Legislative Council
The Hon. R.I. LUCAS (Treasurer): I move:
That the summary of the South Australian Jobs Workshops, laid on the table on 9 February 1999, be noted.The Hon. M.J. ELLIOTT: I will put a position on behalf of the Democrats. Unfortunately, we were not notified of this debate until last Thursday, so it did not give me a great deal of time to give the level of considered thought that I would have liked in relation to this debate. There are no miracle cures for the job situation in South Australia and in Australia as a whole, and no-one should pretend otherwise. We can do a whole lot of things and, collectively, each can make a contribution. I am sure that many valuable ideas are included within the booklet we are noting, which was tabled in Parliament yesterday. A few ideas also cause me great concern, so the sorting of the wheat from the chaff is still to be done. There is no doubt that the booklet contains many ideas. I am sure anything I say today will not be original and will probably overlap and be found somewhere in the booklet as well.
Before we start talking about specific moves for creating jobs, we should ask some other more fundamental questions about what it is that we are trying to achieve. People say, `We want to create jobs.' It is my understanding that South Australians per capita are working more hours per head than they have for the best part of three decades and that the average amount of work done by South Australian adults of working age is higher than it has ever been. So, there is no shortage of work; in fact there has been a growth in work. What there has been a loss of is jobs. What is happening is that those in work are working far longer hours than they ever worked before, whilst many others are not working at all or find themselves in the worst of all work situations, the casual, part-time job and all that that entails. In South Australia we have many families in which two people are employed full-time. When I say `full-time', we are probably talking couples who are both working 60 or 70 hours plus. Then there are other families in which no-one is working. That is not a criticism of two-job families, but it does note that there is, if you like, the work and the way in which it has been carved up to create jobs, and the way in which it is then being distributed is creating an imbalance. Members usually will also find that, for the most part, the people who are working long hours are often in professional jobs and earning huge incomes as well. The other families that are getting little work are usually on low wages and employed casually and have all the problems that casualisation infers. Our challenge is to try to redistribute the amount of work already present in our economy. One suggestion which I noted in the jobs book and which is made by about 30 people—and something which the Democrats have advocated for a very long time—is that we need to look at a lot more permanent part-time work and particularly in relation to job sharing. Many people currently working full-time would happily work part-time, but permanent part-time work is not that easy to come by. Increasingly, the part-time work that is around is casual and, other than perhaps university and school students, not a whole lot of other people are looking for the types of conditions that go with casual work. They are great fodder for the chain stores and the restaurants but not much for elsewhere. The Education Department is one of the few employers in South Australia that has encouraged and allowed permanent part-time work to occur, and it often happens through job sharing arrangements. Members will often find two teachers sharing a single class in primary schools. On several occasions my children have been taught under that arrangement, and from what I have seen it has worked very well for the teachers and certainly it has not been a problem for my children. In secondary schools it is even easier for a teacher to work .6, .8, or .4.526 The Government should consider whether there is some way of encouraging other work places to examine permanent part-time work and at least making it available to those people who want it. As I said, there are many who want to do it for a whole range of reasons. We may find a person approaching retirement who does not want to retire, but the choice at the moment is full-time work or no work. I think many people approaching retirement would happily go to .5 or .6 because they still value work and the money it generates. They are usually financially secure or reasonably secure and already own their home and would quite happily wind back their work commitments.
