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House of Assembly - Fifty-Third Parliament, First Session (53-1)
2014-08-07 Daily Xml
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Community Service Organisations

Ms HILDYARD (Reynell) (15:27): I rise today following numerous conversations with a range of South Australian community organisations, large and small, who work in communities with citizens who need support and empowerment on their journey, who are affected by disability or mental illness, who are homeless, who are fleeing from violence, who are looking for a job or who just need a hand for a short period of time.

For decades these organisations have operated in one of our fastest-growing industries in an environment of growing and complex community need, an environment where resources are scarce and there is constant pressure to allocate and grow these scarce resources, pressure to balance with these scarce resources the need to spend time to build the capacity to advocate, fundraise, connect and collaborate, to ensure sustainable change and to provide quality community services to those who need them, and the equal need to appropriately report and manage the governance and staff of their rapidly growing organisations.

These are community organisations at the heart of our metropolitan, remote and regional communities who make a difference with, and for, so many of our most vulnerable community members. These are organisations that are advocates for those whose voice needs to be heard and would not be heard without their support. These are organisations filled with almost 250,000 workers, 30,000 of them South Australians, whose commitment to supporting and empowering people knows no bounds, whose professionalism and experience are extraordinary and whose sheer kindness keeps community members from feeling alone, disempowered and from the depths of despair.

These are the organisations that are under fire from the federal Abbot Liberal government, which is considering a bill that proposes to repeal the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission Act 2012 and to abolish the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission (ACNC).

The ACNC was established in 2012 to support community organisations. It gives expert advice, assistance and valuable data to them, so they can spend less time on administration and more time on the community work they are passionate about and best at.

The ACNC is the independent national regulator of community organisations. It was developed to maintain and enhance public trust and confidence in the sector through increased accountability and transparency, to support and sustain a robust, vibrant, independent and innovative community sector, and to promote the reduction of unnecessary regulatory obligations on the sector.

The ACNC came about after years of advocacy by the sector for it, with its establishment as an independent regulator giving effect to a primary recommendation of the Productivity Commission research report into the contribution of the not-for-profit sector released in 2010. Despite this, the Abbott government wants to scrap this support for community organisations.

Four out of five community organisations want to keep the ACNC. If you visit the website for public submissions on the bill, you will see submission after submission in support of its retention. The sector is extraordinarily unhappy with the proposed scrapping of the ACNC and deeply concerned with the consultation processes, or lack thereof, on the post-ACNC arrangements.

The barely advertised current consultation on post-ACNC regulatory arrangements initially did not even have a session in Adelaide, although one was added later. The consultation on a proposed national centre for excellence, similarly, did not have a face-to-face consultation in Adelaide, leaving South Australians to only complete a survey to have input. So-called consultation on what will happen post the ACNC equates to the Abbott government ignoring the views of the sector which are strongly in favour of maintaining the ACNC.

Comments on the proposed new arrangements are due by 20 August, but the options paper the government seeks responses to states that the feedback will inform public consultations in July and August. Embarrassingly, their submission template has been identified as not working on several occasions and contains a list of stakeholder categories that clearly demonstrate no understanding by the Abbott government of the community sector's scope.

The bill to abolish the ACNC has not yet been finalised. In South Australia, we have an opportunity here to work with and for South Australian community organisations that operate in every single one of our electorates to say that the regulator that was put into place after years of poor regulation and public consultation to design a better system should be maintained.

Tony Abbott it is not listening and wants to see community organisations spending more on reporting than on working in the community. South Australia's community organisations need us in their corner, and I hope that, together, we will be.

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