Wednesday, 21 February 2024

Storm recovery

John PESUTTO (Hawthorn – Leader of the Opposition) (14:13): My question is to the Premier. Yesterday the Premier told the house that 90 per cent of the 530,000 Victorians who lost power last week were ‘reconnected in the first 48 hours’. According to the Department of Health, once food in the fridge is:

… no longer cold to touch, it can be kept and eaten for up to 4 hours and then it must be thrown away.

Despite this, Labor set the eligibility threshold for their power outage support payment at seven days without power. Why is the Labor government setting illogical conditions that stop Victorians who desperately need financial support?

Jacinta ALLAN (Bendigo East – Premier) (14:13): The Leader of the Opposition selectively referred to some of what I answered yesterday on this issue in response to supporting Victorians who have had prolonged periods of power outages. I want to again acknowledge that the latest advice that I have, as of this morning, is that there remain around 1269 customers without power. Again, I acknowledge that this is a difficult time for those customers and that there is ongoing work to support the reconnection of those properties to the network. They are predominantly on the single-wire part of the network, and that is perhaps the most difficult part of the network to reach into and reconnect.

As I said yesterday in the house, it would be both wrong and deliberately misleading to indicate to any member of the Victorian community who has gone through the effects of last week’s devastating and destructive wind event to present the only response from the government as being that of providing support through the prolonged power outage payments. That would simply be wrong, and I would hope that the Leader of the Opposition at a time of emergency response would not be deliberately misleading Victorians about the nature and the range of supports that are provided to communities. I went through some of this yesterday about the supports that are on offer, particularly supports like the personal hardship payments. There is the work around the recovery support program. There are a range of supports that can be provided. If the Leader of the Opposition would like a briefing from Emergency Recovery Victoria, who are leading this effort, he can be precisely across this detail so he can, instead of running around trying to deliberately mislead communities, provide this important information to Victorians.

John PESUTTO (Hawthorn – Leader of the Opposition) (14:15): Yesterday the Premier stated in relation to support for small businesses hit by the blackouts that there are ‘other supports that are available’. If a small business lost power for four days last week, potentially costing them over $20,000, the single largest government support payment available to them is $380. Will the Premier now tell Victorians what other small business supports she was talking about yesterday?

Jacinta ALLAN (Bendigo East – Premier) (14:16): As I also indicated to the house yesterday – and the advice I have is this work continues today – because of the size and scale of the destructive wind events that tore through the state last Tuesday there continues to be work on the ground around reconnecting customers to power. I want to thank the emergency services who are continuing out there as we enter into another couple of days ahead of us of extreme weather, who are out there with the clean-up work that is going on –

James Newbury: On a point of order, Speaker, on relevance, this question asked what other support payments are available.

The SPEAKER: The Premier was a little bit outside of answering the question. I do ask her to come back to the answer.

Jacinta ALLAN: Speaker, this is relevant because, as I said yesterday, there are impact assessments underway right now. As those impact assessments are undertaken on households, on businesses and on community assets, we will get the full picture of what additional support needs to be provided. Again, we thank those workers who are right now doing this work on the ground.