I think parents would happily work .8 because they want to be home when their children get home from school; and again, given the option, people would say a 20 per cent cut in their pay or in both their pays would be worth it. They would say, `We are both working and we can afford it', but at the moment those sorts of options more often than not are not there. I encourage the Government to look carefully at that option and to look at the redistribution of work so that there are indeed more jobs. However, I must say that I would not want it to go to the extreme that we find in the United States. I refer to an Adelaide Review article (January 1999) which may be one of the last articles that Don Dunstan wrote. Headed `Impoverishing the work force' he talks about the American miracle, and I note that the American miracle was commented on earlier by the Treasurer. The article states: The Americans claim an unemployment rate of 5 per cent. Those are the official figures, but the nature of the `employment' is worth examining. Consider the following: when President Clinton boasted at a rally that he had created 11 million jobs a worker interjected, `Yeah, and I've got three of them.' When he added that most of the jobs were relatively well paid, the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank, showed that 30 per cent of America's full-time workers earned poverty level wages. The article also states: When the American minimum wage was increased to $US5.15 per hour it meant that minimum wage workers were still $US2 000 worse off than 30 years ago. When people start talking about the American miracle, they are talking about a work force where 30 per cent of full-time workers are at poverty level, where there is a casualisation rate well beyond Australia's, and where the minimum wage of $5.15 an hour is $2 000 a year worse than it was 30 years ago. I recall another article which indicates that, when you do an analysis of what the Americans call `unemployment', it is different from what Australians call unemployment. America has a large gaol population of 1.5 per cent, and they are not included in the unemployment figures. America has an extraordinary number of people on parole—I think around 7 per cent or 8 per cent—and they are not counted. They are unemployed but they are not counted as unemployed. There is also a large number of people in America who have never registered as unemployed for a range of reasons—for example, the Mexican workers who pick a bit of fruit for part of the year and for the rest of the year they are not in work and therefore they do not exist and so they are not regarded as unemployed. People living in the ghettos are not employed and have other means of getting revenue, I guess. They are not working in an official sense, and that is what is driving the drug scene in America: the high levels of poverty. That is what is driving crime in America. Of course, those people will never be counted among the unemployed because they will end up in prison and on parole as well. They will never be unemployed in their whole lives. That is the American miracle. People who blithely talk about what is happening in America forget that it is a sick country and it is a country in which Australians, unless they happen to be in the wealthy section of America, would never want to live. I have visited America on a couple of occasions and have met some delightful and lovely people there and I have seen some great things, but it is not a place in which I would choose to live, nor would I want Australia to ever model its economy on the United States. I have discussed some things that we may do. Some things are beyond the State Government but, while we have a tax debate running, we could look at the way in which our tax structures work. I recall Mr Howard many years ago, I think, talking about the possibility of couples combining their incomes and having a tax structure that addressed that. I find that somewhat attractive because the current tax structure works in such a way that, if one person works, you get all sorts of benefits through the tax system if their partner does not. The moment their partner starts to work, many of the benefits disappear, and it is a classic poverty trap that impacts on an individual. Once you come into the work force you have to work a lot to start making up for everything you lose.Then of course there is child care, and people start chasing their tail. It is not Democrat policy but personal comment when I suggest that there is some merit in what I recall Howard talking about six or seven years ago in relation to a tax structure that encompasses household income in some way. There are some households where both people are working and making enormous amounts. There are many couples who would happily work fewer hours but, as I said, unfortunately many employers do not offer that option and to some extent the tax structure does not encourage it either.
People have to work either full time or not at all because of the poverty trap arrangements that work within the tax structure itself and in terms of the various benefits that are available. I am not talking about making women stay at home: I am suggesting that, if I was a teacher and still teaching and in another five years I would own my home and everything else, I would be happy to work .8 and work on my fruit block in the Riverland or just spend more time by the river. Such an option is not available at this stage.
I look at some of my friends where one or both partners are teaching and looking to wind back their work time but still have children at school. The tax structure works in such a way where, as I said, you have to work full time or not at all and perhaps not half time. I am largely going to focus on what the State Government can do but, while I am talking about the Federal Government, I point out that we now have another opportunity because the GST debate is about much more than a goods and services tax. The GST debate is about the way our whole tax system is structured in Australia, and it gives us an opportunity to talk about many other matters that could help employment.
For example, this could be the opportunity to abolish payroll tax, which is a major source of State revenue and which States would not want to give up, yet we also know that it is clearly a tax on employment. I find it curious that one of the reasons given for introducing a GST is that it is not a tax on employment, like some other taxes, yet the Federal Government has never put payroll tax on the table. If it is serious about getting rid of taxes on employment, payroll tax is an obvious tax to remove. As I said, the States would not be too happy about that because payroll tax is one of the few sources of revenue we have. At the same time we should be entering the debate with the Federal Government and saying, `Let us look at the vertical fiscal imbalance that is currently occurring within Australia and let us look at the way the States themselves are being funded. Let us give some guarantees so that payroll tax, FID and all the other taxes that the States have been forced to rely upon do not continue to create problems'.
