Wednesday, 11 May 2022

Statements on parliamentary committee reports

Public Accounts and Estimates Committee

Report on the 2021–22 Budget Estimates

Mr FOWLES (Burwood) (15:02): Thank you very much, Acting Speaker Morris. Your well-earned reputation for precision is no better endorsed than in that 3 seconds of glorious silence as we waited for the effluxion of time to bring the members statements period to a conclusion. Thank you again for your service and for your time in the chair, and please go lightly over the next 4½ minutes.

I am pleased to rise at frankly an unusual hour of the day to make a contribution on a committee report—I do not know that this often happens in the afternoon. But I am pleased to talk about the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee’s report on the 2021–22 budget estimates, which was tabled back in October of last year. In chapter 2 of that report the estimates of capital expenditure were made, and they were at that time budgeted to average $22.5 billion a year over the budget and the forward estimates. The budget estimated that capital investment would average $20 billion over the four years from the budget year.

Now, that is a very significant infrastructure investment. There is no doubt about that. The report goes into some detail about some of the major capital programs that underpin it, including of course the Big Build. But I just want to in discussing very specifically the report of the committee contrast it to the federal Liberal budget this year, in which 6 per cent of new infrastructure spending over the same four-year budget period was allocated to Victoria—just 6 per cent. So necessarily, when in this state we talk about budget matters, we have the lived reality of about half of state revenue being derived from grants. So it is in my assessment entirely impossible, frankly, to talk about infrastructure spending in this state without talking about infrastructure spend from the feds, and it is extraordinary that just 6 per cent of new infrastructure spending in the latest federal budget is going to Victorians. That is $208 million for Victorians out of a total of $3.5 billion, despite the fact that we have a bit over a quarter of the nation’s population. The spend is behind Western Australia, New South Wales and Queensland, and only 15 per cent of the projects announced in the Morrison government’s multibillion-dollar budget splurge have in fact been assessed by Infrastructure Australia. So it is a budget that is all about the Prime Minister trying to save his own political skin and an all-too-compliant Treasurer bowing and scraping to his every whim. It is frankly extraordinary that any federal Treasurer, let alone one from Victoria, could see fit to allocate less than 6 per cent—less than 6 per cent!—of new infrastructure spending to a state with more than a quarter of the nation’s population.

It is unsurprising, I guess, because the architects of this budget are the very same people who have demonised, belittled and denigrated Victoria and Victorians at every single chance over the course of the last two years. They turned kicking Victorians when they were down into an art form. In our darkest hour the federal Treasurer did not stand beside us, he did not offer words of comfort, he did not provide the support that was expected of him and the federal government. He thought he was attacking the Andrews government, but in fact he was attacking every Victorian who was doing the right thing: staying home, getting tested, keeping our community safe.

The federal Treasurer described the problems of hotel quarantine—a program that was stood up in just 72 hours—as the biggest public policy failure in the nation’s history. I think we all know what well and truly holds that title, and that is the comprehensively botched rollout of the coronavirus vaccine, because the single biggest impact on the federal budget revenue projections is ultimately the delay in the return to something approaching normal. That delay was economy wide, and it was a delay that was entirely within the control of the federal government. It is a program that the federal government say they worked on for many months, and yet as at 30 June 2021 the percentage of our population that was vaccinated was 4.68 per cent. That ranked us dead last in the OECD out of 28 nations. Dead last, long behind Chile, with a population of 20 million, at 53 per cent, and Hungary, at 48 per cent. These are nations with per capita economic output of about a quarter of what we have here in Victoria.

Victoria’s reward for doing all the heavy lifting as a result of the federal government’s horrendous management of the vaccine rollout is to be shunned yet again on infrastructure in this federal budget. It is a miserable budget brought down by a miserable federal Treasurer and a miserable Prime Minister, and it is absolutely time to kick this lot out.