• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

CORRECTED VERSION RURAL AND REGIONAL COMMITTEE Inquiry into extent and nature of disadvantage and inequity in rural and regional Victoria 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, Mildura 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 Sunraysia Mallee 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.

Load more

  15

Copy Link