I do not criticise the State Government for having payroll tax, FID or other taxes because we need the income. On the record on a number of occasions I have said that at this stage the State probably has no choice but to look at a tax increase. However, with the GST debate occurring right now, States would be foolish not to grab this opportunity to look at restructuring the way our own revenue sources work. I simply pose a hypothetical question at this stage as to whether or not there is some possibility of consensus between the Democrats, Liberal and Labor, not necessarily on the whole of the Government's tax package but at least on some elements of tax reform which might be of benefit to the States and to the benefit of employment. Within the context of the debate we are now having I pose that question, and I would certainly like the Government and the Labor Party to respond to it.[Sitting suspended from 6 to 7.45 p.m.]
527
The Hon. M.J. ELLIOTT: I will return, briefly, to an earlier discussion about the work force and its structure in order to underline my concern about the way in which jobs are now distributed and the particular sorts of jobs that are now being created. The December job list figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics show an improvement in South Australia's jobless rate. Full-time work continues, however, to be replaced by part-time jobs. The figures show an increase in total employment of 8 300 since the previous month, but the number of full-time employed fell by 2 700 in December. The job market has continued to rely on increases in part-time work to offset the ongoing drop in full-time jobs. In fact, I said previously that I would encourage more part-time work—if it was part-time permanent work—where workers opt to take it. As I understand it (although the figures do not show it), most of the growth in part-time work is not part-time permanent work and, as such, is a reason for real concern. Since January 1998 South Australia has experienced a total drop in full-time workers of 4 400, so we are seeing an expansion in the number of working poor who are relying on part-time casual work to survive. That is a matter of very real concern.
I spoke about some changes that I thought could be initiated via the Federal Government, but there are some things which can be done within the State itself at a legislative or regulatory level and which could further assist growth in jobs. For some time, the Australian Democrats have been both concerned about and actively fighting on issues which impact upon small business. We do need, I believe, legislation within this State that prevents companies with excessive marketing power engaging in oppressive and unconscionable conduct. Some elements of that are now found within the retail trade legislation, but I have some doubt whether or not that at present is sufficiently strong.It must be noted that for every job that is created in a large retail business about 1.7 jobs are lost in small retail businesses. As this aggressive competition from the monopolies or oligopolies of retail and other areas continues, we are seeing an increasing move towards expenditure in capital items replacing labour. Society does not gain in that we are losing competition, and we also lose because there is less employment in many of these large businesses for the same amount of investment as one will find in smaller businesses.
Legislation is long overdue at both State and Federal levels which tackles issues of monopolies in a real sense. It is quite clear that current anti monopoly legislation in Australia is far weaker than the anti trust legislation in the United States, where they break up monopolies with much less market power than we see in the Australian situation. Certainly, we could also do things to assist small business in terms of the amount of red tape that is involved. I have already spoken earlier about the suggestion that payroll tax could be abolished as part of the GST package, but we can go much further. For the life of me, I do not understand why employers have such a myriad different forms to complete, with information often duplicated. For instance, if one has employees, one must fill in forms in relation not only to income tax but also to WorkCover and a whole lot of other things, many of which contain the same information. I would suggest to this Government that one simple solution would be a computer software package which would run on a PC and which would be capable of generating all the various forms from one set of input. That would not be a complex computing job. If the Government wanted to facilitate small businesses, all it would need to do is come up with a computer program that runs people through the series of questions they need to answer, and the computer itself would then generate the various forms which are necessary, whether it be for income tax, workers compensation or whatever else. The paper war would be much reduced and, therefore, the disincentive for employing people would be reduced.Even in my own capacity as a member of Parliament, I employ people to do work for me, but there are times when I think the paperwork hardly compensates for the amount of work they end up doing. I suggest that that is a very simple thing which the Government could do. I would argue that the development of such a computer program would not be inordinately expensive. I suppose an alternative would be to have one body acting as an agent for all these other bodies. I cannot see why it would not be possible for the Australian Taxation Office to act as an agent for South Australia's workers compensation or as an agent for any of the other levies that are also imposed on employers so that it is effectively a one-stop shop. So, there are two alternatives, but both of them would significantly reduce the time spent embroiled in paperwork by small businesses. It does not tend to impact on big businesses as much, in that they can afford to take on specialist staff, and it is probably a small cost in the overall costs of their business. However, a small business generates a greater percentage of paperwork in relation to employees (and by `percentage' I mean the percentage of the total effort that goes into it.)
