Wednesday, 31 August 2022

Motions

Budget papers 2022–23

Debate resumed on motion of Mr WYNNE:

That this house takes note of the 2022–23 budget papers.

Mr EDBROOKE (Frankston) (15:18): Thank you, Acting Speaker McCurdy. It is lovely to see you in the chair this afternoon.

A member interjected.

Mr EDBROOKE: No, he is a good Acting Speaker. It is my absolute pleasure to rise and speak on the budget take-note motion. As we have seen in question time today, there are some remarkable statistics coming out from the ABS at the moment, and that is because of a government that has made a plan and stayed with that plan throughout a global pandemic. In many ways, this 2022–23 budget is one of the most important budgets that the state of Victoria has ever seen, coming out of a crisis that the world experienced. It is a budget that makes a foundation for recovery across the board. We have seen the pandemic repair plan and we have seen the Victorian Future Fund, and the figures out today show that all the work that has gone in—the long-term work and that vision for our economic future—is actually working.

If I can take you back to 2012, the unemployment rate was 5.8 per cent, the highest on the mainland. I think in 2014 that got above 6 per cent—it might have been 6.2 per cent from memory. Since the pandemic, since the tranche of economic policy that has been put in place, which I will go into in a minute, we have seen those statistics rapidly decline, which is a good thing. Unemployment as of June this year was 3.7 per cent. As of July, the next month, it was 3.2 per cent, and we have now heard the Victorian Treasurer talk about 3.1 per cent unemployment in Victoria, which is the lowest in the nation. That is right, Victoria is leading the nation on unemployment. It is the lowest in 50 years, and it is interesting when you put in perspective that that national average is 3.9 per cent. We do hear from those opposite from time to time, or maybe every day, about what is not happening correctly with the Victorian economy. There are many, many states and nations in the world that would be jealous of the comeback that Victoria has had and that credit to a huge extent can be apportioned to the Treasurer of Victoria and good governance, of course.

I will get into some of the budget features that affect Frankston very soon and be very excited do that. But I know I could take up my whole 15 minutes doing that, so I did just want to talk about some of the things in the budget that I think meant a lot to people in Victoria. We have been through a really hard time, and everybody knows that. But Victorians are definitely not whingers. When they see a problem, they want a plan and they want to see it fixed. They do not want to see someone just standing there waving their arms around, saying words that mean nothing. This budget certainly brought a huge amount of policy to bear, and it was a lot to digest for a lot of Victorians. But we will go through a bit of a list, and you can see how this budget has been the catalyst for our economic recovery.

There were some obvious issues around ESTA, and there was record investment and recruitment, with $330 million in there. We had 90 new paramedics, 500 new officers and 50 new PSOs over two years, funded and catered for in this budget. We also had that aforementioned pandemic repair plan. We had the funding to train and hire 7000 new healthcare workers and a statewide investment of $2.9 billion in health. We had many upgrades of emergency services facilities. I see the State Control Centre was funded $36.2 million and SES $28.5 million to maintain and upgrade the facilities that those absolute heroes in orange use every night and every day. Often when we are in our beds sleeping they are out there doing the hard yards. Also the CFA received $16 million to upgrade 40 CFA facilities to be female friendly, which is really, really important. There was $44 billion funded into the Victorian community response to COVID, essentially for workers, businesses and people’s jobs as well.

On another level, the international level, it is very clear to international businesses that Victoria is open for investment, well and truly. It is attractive to international investment. I recently met with a company called LeadSquared and their CEO, Nilesh Patel. It is a fantastic story of a startup that has now become a unicorn—so it has achieved more than $1 billion worth of investment. They started in a room that was accessed via a garage. They basically run out a customer relations management system with software as a service, and they have just made Melbourne their Oceania base. It is a billion-dollar company, a unicorn to come out of India that has made Melbourne their Oceania base, which is amazing. It is very, very important for people to realise that the statistics around these businesses, unicorns and startups, are huge. We are dealing with data that suggests that unicorns and startups created 60 000 jobs in Victoria since 2017. That is not a figure to be sneezed at, and these companies are coming internationally to Melbourne because they see an economy that is growing. They see unemployment is down. They see partnerships that they can make with universities over here and other educational institutions, such as the partnerships with Deakin University and partnerships with RMIT, which were spoken about at length at the Australia India Business Council, an event which I attended recently.

