MATTERS OF PUBLIC IMPORTANCE
Dr HAINES (Indi) (15:29): I thank the member for Perth for giving us some prescribed bedtime reading and pointing out that the honourable member who proposed this MPI spoke for only a short period—and that's because that is the way we do it over on the crossbench; we share our opportunities to speak. So I thank her for that opportunity. Nationwide we rely on essential services such as health, utilities, banking and post in our day-to-day lives.
They're not luxuries, but they allow us to live safely and they allow us to live with dignity. Unfortunately, the government doesn't always see these services as essential in the same way that I do and that rural and regional Australians do. Delivering essential services in regional Australia is more complex—it is—and more expensive than it is in major cities, and it requires different solutions.
Populations are more dispersed. Services obviously must cover larger distances, often on poorly funded roads with poor telecommunications and no public transport. Too often, when funding and service delivery decisions are based on population or based on profits—because they have been put into the private sector—regional Australians miss out, time and time again.
That burden falls hardest on older residents, on young families, on people with low incomes, on small businesses, on anyone for whom distance is truly a daily barrier. Over recent decades Australia has embraced privatisation, and successive governments sold public utilities and corporatised key government services. It was wonderful to hear about the electricity services in WA—a great example; if only it wasn't exclusive to WA.
Successive governments sold government enterprises to private markets, and they sold these decisions to us with claims of betterment: 'We're all going to be better off.' They claimed that competition would drive efficiency, improve quality and reduce costs. Well, many of us have been sold a pup on that one. These market based models work best—if they work at all—where there's the population density to support competition, and in regional Australia these conditions rarely exist.
For years, regional communities have watched services retreat. The NDIS, aged care and child care are dominated by private providers, but waitlists are long, if you can find a provider at all. It's the classic thin market problem.
Post offices have closed, bank branches have completely disappeared in many communities, and it's hard to wind back the clock. But government has a responsibility to step in where markets fail, because some services, whether publicly or privately owned and operated, are simply too important to be treated as optional, as a 'nice to have'. Services like banking and post are essential to the functioning of regional communities.
They just are—whether it's a small business sending and receiving goods, a country footy club handling match-day takings or an older person who is not confident doing banking online. This is a matter of necessity. It's a matter of human rights and equity, not a matter of convenience.
Hundreds of towns that once had a bank now have none, and one third of regional bank branches closed in recent years. In my electorate, in places like Eildon and Taggerty, business owners are making 90-minute trips for routine banking. That means time away from their customers and time away from their employees.
It's an absolute drain on their productivity. It's an additional cost at a time when rising costs are of paramount concern to all Australians. That's why I'm so disappointed by the government's response to the 2024 inquiry into regional banking closures.
It's one of the many things that reinforces the failures and the perceptions—the reality actually, because it's not a perception; it's a reality—that regional Australians are being left behind. After allowing the report to sit on the shelf for two years, the government failed to accept a key recommendation to recognise financial services as—guess what?—an essential service.
This sends the wrong message that access to banking is optional, when it should be guaranteed. A better response would be seriously considering the inquiry's recommendation for a regional community banking branch program. A community banking model has already proven its value in communities like Beechworth, Bright, Mount Beauty and Mansfield in my electorate, which have branches in which local people have ownership stakes, and profits are reinvested back into the community.
These models are not private, not public; they demonstrate that commercial activity and community benefit go hand in hand. These are essential services: post offices, banks, health.