In terms of legislation and regulation, I know that people have different views about the way in which the Development Act could and should work, but I have been a long-term advocate arguing that the current application of the Development Act, particularly in relation to major projects, has been working to no-one's benefit. There has always been a danger that the Government would try to steamroll things through, but at the end of the day I think that creates a greater, rather than a lesser, level of uncertainty.
We need a process that is absolutely predictable and not reliant upon a Minister's saying, `Don't worry about it, I'll fix it up for you.' What we need is good up-front planning that gives very clear guidelines about what is and is not acceptable. Perhaps if that had been happening for some years South Australia would not have the reputation that it now enjoys. It has been Governments' preparedness to kowtow to the white shoe brigade, suggest that everything is okay and try to bully the way through that has created the level of confrontation that we have seen in South Australia. I think the Government could look at some of the successful things that have been done. I think the current Government was responsible for the creation of a zone for siting foundries—a very good idea. It created a great deal of certainty. People knew they could go to that zone and establish a foundry without running into any problems. Foundries have problems with their local communities. Castalloy, for instance, is having those difficulties in Camden at the moment. I think that providing that level of certainty up front is a good thing.The other example that comes to mind is the development on top of Mount Lofty, where the zoning was not necessarily conducive to what happened there. The Government set up a genuine consultative process, and I heard nothing but praise from all directions—from conservation, Aboriginal and development groups—as to how that process worked. However, David Wotton himself said that the one mistake he made was that, having gone into the initial planning stage, he disbanded the group. His regret was that it was not maintained through the design stage, as that would have ensured that the few residual problems that eventuated almost certainly would not have.
I am surprised that the Government, having done something so successfully, did not learn a lesson from that and do it again. However, it has not, and that mystifies me. In fact, I do not think that those two successes to which I have referred have been replicated since. The Government should look at these very real successes and seek to build upon them.
The next area I want to look at briefly relates to infrastructure. The Government, with very strong support from the Democrats, has been promoting the Adelaide to Darwin railway. In this place I have argued that we need to look at our transport infrastructure elsewhere in the State. I think that if we are to make the Adelaide to Darwin railway a real success the route between Adelaide and the Eastern States needs to be upgraded as well.
In the past month or so I have become aware that some significant work is about to happen on the Adelaide to Melbourne line, although the area most needing upgrading and where the greatest amount of fuel is expended and where a great deal of time is lost is that through the Adelaide Hills. That needs a significant amount of work done. The current tunnels do not allow double-stacked carriages through, and this means that the movement of freight will always be inefficient unless either those tunnels are upgraded or a new route is found. Also, the various gradients through which the line goes in the Hills are such that the size of trains is limited and the number of locomotives needed is very high. That again is avoidable. An upgraded line will make Adelaide more competitive into the eastern markets in terms of the cost and speed of delivery from Adelaide into the Eastern States and would also mean that Victoria, in particular, would be more likely to support the Adelaide to Darwin line if it could see that it could use it quickly and efficiently.
But there are other internal links. We in South Australia are very reliant upon cheap fuel, and while fuel is cheap road transport looks great. But there is no question that the day will come when the fuel dependent road system will not be as cost-effective as a rail system. Already a long-haul rail beats road. At this stage Mount Gambier is isolated from rail, and we need to look at that again. It worries me that Eyre Peninsula, which has an internal rail system, is disconnected from the rest of the system. I think that Whyalla, which cannot rely upon BHP, as I understand it, for more than probably 15 years (that is how long before the ore runs out) would gain not only by being connected to the east but by being connected back into the rest of Eyre Peninsula. Its capacity to be a major service town across the Peninsula for new mining and other ventures, which are almost certain to happen, is very great. I think we need to look at that. This is the first time I have talked much about spending money, but I have to say that it is a question where we spend our infrastructure dollars. I personally would have spent our infrastructure dollars on improving the rail system before I spent it on the tunnel that we have just built on the freeway. That is a personal decision, but in terms of the long-term benefit for the State I think an upgraded rail system would have created greater long-term economic benefit for the State than that tunnel which, at the end of the day, probably saves about five minutes of travel time—I would be surprised if it is much more than that—and creates similar problems which the Southern Expressway has created.People on the Southern Expressway are saving two to three minutes and, because it works so well, the traffic count has gone up and the traffic speed from there to the city has slowed down. It has been an investment which, unfortunately, has been counterproductive: it was a great idea in isolation, but it does not operate in isolation. I do not think that the best bang for the bucks in infrastructure was achieved. The Government would have been much better off putting a light rail system into the southern suburbs and making a real attempt at shifting large numbers of people in that manner.