We have also got of course the all-important Suburban Rail Loop. It has been in the media a little bit lately. I think there have been a lot of people talking about that. In my neck of the woods in Frankston any time you talk about the Suburban Rail Loop and you want to talk about the faux choice between public transport and health, people in Frankston turn around and they say, ‘Well, why can’t we have both? What is the issue?’, because in Frankston we are building a $1.13 billion hospital. It is huge. It has got its own childcare centre, a community centre, car parking, 12 storeys, 130 beds, oncology, new theatres, a special care nursery, a women’s clinic, new paediatrics and obstetrics, mental health, children’s services and new maternity. People know that the Suburban Rail Loop is a visionary project. It is one of those projects that, as the Premier has said so many times, we will not see completed while we are in government perhaps, and that is the great thing. I think that people see it is about projects that create the future and not just looking through the lens of a three-year term or a four-year term at the state level.

The Suburban Rail Loop means a lot for people in Frankston. At the moment people in Frankston get on the Frankston line and they have to go all the way to Richmond or Caulfield to get on the Cranbourne line to go east. That would be, say, a 20-minute drive usually for us. The Suburban Rail Loop means you will get off somewhere near Cheltenham and you can go straight east, just like on any modern railway in a metropolis internationally—so that would be Tokyo, London and many, many other countries which we would compare ourselves with, some of their major cities.

There has been a huge investment in education. It has been spoken about quite a bit, but one of the proudest moments I had in here, in Parliament, this term was hearing that the Andrews Labor government would fund the redevelopment of every single special school in Victoria. That is a huge commitment to make sure that we redevelop those schools to the standard reflecting the kind of education they are providing for those children. Of course, yes, I might have a special stake in it, being a former special school teacher, but what those families go through, what some of those kids go through and what those teachers do to support those children growing up, well, they deserve this. That was something that made me very, very proud to be a member of this government.

We know that the cost of living has become a huge issue for many, many families in Victoria. We have seen interest rates rise through the RBA. They are trying to pour some cold water on the economy, giving us less money to spend in the market. So there have obviously been actions taken by our government, and one of those actions has been the power saving bonus—hugely popular in Victoria. Even if Frankston is just a test of what people are thinking about this project, I was in a shopping centre at a table for 7 hours the other day, and four of us, four people, did 167 power saving bonuses for people that might have been elderly and not able to understand the internet or did not have access to the internet. These people were able to compare their bills. It was amazing to hear one particular person who came along, shouted me a coffee and said, ‘Hey, this is the least I can do; I just made $250 with 4 minutes time, and I walked away and I compared my energy bill and I am going to save $1400 a year’.

Of course this is on top of everything else that this government has done, including removing so many level crossings. We promised 50. I think we are up to 85. Member for Sandringham, do you know how many level crossings we are up to?

Mr Rowswell: Not Highett and Wickham roads.

Mr EDBROOKE: I have lost count it is so many. Rental law reforms, building 100 new schools—

Mr Rowswell interjected.

Mr EDBROOKE: I can tell the member for Sandringham is continuing his celebration of those level crossings. We have banned embedded networks, which is essential. When you look at some of these bills people are getting, these power bills, they just do not make sense to even an educated person who might work for a power company. They cannot even explain it to us, and embedded networks do not do anything to improve that.

We have also seen free TAFE. It has had some amazing uptake in Frankston. We have got stage 2 of Chisholm TAFE being constructed as we speak, $67 million. The slab went down the other day and the hands went up; everyone was cheering in Frankston. There are some great courses there, free TAFE courses that have been added to that TAFE as well, which is quite amazing. I noticed signs on the way home the other night for free entry for kids to the Melbourne show too. It might not mean much to you and me, Acting Speaker, but it does to a lot of people. And also of course we have got the free kinder announcement, so three-year-old kinder, pre-prep and four-year-old kinder—15 hours. That is about two and a half grand a year in savings for people at home. But importantly, as has been pointed out so many times, it means people can actually go back to work without paying for child care. Their child can go to pre-prep or kinder and can get an education and the best start to life, and at the same time there can be a mum or dad working as well—and not just working to pay off the child care.

