded through DOT and the Department of Planning and Community Development?

Mr HAWSON — Yes.

Ms TIERNEY — What about the Small Town Development Fund?

Mr HAWSON — We access that from time to time.

Ms TIERNEY — Because that is a very popular one in my electorate, that is often the case. Do you have the no-interest loan scheme operating in your area? If not, can I really suggest it?

Mr HAWSON — Not specifically through us.

Ms TIERNEY — A lot of neighbourhood houses administer that; it is just fantastic in terms of people who are disadvantaged in particular. A lot of country towns in my electorate have got it through their neighbourhood house or community house. There is also a range of volunteer support grants that your communities might be interested in.

There are also a number of business support grants — I know I have done three or four in the last week around the Colac area — which are about getting local businesses hooked up with people working at home on computers and whatever, and also highlighting and promoting their businesses and making sure people actually stop their cars, get out of their cars and walk into the premises and hopefully buy. There are a lot of things that are happening.

It means there is partnership; it means the local community, the local government and the state government working together and getting that done. It is good to see that there is quite a bit that is getting done here, even though people say that distance prevents it.

Leaving that to one side, in terms of your 17-year-olds to 24-year-olds, if you are talking about 450 younger people out there — —

Mr HAWSON — That is outside that cohort.

Ms TIERNEY — Outside of that cohort. You said that that is equivalent to another school?

Mr HAWSON — Yes.

Ms TIERNEY — What are they doing? Do we know that? What tracking have we done?

Mr HAWSON — Very difficult to say. Ms TIERNEY — What are the usual points of contact for young people? Apart from sport, which is very important, and apart from the pubs, what are the other natural points were young people come together in this town?

Mr HAWSON — Not a lot. I do not know if I could open it up for Donna, but that is one of the real driving issues. We have just completed what is called the youth agenda, which is basically a youth plan, if you like, that tries to bring all those issues together. We always get the, ‘There is nothing to do’. One of the things that is coming out of the community planning is that with virtually every community plan we do we end up building a skate park.

Ms TIERNEY — They are very popular.

Mr HAWSON — That seems to be quite high on the list. We have built one in Ouyen, we have built one in Merbein, and we have a local one down here — and they are utilised. One of the real things that is emerging in the rec or sporting area is the concept of disorganised sport — or non-organised sport is probably a better way of putting it — where people recreate but they do not necessarily want to be part of a club, a footy club or a whatever; they just want to be able to meet every Tuesday and go and shoot hoops, or street soccer is something we are really focusing on, particularly in those high disadvantaged areas, where we can build a half court and try to get those types of activities happening, where it is not an organised thing, I guess. That seems to be attractive to a lot of kids.

That is the real issue we have. The reason we have that figure is the research that people have done. They have had contact with a kid or they have touched base with a school and then they have lost contact. Now what happens, who knows? That is a difficult thing to capture and I guess that is why it flies under the radar a little bit, too.

Ms TIERNEY — There are a couple of examples, but there is one particular example that comes to mind that John would know about, too. It is in Warrnambool, where we have an organisation called the Brophy Family and Youth Services — you would know about it — where they have carved out different spaces for youth, or youth have actually carved out the space, and so they have ownership of a lot of projects.

What we have seen there is leadership within the youth groupings, and they themselves have worked out mentoring systems amongst themselves. It is not just a place to go if you are so-called disadvantaged; it is actually a vibrant cross-class space for a range of people. If you have not been there — I am sure that people in community development know about it — it is a good place to look at, particularly for a city this size.

Mr HAWSON — One of the things that has happened in recent times — I do not know how recent it is; it is recent knowledge to us — is the shift with education in regard to making schools the centre as opposed to supporting alternative education settings; saying to schools, ‘You are now responsible for the broader community’. Whether it is socially disadvantaged or not, the school needs to be the centre because it has the resources, but at the same time we need to look at changing the suite of options that a school can offer because that mainstream school is not necessarily going to provide a solution to these disengaged kids.