Another industry where dollars need to be spent by Government is in aquaculture. I want to put on the record again that the Democrats believe that for a range of reasons aquaculture has an important role to play in this State. First, and most importantly, virtually all our fisheries are at maximum extent, and I would suggest that probably some of them are being over fished at present. The only way that there will be further seafood will be through aquaculture, which has major economic potential as well.
Unfortunately, this Government has tried to do it on the cheap, and at the end of the day I think everyone is a loser. I hear the tuna farmers complaining right now, but I cannot help but think that they partly brought it on their own necks. They have tried to fast-track things through cosy deals, but all the research has tended to concentrate on aspects of the biology of the tuna alone and not look at the interactions of tuna with the environment and at questions such as, `Are their risks with bringing pilchards into South Australia?'
There is no reasonable doubt now that disease was introduced into the pilchard fishery by the imported pilchards. I have seen enough scientific evidence now to make fairly clear that the imported pilchards brought in the disease that decimated the fishery not only in South Australia but also interstate. I think it is sloppiness, trying to cut corners and not working on sound scientific advice which created problems with the pilchards and which I believe was responsible for the tuna deaths at Port Lincoln. We must build an industry on adequate scientific research and on proper independent—and I stress `independent'—scientific advice. If we can do that, we will have an industry that will supply a lot of jobs for a long time. If we do not do that, I think we will find that even investors in the long run will be severely hurt.
In relation to business assistance, I have already talked about the potential for reducing paperwork. I think that we should also be looking at business incubators. I note that there are some start-ups of those now happening in South Australia. The Democrats have been long-term supporters of small business incubators. For those who are not aware of how they function, basically a person with a business idea in the first instance would convince the operators of the incubator that they have a viable business idea; they enter the incubator; and they are provided with a range of assistance. You often find that small businesses fail in their first three years, and they usually fail because they are not very good at anything other than their core business. A person may be particularly skilled at metal work, aquaculture or some other skill and that may be their core business. However, they also have paperwork to do, they need business plans, and they need to be able to advertise their business. They need to do a whole range of things for which they do not have the skills. The idea of a business incubator is to provide support in those areas and to give them skills as their business develops. After two or three years, the expectation is that they will move out of the incubator into their own premises and that new businesses will come into their place. I am quite excited by the incubator I saw at Wallaroo, which is an aquaculture based incubator, and an incubator is also starting up at Mount Gambier. As well, a computer business incubator is operating in Adelaide. Incubators have been successful when used overseas and, importantly, they build new small businesses. We know that small businesses are the bulk of our economy, and we know they are also the major employer in our economy. Anything we can do to get up small businesses that are likely to survive in the long term is a good thing. It need not be a net cost to the community, because it would be expected that the services provided would not be provided simply for free. The small business would be expected to pay for the assistance that they are receiving. However, more importantly, there will be a pay-back to the community as a whole as they prosper and as they start to employ.There has been a failure in South Australia to adequately market the State overseas, although there have been some promising signs in the past 12 months or so. There are three areas in which we have failed to capitalise on opportunities. With regard to education as an employer, according to the last figures I saw, South Australia was getting about 4 per cent of tertiary students who came to Australia. On a population basis, we should be getting about 8 per cent. We have clear advantages over Melbourne and Sydney, because Adelaide is a cheap city for accommodation and food, an easy city in which to move around and a safe city in which to live. It has all the profiles overseas parents would be seeking for their children, yet only 4 per cent of overseas students came to Adelaide. It was simply a marketing failure.