We have seen the public transport Night Network rollout. We built Australia’s first pride centre. This budget saw the rollout and completion of 1800 school upgrades across the state, which is quite amazing. We have criminalised wage theft. We have brought in the Smile Squad buses for free dental but also two sets of glasses for children in schools too, which as I spoke about yesterday, is an absolute game changer for early diagnostics for children who cannot explain why they might not be able to read or why they cannot see figures correctly. We have also revived the closed regional railway stations. We have got the amazing sick pay guarantee, which I know no-one thinks they need until they actually do, but there were a lot of people signing up for that because they were suddenly realising that the previous federal government would not come to the table on this. This is five days pay—not leave, five days pay—for anyone so they do not have to go to work sick, and that is something that is very valuable.

We have rolled out free baby bundles. We have got those five new Metro Tunnel stations. I think I saw one on Instagram last night, and I was just blown away at the size of the thing. The level of construction is huge. The $250 power saving bonus I have mentioned. Back in Frankston I just want to take you to Frankston Hospital—not just Frankston Hospital, though, the health services in Frankston. I have mentioned Frankston Hospital plenty of times in this house but not enough. I do just want to squeeze in there that the Andrews Labor government is essentially taking a private hospital, Frankston Private, which has been under-utilised at times, and making it an institution that will perform 9000 elective surgeries per year. If you stack that up with the hospital in Box Hill, it is the same model, but with 4000 elective surgeries per year—along with new GP clinics as well with 300 new consultations every week.

This government is delivering, whether it be in areas like Frankston or across the state. Whether it be in social policy or whether it be in solid economics coming out of a worldwide crisis, we are delivering. We say what we do and we do what we say, and people at the election in November will know that. They will know that sometimes leadership might not deliver you exactly the outcome you want, because you have to think of the community and you have to keep the whole community safe, but people will say that there is one thing we know about this Labor government and that is that they do what they say and they deliver.

Ms STALEY (Ripon) (15:33): I rise to speak this afternoon on the take-note motion on the 2022–23 budget. I have already spoken on the budget earlier, so this is my second go at it, and there is plenty to say about what is wrong with this budget. I am going to start of course with health. When we think about health and we are thinking about particularly Ripon, the major project in health in Ripon is the Maryborough hospital. Now, that is a commitment that was made by the government and by me in 2018, and I remind the house that at the time the opposition felt that that project would be done over two terms. I remember the government put out media releases shrilly trying to savage me for saying that we would take two terms to do this important project in Maryborough, but when we go to budget paper 4 and we go to page 68, what we see there is that there has not been a sod turned on this project, and we are now well into time-on in the fourth quarter, so they are not going to get it built in this term. But when we look at where we are going next term, there is the ominous remaining expenditure line that is out past the budget estimates, which is $94 800 000 of a $100 million project.

The government are not even prepared to front up and suggest when they are going to finish this project from the last budget that they have brought down in this term. The people of Maryborough are absolutely right to be concerned, wondering where this project is going, why it is taking so long and why we are only getting pretty pictures but no actual design schematics yet—they are still doing consultation. I can say with absolute certainty that if the Liberal-Nationals are elected in November, we will build this hospital. We will not constantly put it off in the way this government have—it is always on the never-never; they have not started it. We will build this hospital.

We will also allocate $30 million to deliver the first stage of the St Arnaud hospital redevelopment. Parts of the St Arnaud hospital were built in the 19th century. The main building was built in the 1930s. It is not fit for purpose. The patients rooms are on the first floor; they are highly inaccessible. It is one of those buildings that was built with a big verandah around the front, and the idea was that you would be able to convalesce there and sit out on the verandah. Well, the verandah of the St Arnaud hospital has so much concrete cancer that it is closed; you cannot go out on it. As a result, it has very small rooms, shared bathrooms—it is not fit for purpose. We will rebuild that facility. Labor has no such plans.

Similarly, when we go to Beaufort, the Beaufort hospital is a lovely little hospital. It has got a lot of aged care in it. Again, the facilities are tired, and the board and CEO have come up with a great plan to redesign their site and get all of the aged care into one building, which is where it needs to be now—we do not really have high care and low care anymore, we have ageing in place. Again, the government has shown no interest, in this budget or any other budget, in funding that.

Similarly, I cannot go past the Daylesford hospital. Daylesford is not in Ripon; it is of course in Macedon. Macedon is represented by the current Minister for Health, the government’s fourth health minister for this term—but nonetheless she is the health minister. She is unable or unwilling to get that hospital $75 million. She was wholly unable to convince the previous health minister that her community needed that $75 million, and she has not done it now as the health minister. That is clearly one that would benefit residents in Ripon and those in Hepburn, and if the minister had any authority in her portfolio, surely she could get at least stage 1 of the Daylesford hospital redevelopment done.

