SIXTY THOUSAND CAN’T BE WRONG WITH SIXTY THOUSAND REASONS WHY! Has there been a mass regional exodus despite Royalties for Regions?

You will understand why this is a possibility when you enter the WHEATBELT DEVELOPMENT COMMISSION WEBSITE and click on the link ‘Royalties for Regions Progress Report 2013-14’.

When you enter you are told ‘this page you are looking for does not exist’ .Then you advised to check for ‘typos’ that do not exist either, nor does a 2014-15, 2015-16 and 2016-17 report.

Mystified, you then click on Royalties for Regions Progress link to the DEPARTMENT OF REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT website. Same answer-now its three strikes and you’re out!

The WHEATBELT DEVELOPMENT COMMISSION identifies its goals ‘surprisingly enough’ as developing the Wheatbelt region including facilitating opportunities for business, industry and population growth. So does the DEPARTMENT OF REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT.

You should not be ashamed of thinking now that no R4R funding has been spent on actually creating business and industry development and population growth in the Wheatbelt or any other region.

Bye-bye! 

The word is out that 60,000 have crossed back over the ’Rabbit Proof Fence’ because there are few jobs, especially in rural WA, where Royalties for Regions funding appears to have created little local employment opportunity.

This loss is like the population of Bunbury and surrounding districts has all but disappeared. Or you can equate it to both Geraldton and Kalgoorlie being empty, accept for a few hangers-on still hanging on, and an almost uninhabited Wheatbelt.

That is how much the disappearance of 60,000, formerly WA citizens, means when equated to regional population demographics.

Many, if not most, left the Pilbara in particular after massive mining infrastructure projects were completed, then the bottom fell out of the iron ore market. This capped-off a series of annus horibilis’ for the state’s socio-economic stability.

Despite the fact that as early as 2013, it was well known in building construction circles that China had a gluttonous stockpile of iron ore and steel, the Nationals, Brendon Grylls, still maintained he needed massive amounts of R4R funding to build a palatial Pilbara for a community of 50,000 in Port. Hedland and Karratha. (That is nearly twice the current 2017 population.)

Mr. Grylls even video-linked himself to the promotion of Veronica MacPherson’s $200 million, lavish Newman Estate project, the subject of an ASIC investigation. It is called a ‘Ponzi’ scheme involving the alleged fraudulent manipulation of investors in a major money-making scam.
If Mr. Grylls was relying on the support of the major multi-national mining companies to ensure a massive permanent population explosion in his electorate he was way off the mark.

That was never going to happen. The day the iron-ore price plunged was the day the Pilbara population of FIFO workers and support staff plunged with it, local businesses shut up shop and domestic property prices fell through the floor.

Where Mr. Grylls thought a huge new population would come from (worth the billions he spent for it) is a mystery to all but himself.

Even the manufacturers of steel-framed modular homes for North-West, WA, knew that housing development in the Pilbara was going to hit a brick wall way back in late 2013, but they were not about to tell Brendon Grylls.

When Mr. Grylls tried to payback the lack of support by the miners by demanding a mining tax, he got a payback in spades. In fact, not spades, but large excavators that buried his political career in a very large pit.

Mia Davies’ most avid supporters should acknowledge that her recent statement that the current government was making an ‘unprecedented attack on the bush’ is premature trash-talk. It would have been far more helpful if she had trash-talked the Allawuna Farm waste disposal project when she was elected to represent the Central Wheatbelt in 2013.

If Ms. Davies had backed this statement up by saying that support by R4R funding had created 500 new jobs and guaranteed any increase in population in her electorate then she should be listened to.

Unfortunately there are no verifiable statistics provided by the Wheatbelt Development Commission, the Department of Regional Development or any other commission and agency to make this dream an actual reality.

So where does the Wheatbelt go from here if it wants to be funded by the new system of Royalties for Regions?

It will require unprecedented reliance on local business groups such as a Local Business Associations, the local Chamber of Commerce and Industry and bodies such as the Wheatbelt Development Commission to come up with irrefutable evidence of viable development projects that demand Royalties for Regions funding. That will be the ‘be all and end all’ of the funding equation.

David Taylor.