We had individual universities—sometimes individual departments—marketing themselves in a vacuum. They were going into a market trying to promote their product when nobody knew where South Australia or Adelaide was. I note in the past 12 months that a group has been formed, which is now seeking to do some coordinated marketing, and the major driving force behind that was the Lord Mayor, Jane Lomax Smith. If the Government had its way, the Adelaide City Council would not have existed, but luckily it did not get its way. Perhaps the new Minister for Education Malcolm Buckby may have played some small role, and for that I also congratulate him. However, we still have a long way to go.
There are success stories. The catering school in Adelaide is doing extremely well. The Waite Institute now has more postgraduate students than it has undergraduate students. For years the flying school at Parafield has been bringing in large numbers of trainee pilots from Indonesia, Greece and a whole range of countries. They have been the few successes among what otherwise has been very much a vacuum. What is true of education is also true of health. We have a superior quality—although I must say severely under-funded—health service, particularly compared with that of any of our neighbours. I know one hospital was even seeking to start marketing itself in the United States, because it was cheaper to fly to Australia to have an operation than it was to have it in the United States, and you would get better quality medial attention at the same time. So far I have seen some individual hospitals and services—again, like the universities—trying to market themselves in a void of awareness as to where South Australia is and what it had to offer.I have put to several Government Ministers that what we should be doing, as they have more recently done with forming a body for education, is to form a similar body for health as well. I went a step further and argued that there really needs to be a promotion of South Australia as a destination for education, health and tourism. Many of those growing tourism markets in Asia are also the potential markets for both education and health. I have had personal experience of that. My wife worked briefly with a firm that was bringing in patients for medical procedures in South Australia. On one occasion, I joined her when she met the patient who arrived. The patient travelled not alone but with three other relatives: her husband, mother and brother-in-law.
I found it interesting to note that, while they came here for the medical procedure, they did the full tourist bit. They travelled around not just Adelaide but the district in a taxi, spending quite a few dollars. The brother-in-law visited Flinders University, because his wife was looking to get some postgraduate qualifications. So the combination I have just been talking about, in a hypothetical sense, is very real. This one group of people came for one reason—a health reason—yet tourism and education were also on their agenda. You can clearly create positive feedback between those three industries, and all three are capable of being significant employers. I am encouraging the Government to look at a body that would oversee the three of those and strongly promote Adelaide as a quality destination for all those things, and to build an awareness of Adelaide to start off with, so that individual hospitals, universities and tourism enterprises can all go into a market that has a good awareness of South Australia to begin with.
We can also use education as a way of stimulating industry. Our wine industry undoubtedly was built on the success of education; it was built on the success of Roseworthy. For many years, Roseworthy was turning out quality wine makers or wine technicians. These people went into the marketplace, and they not only worked for big wineries but a number of them became involved in setting up small wineries as well. Those small wineries acted as an educator for the South Australian consumers who went to them. It was a gradual process for a long time, but it was building. The whole underpinning of the wine industry clearly had this quality of education, so that we had, one on one, the best wine technicians in the world. There are brilliant winemakers in other countries but there are a lot of ordinary ones. However, I do not think Roseworthy was turning out bad ones, or even ordinary ones.
An honourable member: They made some good wines, too. The Hon. M.J. ELLIOTT: Absolutely! The question I pose quite simply is: having had that success with wine, why can we not learn our lesson and ask where else there are opportunities? There are opportunities. The dairy industry in South Australia is small by national standards, yet the dairy potential, particularly of the South-East of the State, is huge. I ask the question: why are we not turning out quality cheese makers in the same way as we are turning out those quality winemakers? In South Australia we are making almost nothing but cheddar cheese, cheese spreads and powdered milk. They all have very real markets.However, I have read quite a few of the industry journals, and there is a major problem in Australia with sufficient know-how on cheese making. The few independent cheese makers we had, for example, Yoannidis in the South-East, have been bought out by the big cheese makers and have disappeared. Yet, while he was there, he was visited by a lot of people and was playing that same education role in the public that the small winemakers played. I think we should look at food technology in general and increasing the number of cheesemakers. There are five or six small cheesemakers in the whole of South Australia at present, some of whom are quite good, but it would be good if a tourist could come to South Australia and visit a region that not only had wineries but cheesemakers: the two go well together.