We are involved with the Youth Connections program which will broker that, but that is a pretty lightly funded project; it is only in its infancy and it is only just occurring. That will make a big difference when it really gets up and running. It will involve TAFE and other options so that kids can find their niche in life rather than having the 9–3.30 curriculum that is obviously not working for them because they do not want to be there or they do not have the family support or whatever. That is really the focus of the community engagement framework and the projects that are working through the department of education.

We have a real focus on that now that was not there before. The main difference is that we have officers working from the department of education in the town whereas we drifted away from that a little bit in days gone by with the way the evolution of education went. We need to work closely with those groups and connect them with what we do in community engagement, our service position, our youth services and so on. We need to bridge the gap between that and the actual education sector, which has been probably the biggest silo we have had. That is probably why we have the situation we have.

Mr NARDELLA — What is the municipality’s budget, do you have a dedicated grants officer and have you got a forward strategy for sport and rec and other grant applications for the federal and state governments on that?

Mr HAWSON — Off the top of my head it is around $78 million operational and we have a capital works program of about $30 million. Do we have designated grants officer? We appointed one two years ago and they have pulled in around $5 million in those two years. What was the third question?

Mr NARDELLA — A sport and rec forward plan and grant application.

Mr HAWSON — Yes, we have got a recreation strategy and we are also integrating that with our community-based plans so we have a municipality-wide rec strategy and we are integrating that. It is partly funded through DPCD as well as council’s contribution.

Mr NARDELLA — Thank you very much.

Ms DARVENIZA — Would you be able to provide to the committee the breakdown of your budget: what your budget is, how much of it comes from your rate base, how much from the feds and how much from the state and what sort of programs the state and federal government money contributes towards and how that compares now to, say, in 1998? I am not asking you to do that now but if you could provide that to the committee, it would be appreciated.

Mr HAWSON — I can; it would be through our finance area. I do not know what their time lines would be on that because it is a quite significant piece of work.

Mr VOGELS — It is a huge bit of work. Why do we not just ask for copies of the last nine annual reports — they would have it all in there.

Mr HAWSON — Probably one of the more valuable documents is our strategic resource plan which is a 10-year financial statement that gives, I guess, a helicopter view of the grants received, both commonwealth and state, what our operating revenue is, what is going to capital works and so forth. That would probably be best.

Ms DARVENIZA — I am happy for you to provide that as well but I would like to know what your budget breakdown is from rates, federal and state government grants and how that compares to 1998. I have asked it of a number of other councils that have made submissions to the committee and none of the others seem to have had any problem being able to provide it.

Mr HAWSON — No, I do not see it as too much of a problem.

Ms DARVENIZA — Okay, good.

Mr HAWSON — But the time frame will be up to the finance area.

Ms DARVENIZA — If you have a problem with the time frame, perhaps you would get in touch with us. We would appreciate that.

I have a couple of other quick questions about the 17 to 24-year-olds who are not involved or engaged in education. I am glad to hear about the work you are doing because I know both state and federal governments are working very closely with local government and communities to make sure those people — that cohort of students — are engaged whether they have not finished year 12 or they have not gone on to further education. It is a group that is being targeted, and extra funding has gone into TAFE colleges to assist with keeping them in education, and I am glad to hear it.

Mr HAWSON — Can I just clarify that, and it may be misinterpreted a bit. The indicator is measured from the 17 to 24-year-olds; that is actually what the indicator tells us. The figure of 450 is school-age children. I guess that is the whole gamut. You could say that is under 17 years depending — —

The CHAIR — Exactly.

Mr HAWSON — It is important to differentiate. The indicator is just telling us because we have just picked a cohort to tell us what the story is.

The CHAIR — There are 420 kids who are not doing anything.

Mr HAWSON — That is what we believe, yes.

The CHAIR — They are not employed and they are not in education. They are just sitting out there playing Nintendo.

Mr HAWSON — We do not know.

The CHAIR — You do not know. Exactly.

