CONSTITUENCY STATEMENTS
Ms LE (Fowler) (09:30): On 4 September, the chair of the New South Wales Local Government Grants Commission wrote to Fairfield City Council with a number. Under the commission's proposed new methodology, Fairfield's financial assistance grant falls from $10.16 million to $6.73 million, which is a cut of $3.43 million. A third of the grant will be gone; the local roads component will be halved.
Fairfield is the most disadvantaged local government area in New South Wales. Not one of the most—the most. On SEIFA, the index which measures relative socioeconomic disadvantage, Fairfield ranks first in the state and 35th out of every council in Australia.
My electorate of Fowler has the lowest median personal income of all the 150 electorates in this country, at $520 a week. The grants commission has looked at the poorest community in the state and decided it needs 34 per cent less. How does that happen?
It comes down to what the model measures and what it ignores. It prices in remoteness. It prices in population.
It strips out the disability allowance that used to recognise structural disadvantage. There is nothing left in it that recognises a community built by refugees and migrants, where English is a second language in most homes and where we have carried one of the highest rates of humanitarian settlement in this country. Disadvantage in my community is not measured in kilometres from a capital city.
We are 32 kilometres from the Sydney GPO. By this model, that makes us comfortable. We are not.
Then there are the roads. The new model counts road length and construction costs. It expressly excludes road condition and road usage.
Fairfield has 212,000 people living within 101 square kilometres. Our roads are short, but they are hammered, including by heavy vehicles travelling through. Yet we lose half the roads grant.
The commission has built a safeguard so the 14 most remote councils cannot go backwards, and I appreciate that. There is no safeguard for the most disadvantaged council in the state. That is the inequity.
And $3.4 million is untied federal government assistance—the only funding council can point to as to what our community actually needs: libraries that stay open, footpaths that are safe for our elderly and programs for our young people. This also sits on top of a pattern. Under the Major and Local Community Infrastructure Program, 227 projects were invited to apply, with more than half a billion dollars committed.
Fowler was not invited to apply for a single one. We received nothing, not one dollar. You can't apply for a grant you are never told exists.
That's not a competitive process; it's a privileged guest list. And, when the list is drawn up behind closed doors and the money is doled out without transparency, genuine need and equity are abandoned. The people of Fowler work hard.
They run small businesses. They pay their taxes. They deserve to be counted.
They deserve better.