The Hon. A.J. Redford interjecting:
The Hon. M.J. ELLIOTT: I don't think it is very hypothetical. Most of our wine areas have had or do have dairy industries. Golden North in the Clare Valley in the past had a very active operation, as did the Barossa, the Adelaide Hills and the South-East. Those two industries would run hand in hand very well. If we set up this State as a place of excellence not just for winemaking but also food making, we will go further.
We are now talking about producing olive oil—there are a lot of olive trees going into the ground—but I wonder whether we have all the technicians that we need even to do that as well as we might. I suspect that we do not. I do not think it would take very much up-front expenditure on education to produce the people who can drive that industry forward. I have no doubt about that.
The opportunities go on and on for further value adding to our aquacultural products. We have one or two people now making excellent smoked salmon and those sorts of things but, again, I wonder whether we are barely scratching the surface. If the Government spent some money on education with a relatively small investment it would create a bigger industry. It will not happen overnight; it might take another decade before the major rewards come, but it should be done.
At the last two elections the Democrats advocated that the Government pick several areas within universities where we should seek to be at the forefront of research. I have talked about food technology, but why do we not create a chair at a university in urban water management? We are doing some fairly creative things in Adelaide at the moment, but I think that academic underpinning of that would be useful.
The Hon. A.J. Redford interjecting:
The Hon. M.J. ELLIOTT: Yes, lots. South Australia has the potential to develop a tourist market that is very different from a great deal of the existing Australian market—the niche of ecotourism. I remember when I first raised this five years ago that I was attacked by the Advertiser. I re-read the text of that article to remind myself. I think I know who the author was. It states: The Australian Democrats, on the other hand, seem blithely unconcerned with long-term growth. They live in such a nice world, warm, caring, drenched in history, full of sensitive people and tooth fairies. Such is the impression created by the Party's tourism policy unveiled by Legislative Council member and would-be House of Assembly member, Mr Elliott. To be fair, it was not something as simply brutal as a tourism policy; it was a cultural and ecotourism plan. Mr Elliott says people come to Adelaide to enjoy its charm and go to the Outback for the open spaces. Restoration of Adelaide's many historic buildings was a priority under the plan he announced. I could go on. The journalist talks about people coming `to gaze, weak at the knees, at the iron lace verandahs of North Adelaide and the glorious facades of long gone banks. They later intend to frolic under the stars in the desert.' I still stand by what I said. When I launched that tourism policy, I was photographed looking out of a window of the Beehive building suggesting that it should be renovated. An honourable member interjecting: The Hon. M.J. ELLIOTT: Yes. I feel that I might have been on the right track, because I have no doubt that that building is becoming one of the more photographed buildings in Adelaide. There is no question that the fabulous facades of Rundle Street East are one of the big attractions of Adelaide. There were some who would have happily pulled those buildings down and replaced them with modern buildings. I believe that the revival that we are now seeing of Central Adelaide is being driven by the survival of the feel of places such as Rundle Street East. People find the area so attractive and comfortable that it is bringing more people into the area to live. It is not a matter of not having development—we will have heaps of it—but what is driving it, what is the attraction? There is no doubt that the quality of life in Adelaide—quality in both a physical environment sense (the built environment) and the physical environment itself—is what makes Adelaide attractive not just a place to live but to visit. I was critical when I released the policy of a Government that seemed to be too focused on marinas. I retain that position. People do not come to Adelaide to look at marinas. If they want marinas, they can go to many cities around the world. Adelaide used to be one of those cities where you could walk from one end to another along the beach. It is not any more. How many cities in the world can boast the capacity to walk from one end to the other along a clean beach? The Hon. A.J. Redford: I've seen it in hundreds of tourist brochures of cities around the world. The Hon. M.J. ELLIOTT: Yes. If you go to Waikiki, the beach actually comes from Australia—it is artificial. Tourist brochures contain little narrow shots, but they do not make up for— The Hon. A.J. Redford: Where can't you walk? The Hon. T.G. Roberts interjecting: The PRESIDENT: Order! The Hon. M.J. ELLIOTT: You missed the point. As we develop tourism in country South Australia we must make sure that we do not in any significant way alter what people come to see. There is potential for huge employment in tourism in rural South Australia. Ultimately, the size of that employment might be limited by the wrong sorts of developments going into areas that people come to see. It has always been beyond the comprehension of the Democrats why South Australian Governments (both Labor and Liberal) over the years have not tackled the issue of alternative energy development. Some years ago, when the Hon. Ian Gilfillan