Ms DARVENIZA — The point I am making is that I am pleased to hear you talk about those things you have in place for that 17 to 24-year-old age group that works with TAFE and with higher education.

As a council you have been very successful in attracting grants and money from the state government. In fact between January 2009 and February 2010, just from rural and regional development alone, you have attracted $3.3 million. If you include that in what has been made available since 1999, I think it is something in excess of $18 million; that has been money through rural and regional development programs. Clearly you are doing something right. That is a very considerable amount of money to attract into the region just for those areas.

You have been successful in getting in excess of $55.5 million for government schools in the Mildura and Mildura electorate since 1999. Clearly you are doing something right as a council in being able to work in partnership with governments of a state and federal persuasion to address some of the needs of your community. What I would like to ask is: how well does that work in being able to identify your priorities and then being able to work with governments to attract funding to address those priorities for disadvantage? How successful have you been? They must be right up there in your planning. I know they are; I have been to planning sessions on numerous occasions where you have made submissions. How has that worked? How has government assisted you in addressing the priorities you have recognised for disadvantage?

Mr HAWSON — I think we have probably come a long way with regard to how we do our planning and really diagnosing what the real priorities are. I think there is planning and there is planning in terms of how sophisticated you want to be in really delving down into the issues. I think the support we got with the community development planning was a huge step. That was just on 18 months ago by the time we go it up and running. That has enabled us to put staff in communities to really delve down to see what are the issues.

It is easy to pick up the big-ticket items and say, ‘We will build a such and such’ and ‘We will build big infrastructure’. But then to translate that into, ‘Is that driving what it needs to drive to address the disadvantage?’; that is really where we need to do the work. I guess the support in being able to diagnose those needs better is probably going to stand us in really good stead maybe in a couple of years to really know that these are high priorities and government and council has a lot of confidence to say, ‘Yes, it is the right thing to do to build a pool in Merbein’, or ‘It is the right thing to do to support the arts centre’.

Ms DARVENIZA — I hope it is the right thing to do to support the arts centre; we have all put a lot of money in that one.

Mr HAWSON — We know it is because we acknowledge the importance of the arts in developing our issues. We have just got a partnership with VicHealth to do some work through a specific project to address mental health and the arts and connect them up. It is the LEAP project — localities enhancing arts participation — and that is a really important project that is happening.

From my viewpoint we are in a better position because we are doing better planning so the state government and commonwealth governments have more confidence in saying, ‘They are doing the hard yards and finding out the real story and they have the data to back it up’. Whatever government is in power would see that as a good thing because you are getting the real story and not a glossed over, ‘It is a good thing to put some money into that particular local government’ approach. As to how well we are doing that, I think we are going the wrong way. I think the regional plan stuff will be okay but it is shifting towards a local focus which will be the key. The Loddon-Mallee regional plan has a northern and southern — —

The CHAIR — Component.

Mr HAWSON — Yes, and it is bringing that. We need to reinforce that decision making to northern and southern areas. We do not have a lot to do with Bendigo. We cherish their friendship but they are in a totally different catchment, they have a train, they have a lot of access we do not have to services, they have a lot of synergies with metro areas that we do not have. Once we acknowledge that, we will be able to streamline the funding mechanisms we have at the moment.

Gayle mentioned putting in for funding. We need capacity so that our local communities can go through that process, or perhaps we need to streamline the process so that we can access it more readily and get to the pressure points, but that is all dependent on how good our planning is in the first place and what confidence you have in that information so that you can say that the no. 1 priority in that community is to address that school, that kindergarten, that sporting facility or whatever. Once we have that confidence the rest will flow. Investing in that priority setting would mean you are on a winner if that is the answer. Working together we are doing it.

The CHAIR — Thanks, Martin. We have to wind up; we have gone way over time. We really appreciate your evidence; it is outstanding and we appreciate the detail you were able to go into. We will make a copy of the transcript available for you to peruse in a few weeks and you will be able to make sure there are no typographical errors. Thank you again for your time and good luck with your work.

Witnesses withdrew.