The final one I would mention is the Ballarat Health Services expansion, and that is in a similar situation to the Maryborough hospital. It is a very big project; it is a much-needed project for Ballarat. Ballarat’s hospital has got very high waiting lists and huge instances of ambulance ramping because its ED is overwhelmed. The government are planning to spend a significant amount of money on that hospital—at two elections they have announced it—and almost all, I am going to say over 80 per cent, of their funding is again in the never-never. It is not scheduled to be spent. Who knows when we are actually going to see any new buildings in Ballarat Health Services.

That brings me to the broader issue of health. I note that the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee has had a good, hard look at Labor’s budget—the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee is chaired by a Labor member and has a Labor majority. When they looked at health they found—finding 20, page 30, of their most recent report—that the 2022–23 budget for the Department of Health represents a 7.5 per cent reduction from the 2021–22 revised budget. That is $2 billion. The government has cut $2 billion out of health when we have got 87 000 people on the elective surgery waiting lists. We have people dying because ambulances will not turn up. We have got emergency departments, including that in Ballarat, overrun, and yet the government has cut $2 billion from health. You would not make it up. But then they go further, and when confronted with this reality in the budget papers and asked about it in a Public Accounts and Estimates Committee hearing, when the Premier was asked, ‘Why have you cut $2 billion—here’s the page reference, BP 3, page 220’, the Premier said:

There is no cut to the health budget ...

Well, that is not what the budget paper says. You are not meant to mislead the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee. In fact that is why we now have a minority report, because over and over again senior ministers and the Premier sought to say that black is white and that what their own budget document says is not the reality of the situation. But unfortunately for them they are the ones that published the budget. The budget shows that they have cut $2 billion from health.

That brings us to something they have not cut, and that is the Cheltenham to Box Hill part of the rail loop. The people of Ripon have never, in my opinion, had much of an interest in this rail loop. It certainly does not service their needs. It does not go anywhere near Ripon. It does not go anywhere near the western side of Melbourne even, and will not for years and years. Even the Box Hill to Cheltenham bit is going to take 15 years to build. On our side of the house we have said that we will take all of the money that the government is planning to spend on Cheltenham to Box Hill and put it into the health system. There has never been a time when the health system has needed that money more.

Specifically when we talk about regional health, and that is a great interest of mine, we will build a new Mildura hospital, we will build stage 1 of that St Arnaud hospital in Ripon, we will build Wodonga, we will build Warragul and we will build a $100 million cancer centre in Shepparton. I think of great interest to many country people is that many of those health services are going to be tertiary health services, and what that means is that they will train doctors and nurses on site. We know—all the evidence shows—that if you train people on site, 85 per cent of those people will stay in the region, at the health service in which they trained. That is particularly true of nurses. We have huge workforce shortages throughout country Victoria at the moment. One of the ways in which you fix that is by making the facilities where those nurses work attractive places to work—not 1930s buildings, which is what they have got in St Arnaud. So it is all part of a workforce development plan as well as providing new and fit-for-purpose facilities for country people as patients.

I now move past health to roads and rail, things that are of great interest to those in Ripon. If I go to budget paper 4, at page 87 it talks about the Western Highway. The Western Highway has appeared in budget papers now for, I would say, 20 years. It is a very big project. It started in Ballarat and is meant to go to Stawell. It has been around for so long that it was funded under the old formulas, where the federal government funded 80 per cent of the road and the state only had to fund 20 per cent of the road. Surprise, surprise, the federal government has in fact funded this road all the way through to Stawell—but it has not moved for over four years; it has not moved for seven years. There have been some monumental mess-ups by this government. They allowed a planning permit to expire. They allowed various other things to go wrong with this project. And there have been protests. I completely concede that there have been protests, but the protests came along after the government had let the planning permit expire, and had it not done that the road would have been built years ago.

We are still now left with a very dangerous road. Unfortunately not that long ago, only a couple of months ago, a paramedic died on that road on her way home from work in a head-on collision. Head-on collisions cannot occur if you have got a divided road. The simple fact is this is a dangerous road. The government has not got on with it, and as a result country people are dying. Country people are dying because this road has not been got on with.

Mr McGhie interjected.

Ms STALEY: I would just respond to the member for Melton: if he thinks it is okay that paramedics die on their way home from work, he should stand up and say so, rather than just interjecting across the table.

