Wednesday, 20 March 2024

Government performance

Tim BULL (Gippsland East) (16:32): It is a pleasure to rise to make a contribution on this debate and to follow the member for Tarneit, who tackled the very big issues in the state around fishing and bushwalking and going to the zoo. I think even highland dancing might have got a run. It was good to see him covering the big issues of concern to Victorians.

I want to make a number of points in relation to rural and regional Victorians, including in my electorate of Gippsland East. There will be no political exaggerations here; I just want to put on the record a general summary of how bad things are in rural areas under this government. I am going to start with roads, and the Minister for Roads and Road Safety is here at the table.

I cannot remember roads being so bad. Trucking companies in my area who have had drivers driving for them for decades and bus companies cannot remember the roads ever being so bad. It is certainly not an imagined fantasy, as some members of the other side have described it. We had the minister standing up late last year saying very proudly that the government had filled 116,000 potholes. Doesn’t that prove a point – that we have 116,000 potholes? What happens is the temporary fixes last a matter of weeks. As soon as we get a bit of rain and we get a few more trucks, they are potholes again. Country Victorians are having to put up with this day after day.

The other issue that we have got that proves the point of just how bad our road network is is the amount of damage claims that have been lodged on vehicles. In 2021 the number of claims was 298. In 2023 it rose to 1532, and it will be higher this year. Do we need any more proof from drivers themselves that it is as bad as it has ever been? It has never been worse. We do not want temporary repairs. We want investment in our roads to have permanent fixes – not fill 116,000 potholes where I reckon a month later 80,000 of them are back as potholes again. It is a short-term solution that is not a solution in the long run. It ends up going absolutely nowhere.

People who come into my office say, ‘How come our roads are so bad but we are spending $216 billion on a metro project?’ Is that why our roads are so bad? Is it that country roads money is being funnelled into metro projects? We were told that was going to cost $50 billion a couple of years ago. We are now up to $216 billion. Goodness knows where that is going to end up.

I will move on to health, another area of complete and utter disaster. We have got people dying in pain on waiting lists. I am sure we have all had their families in our electorate offices. We have got people who cannot get a scan result back in time so they can start their oncology treatment. These patients, you can imagine the sleepless nights they are enduring only to turn up for an appointment with their oncologist and be told the scans are not there, in some cases up to five and six weeks later. We have had ambulances ramped at hospitals because there are no beds for the patients to go into inside those hospitals. This is not a knock on our medical staff. I know a lot of people who work in our hospitals. They are fantastic people. They are doing their best, but they need more support. Every time we raise something about health and the waiting list and the disastrous situation we are in, all we get back is, ‘Oh, we’ll blame COVID.’ We are a few years down the track from COVID now, and we cannot keep blaming COVID; we have got to fix the problem.

With all this going on, the hospitals in my electorate, and I am sure in other areas of the state as well, are being told to cut their budgets – ‘Trim your budgets.’ They are being told, ‘Don’t trim your budgets so that it impacts on any frontline services.’ Well, they have not got a magic wand. How can you cut millions out of a country hospital budget and not impact your frontline services? That is fantasy land commentary coming from the Minister for Health. If she expects what she is asking in her letters to country hospitals to be achieved, she is fair dinkum living in fantasy land. Our hospitals need more funding and more support. We have got to address these overlying problems. Again, people ask, ‘Why isn’t there any money for health? Is it going into that rail link thingy in Melbourne?’ I cannot go and get a coffee down the main street of Bairnsdale without someone mentioning that to me.

Housing: the public housing waiting list is out of control. It has grown massively in recent years. The government stands up in this place and beats its chest about its Big Housing Build, but the Big Housing Build to a large degree is a fantasy, because while they are building new homes they are demolishing and selling off old stock. So the Big Housing Build is not the net gain that it is claimed to be on that side of the chamber. It is almost deceitful. Since the commencement of the Big Housing Build in 2021 and up until June 2023 there were 3180 public housing homes disposed of either by sale or by demolition. Do we hear about that? The Big Housing Build when it was announced was to be promoted as a net gain in housing. On top of that with the homes that have been demolished and the few that have been built, we have got a net loss of bedrooms, of roofs over heads. There has actually been a net loss under the Big Housing Build. In my patch in 2017 we had 933 public homes – 933 in my area of Gippsland. This year we have got 931. They have sold off more stock and demolished more stock than has been built – absolutely ridiculous.

Then we have the federal government coming out and announcing record immigration levels. I mean, the pressure that that puts on all facets of society but in particular our housing – we cannot look after our own let alone having record levels of immigration coming into our country. It just does not work. Then we have got the repairs not being done to public housing. We heard from the member for Croydon in here yesterday, who spoke about the basic repairs not being done. Just as an example of some of the slow time frames, I have got an 89-year-old pensioner who lives alone in a little place called Cann River up in the east of the state. There is not a lot happens in Cann River, but it is a great little community. He has been without his television reception because of a glitch for four months. For this gentleman, his only source of entertainment – even call it company and interaction with the outside world – at age 89 on the pension is through watching the television. He is in a bushfire-prone area. It is where he gets his news every summer. For four months he has been trying to talk to the department to get it fixed, with no response. But there are so many cases around my electorate of work not being done, work not being completed, fences pulled down and not put back up again and damage to properties not being fixed. It is a joke.