visited Israel, there were people in Israel who were involved in alternative energies who wanted to come to Whyalla and set up part of their operation. At that time, the State Government simply was not interested. If any State has good reason to be involved in alternative energies, it must be South Australia. We have relatively limited available fossil fuels—and we know that the significant use of fossil fuels must be limited—but we have any amount of solar power coming down onto our State every day and we have chosen not to develop it. The last area on which I wish to touch involves universities. I do not believe that we in South Australia have picked up on the potential for research as an industry in its own right. We often see research as something that is done and on which industry builds. That is true, but research itself can be an industry. I refer, for example, to medical research. Some of South Australia's leading medical research scientists are under increasing pressure to relocate interstate or offshore, which will lead to a brain drain at a time when South Australia wants to sell itself as a technologically advanced State.South Australia was under risk last year—I am not sure what has come of this—of losing a major Australian breast and prostate cancer research group, which had received offers from several other States to move there. That group, which was based at Flinders University, was exploring two significant offers. The problem stems from there not being enough institutional based funding to support the infrastructure requirements of research projects. We are losing opportunities to attract scientists to South Australia as we do not have enough base funding to keep them in the State.
The top 20 per cent of research projects in Australia survive on Federal Government grants received through various research councils. Only one in four or five applications are funded. Projects are never fully funded by grants with researchers having to seek additional funds themselves from charities and other organisations to enable them to carry out their work.
One of the real tragedies is the way in which funds are given. Many young people are missing out on funding. Grants are offered after taking account of the track record of researchers. So, if you are starting out and have only a few runs on the board you are less likely to receive a research grant than an older colleague. Even once a grant is offered, it goes through a series of cuts. Many research workers spend as much as a third of their time preparing research grants for sums of $5 000 to $10 000. Because of this competitive process, you have to have a good track record or you never get going.
With health budgets being cut, hospitals which have traditionally taken up the maintenance costs of research programs no longer have the reserves and are being forced to cut back on areas such as research and teaching. Research does help South Australia's economy. It brings in about $400 000 to the Flinders Medical Centre alone. The main problem is a lack of infrastructure support. A major review conducted last year rated South Australia second to bottom in the infrastructure support that it receives. Infrastructure support includes providing support staff, the purchase and maintenance of equipment, the presentation of materials and the essential reagents needed for experiments.
In my discussions with senior research scientists, the suggestion has also been made to provide seed money for scholarships which would provide funding for strategic initiatives in research. This could assist young researchers to get runs on the board or scientists returning from overseas seeking to re-establish themselves in Australia. If financial help is provided, opportunities can exist to make more money out of research and also attract further research interest to South Australia. Other States such as Victoria are now using State Government funds to support the infrastructure requirements and, in Western Australia, State Government income from lotteries is earmarked specifically for research. In the medical research area, the Government needs a total of only $2 million to be shared across medical research teams to make them more competitive, which in turn would bring more money into the State. I am aware that in Queensland, which had a negligible research base, particularly in the medical area, it has grown dramatically from a relatively small up-front investment. I realise that scientific research as an employer sounds fairly exclusive, but it must be realised that you are employing not only the scientists but also laboratory assistants and various other people and, if it is generating wealth for the economy, it will provide further employment. At one stage, a significant amount of the medical research in Australia was being done in our State, and I understand that within the next two years we will have fallen below average. That is simply because of inattention by the present State Government, whilst other States— The Hon. A.J. Redford interjecting: The Hon. M.J. ELLIOTT: That is not what I was talking about. You obviously were not listening. The Hon. A.J. Redford interjecting: The Hon. M.J. ELLIOTT: Look, you sat there having a yarn, not listening, and then you chip in, not knowing what you are talking about. The Hon. A.J. Redford interjecting: The Hon. M.J. ELLIOTT: You couldn't chew gum and stand up at the same time! As I indicated at the start, with only four days prior notice that we would be debating this today, I would have wanted to make a more significant contribution, but I am sure that, with the contributions of others, the Government will have plenty to work on. We look forward to some positive results.