Page 2568 - Week 09 - Thursday, 8 August 1991
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the Special Premiers Conference is looking at things like elimination of the duplication of delivery of services. Where the Commonwealth and the States, or even local government, in some cases, are all and severally involved in the delivery of services, how can we eliminate that duplication, eliminate the excessive use of resources and put the resources to much more efficient use?
This is a very serious matter and some specific issues have been identified, such as the home and community care program, TAFE and training programs, disability services and the like. They are specific examples of where two or more levels of government are involved in these processes and that has to be lacking in efficiency and, in the end, not as economic as it might be.
Then, again using the jargon of the trade, there are areas of micro-economic reform. Look at the way activities in Australia are regulated - food standards, for example. Why do we have different standards for food quality from State to State? If it is good enough for somebody in Perth to eat food to a standard, why is it not equally as good for somebody in Sydney or Brisbane or Melbourne to eat food to the same standard? There is an inconsistency and it is largely irrelevant. There is a cost involved in administering six, seven or eight different standards in terms of what is delivered to the consumer.
In the case of regulation of heavy vehicle transportation throughout Australia, again we have different regulations for each State. For example, people often register their vehicles in a State in which they are not resident because the costs there are less than they are elsewhere in Australia; yet the damage that they do to our roads and the costs that they impose on society at large do not change simply because they register their vehicle in other places. So, there is a need for a national look at this road transportation problem, and there are many, many aspects to it.
For nearly 100 years now, under federation, we have had a series of different rail systems, all of them totally inefficient, all of them totally degraded over the years as insufficient money was spent on their maintenance. There is an enormous capital investment in them, yet they are simply not competitive and they simply cannot deliver the service that they were designed and built originally to deliver, except at great cost to the taxpayer. So, it has been agreed that there will be established a national rail corporation that will turn the railway systems in Australia into a single system, and it will be run on a commercial basis. That is an eminently sensible objective and one which I note that the Territory, through its Chief Minister, has contributed to, although the Territory is not a signatory to that agreement as we do not have any rail system; but what is good for the nation in such a matter as this has, in the end, to be good for the Territory as well.
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