Apart from the Western Highway we have a number of other roads that need upgrading. There are C-class roads—VicRoads roads—that carry a lot of grain traffic that are only one lane wide; they are not even two lanes wide. They have got B-doubles on them, and of course they have got more B-doubles on them because the government has not finished the Murray Basin rail project that it so comprehensively botched and that the Minister for Transport Infrastructure completely botched and then abandoned. The result of that is we have more grain trucks on the road. They are wrecking the roads. The roads were not built for them. And then we have got these very narrow roads, and again the government cuts its road maintenance funds and then wonders why the roads are in such bad condition. We have said that we will bring back the country roads and bridges program. That is a major way for council roads to be upgraded, but we need to do more on VicRoads roads.

I note that the Parliamentary Budget Office is an organisation the government does not seem to like very much, particularly since they have found that the Box Hill to Cheltenham rail line does not stack up. But they have also done some other work. They did a report called Asset Investment Excluding Australian Government Funding—perhaps not the most exciting title. What it found was that per person asset investment in metropolitan Melbourne was $15 268 in the last budget, whereas for country Victoria it was only $7142. This government is a city-centric government. This is proof of that. It is one of the reasons that we on this side of the chamber have said that, should we come to government, we will ensure that 25 per cent of our infrastructure investment is spent in country and regional Victoria. That is the proportion of the population that lives outside Melbourne. We deserve and should be getting the same per capita spending on regional Victorians as those in metropolitan Melbourne, unlike with this government, who sees nothing good past the tram tracks. I would also, in this last part on roads and rail, note that we understand that with population growth you need to upgrade various transport options, and one of the ones that we will do is extend the Ballarat bus to Smythesdale so that that community will have half-hourly services instead of three a day.

Despite what those on the other side may like to claim, this budget has not delivered for Ripon. It has not delivered for country people. Overwhelmingly it has projects that are either on the never-never, like the Western Highway—and we will get on with that; or are like Maryborough hospital, which they have not turned a sod on—and we will complete that; or are completely missing altogether. What people need is not coming from those sitting on the government benches.

Mr TAK (Clarinda) (15:48): I am delighted to rise today to speak on the 2022–23 Victorian budget take-note motion. This is an amazing budget for Victoria and for Clarinda. Delivered by the Andrews Labor government, it is a budget that puts patients first and delivers the government’s pandemic repair plan. We know the pressure that has been heaped onto our healthcare system over the course of the global pandemic. Unprecedented pressure on the health system has been felt across the state, the country and the world, and we have felt this in the electorate of Clarinda. We are a major healthcare precinct, and I just want to again say thank you to all the healthcare workers at Monash Health and across Victoria for their hard work, courage and determination as we continue to move through the effects of the global pandemic. Our healthcare workers have been on the front line in this pandemic, and we know how important it is that we support them into the future. That is why this budget delivers an investment of $12 billion to put patients first with a pandemic repair plan, more staff, better hospitals and first-class care.

We are backing our healthcare workers, delivering funding to train and hire up to 7000 new healthcare workers, including 5000 nurses, and create 1125 new registered undergraduate nursing positions and 75 new registered undergraduate student-of-midwifery roles over the next two years. We are also recruiting up to 2000 expat and international healthcare workers through a global workforce recruitment drive.

As we know, right around the country demand for emergency services is at an all-time high. Our 000 services are dealing with unprecedented call volume, and of course when they call for an ambulance every Victorian should have confidence that one will arrive. That is why we are delivering another 90 paramedics, which means we have added 790 extra paramedics to the workforce since we came to government. To help our frontline workers reach Victorians who need them faster, we are investing another $333 million to add nearly 400 new staff to increase 000 call-taking and dispatch capacity for 000 services, including ambulance, and training more operators to allocate calls across the state. It is good to see the hardworking member for Melton; from his previous work, before coming to this place, he knows how important it is for this assistance. So these are very important investments into our healthcare workforce.

There is also a major investment into our healthcare infrastructure which makes sure that every local community gets the health infrastructure and services they deserve. There is a $2.9 billion contribution to building a new hospital and delivering upgraded healthcare services in every corner of our state, including $12 million for Victoria’s second mobile stroke unit at Monash Medical Centre in Clayton, in my electorate. This is a huge investment into our community and the health care of all Victorians.