Rentals are a big part of our housing mix, and what have we done – or what have you guys done over there? What has the government done, I should say, Speaker. They have increased land tax on second residences. In a housing crisis and a homelessness crisis, who the hell thought this would be a good idea? It drives landlords from the market. There is this perception that seems to be on that side of the house that all landlords are rich. These are mum-and-dad investors. They are nurses, they are schoolteachers, they are disability workers. They have chosen to invest in the housing market. They have got other options, but they are providing rentals for people who need to rent. Now, you are forcing them out of the market. We had last week one gentleman who has property investments in the electorates of Gippsland South and Gippsland East who just said he is selling up his investment properties. He is a self-funded retiree. He gets his income off them. That is how he is not a burden on the taxpayer. He is selling his properties locally and he is going to invest in properties interstate because of the land tax smashing that he has received on his bills. He is not a wealthy man, just a self-funded retiree pensioner trying to maintain his income levels. With this policy also, if landlords choose to hang in, they are passing that additional cost on to renters. So then the rentals become unaffordable for renters.

In the cases where they do sell, I would suggest that there are very, very few of those sales being picked up by people on the public housing waiting list. They cannot afford to live in homes. That is why they are on the public housing waiting list. So it is not putting residences back into the pool. I would say they are being bought by people who can afford to pay the additional land tax. It is not helping the bottom end, as this government would have you believe.

Then we have also got the impact on businesses. One publican in Gippsland East two days ago, when I was here in Parliament, sent me an email that bobbed up in my inbox that the land tax on his pub has risen by 380 per cent on last year – 380 per cent. So he has asked me, ‘What have I got to do to survive?’ He is in an area that was impacted by the bushfires a couple of years ago. He is now having to put off staff. Well done; you are impacting employment levels in rural and regional areas. The timber industry decision has kicked us in the guts, we have had the fires go through and now you have introduced a land tax on commercial businesses that results in staff being put off. Who the hell thought in a housing crisis and when we have got to drive the economy to be stronger that a land tax smashing is a good idea? I cannot find anywhere where that is possibly a good idea.

On that land tax, we have got a pensioner, a gentleman by the name of Robert Smith, whose driveway is on a separate title. Because of the lowering of the threshold, he has now got to pay land tax on his driveway to get to his home – because you lowered the threshold. Can you believe that? He has got to pay land tax now on his driveway for the first time because it is on a separate title. We have got another pensioner who had the adjoining block that the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning, whatever they were called back then, could not sell many years ago. It was offered to him for $9000 when he was working. So he bought it and paid it off, and he is a pensioner. Now he has been hit with this land tax on his adjoining block of land, because he is now having to pay under the reduced threshold. He cannot afford to pay it. What does he do? No-one wanted to buy it years ago; no-one will want to buy it now. He thought he was doing the government a favour, and now he is getting hammered.

Other issues we have got, while I have got time: the justice system has massive delays for court hearings. Families having no real say in plea deals – we saw that story this week. Countless victims are concerned about soft sentences. We need to make people accountable. The landlords and local communities shut out of renewable project approvals – that is not going to go well. Input from local communities helps get those decisions right. I concede streamlining the process is not a bad idea, but you can do that without cutting local people out from having their say on these projects. The wild dog program is under threat. We have had a dingo in here this week to pat, for goodness sake. I will show you some photos of what they do to the stock in my area. I have got sheep walking around with their intestines dragging on the ground that they are walking on top of, and we have got a dingo in here that we are patting. It is driving people off the land. We do not need more protections for wild dogs, and we do not need the removal of the buffer zone. It would be absolutely disastrous for our farming community in East Gippsland, absolutely disastrous. They are breeding out of control in the wider bush. We have got timber workers who still have not received their packages. We have got those ‍–

A member interjected.

Tim BULL: Oh, yes, that is funny, isn’t it? We have got down-the-line businesses that were promised funds from the timber industry exit strategy. Seed collectors – we have got people who were not harvest and haulage contractors but drove trucks. One gentleman I am sure a few members of Parliament got this email from around 10 days ago is saying he is about to lose his home because as a seed collector who replenished the coupes for VicForests he has had no income. He was promised a package in a media release four or five months ago; he has heard nothing.

The fire rebuilds are not done. I have raised this in the chamber a number of times. Cape Conran – not done. We are over four years on – four years after the fires. If it was on the banks of the Yarra River, it would have been fixed in weeks – four years. Campgrounds not open, boardwalks not fixed, bridges to campgrounds at Point Hicks, not fixed, by a government that does not give a stuff about the bush. The Premier said he would walk every way with us in the bushfire recovery, and over four years on we have got so many projects not done and many not even started.

My grievance only touches on some of the massive problems we have got for this government in the country. They need to take better care of the bush.