I am extremely proud of the government’s continuing support of and investment into Monash Medical Centre. Earlier this year we finished the second phase of the Andrews Labor government’s $76.3 million emergency department expansion and traffic improvement plan. That project has delivered an additional 28 emergency department beds and an extra six short-stay beds as well as refurbishing 41 adult emergency bays. That project includes a specialised addition of an emergency department mental health, alcohol and other drugs hub as well as a separate, dedicated children’s emergency area. This will help to ensure that patients receive the right care in the right environment. This budget will continue the important development projects already taking place. By expanding our emergency departments, adding more surgical beds to get more elective surgeries done and increasing maternity care and services, this budget will ensure more Victorians get the very best care close to home. Monash Health is amazing. It is the largest health service in Victoria and sees nearly 5 per cent of the state’s emergency cases at the centre in Clayton. This Victorian government will continue to deliver, expand and improve facilities and enhance service delivery to meet the needs of our growing local community in the south-east.

As we roll out our pandemic repair plan to make sure that people get the care that they deserve, we are also getting on with delivering the schools, the roads and the public transport services that they rely on. We are continuing to build a world-class education system here in Victoria, the Education State. Since 2015 we have made significant investments in new schools, upgrades and improvements across the state. This budget will bring our total investment in improving and building new schools to more than $12.8 billion over the past eight years. To help better meet the needs of local families, this budget invests another $1.8 billion in building new schools and upgrading existing schools.

And there are some fantastic results in Clarinda in education. We invested $5.9 million to upgrade Kingston Heath Primary School, giving students modern learning centres and a new oval, because under the Andrews Labor government we are giving every child the opportunity to achieve their full potential regardless of where they come from. I was very pleased to join my friend the member for Mordialloc, the Parliamentary Secretary for Schools, at Kingston Heath Primary School earlier this year to share and celebrate this fantastic investment with the school community. In addition the Cheltenham Secondary College will receive another $413 000 to replace the current portable toilet block in the year 7 village to improve amenity, cleanliness and hygiene. This is part of our Minor Capital Works Fund, worth $42 million. These are all fantastic achievements and fantastic initiatives for Clarinda students and families.

Moving on, there are also some really important investments to get us home sooner and safer. We are building the roads that we now need as well as futureproofing our road network by investing in planning for our transport needs. The budget kicked off planning for installations of traffic signals at North Road and Mackie Road in East Bentleigh to improve safety for locals. This is an important and welcome investment. Thousands of Victorians also rely on our local buses to get them to work, school and around our community. Thanks to the investments in this budget we will get a smarter, faster and more reliable bus network, including more frequent services between Oakleigh, Box Hill and Southland on the 733 and 767 bus routes so Victorians spend less time waiting at bus stops and more time with family and friends—a great initiative, great investment.

We also want to give our multicultural communities the chance to celebrate. That is why we are investing $6.4 million to continue the Multicultural Community Infrastructure Fund so we can build and upgrade community facilities at places of worship through projects such as new car parks, kitchens and meeting places. This is great news for our vibrant and diverse community in Clarinda. It is also great news for the Wat Buddharangsi Buddhist temple in Springvale South, which will receive $250 000 to deliver a new playground for kids attending the temple with their parents and grandparents. Congratulations to venerable Ol Sam, the committee, members and volunteers on this wonderful result. There is also $25 000 for the Benevolent Association of Nafpaktians in Heatherton to upgrade their security system so that they can continue to come together safely in a great community space.

Another fantastic investment, more broadly, is that there are actually contributions of $26 million for young people and culturally and linguistically diverse communities, helping them come together as we emerge from the pandemic. More than $1.1 million will go towards multicultural festivals and events, helping communities celebrate and preserve traditions while also boosting our events and hospitality industry as we recover from the pandemic. Newly arrived migrant services will be assisted with more than $6.7 million to ensure critical settlement services can continue. Importantly, these services bridge the gap left by the commonwealth government, including support for community hubs, legal services and playgrounds. More than $4.4 million will deliver the Victorian African Communities Action Plan, known as the VACAP, including support for homework clubs, school community liaison officers and other key initiatives. These are also very, very important for our youth to celebrate and to be together rather than spending time somewhere else. It is a great initiative.

Almost $1.3 million will also deliver the Empower Youth program, connecting young people in areas of high socio-economic disadvantage.

The SPEAKER: Order! The time has come for me to interrupt business for the matter of public importance.

Business interrupted under sessional orders.