Wednesday, 29 May 2024

Regional Victoria

Peter WALSH (Murray Plains) (16:31): I rise to grieve for regional Victoria. The member for Eureka invited this side of the house to get behind her and her government. Can I say we do not want to go into the abyss of what this government is doing to Victoria or to regional Victoria in particular. We do not want to have the debt that we have in this state. The issue that I specifically want to grieve about is the fact that it is decisions of the Allan government that are driving the cost-of-living pressures here in Victoria. As the Premier would spin it, it is the war in Ukraine or it is international events that are leading to the cost-of-living pressures in Victoria. It is Labor Party Allan government policy decisions that are driving the cost-of-living pressure on Victorians. It is their issue with gas. It is the fact they have got a ban on gas and that no-one wants to explore for more gas that is driving up gas prices. It is driving businesses out of this state.

There was an article in the paper this week about Kagome, which is a tomato-processing plant, beetroot-processing plant and carrot-processing plant in Echuca. Kagome is an international conglomerate. They have got businesses in California, they have got businesses in Japan and they are in other parts of the world, and they are seriously looking at their investment in Australia and how they can actually keep profitability with the price of gas as it is for them to do their food processing. That story goes on right around the state because the decisions of this government are putting that cost-of-living pressure on households and business.

Power prices are exactly the same. The previous contributor talked about renewable energy and talked about transmission lines. By the time we build the transmission lines that are needed in Victoria that they are talking about for renewable energy, the cost of power will have gone up more because it is power consumers that are actually going to pay for those huge transmission lines right around the state ‍– and as I read it, that will not necessarily underwrite the stability of the power grid here in Victoria. It is Allan government decisions that are driving the cost-of-living pressures that we have in this state.

The other thing I want to talk about is – and I have said this to regional people – do not give this government the excuse that there is no money to pay for things. It is decisions of the Allan government that mean there is no money to pay for the things that are needed in regional Victoria. If you think about the $40 billion in cost overruns on the major projects here in Melbourne, $40 billion is hard to comprehend as to how much money that is, but there is a very simple equation. VicRoads have 23,000 ‍kilometres of freeways and highways in Victoria. If you say it costs $1 million a kilometre to upgrade those roads, to re-sheet those roads, that 23,000 kilometres of road would be fixed up with $23 billion. Forty billion dollars in cost overruns, $23 billion to fix the roads in Victoria and then there is $17 billion left over to fix the health system or $17 billion to contribute to more police or $17 billion to build the Warragul hospital in the member for Narracan’s seat. There would be $17 billion left over after all the roads had been fixed if you had not wasted $40 billion in cost overruns on major projects.

Again we think about being asked to follow the government down a particular path. Who was the minister that was in charge of those major projects? Who was the minister? It was the now Premier. How can we expect the now Premier to lead us out of the malaise that Victoria finds itself in when it was she, as a minister, who oversaw this $40 billion blowout in major projects here in Victoria? I grieve for the fact that regional Victoria is suffering because all that money has gone. All that additional capital infrastructure is going to go into the Suburban Rail Loop and some key projects in Melbourne but not into regional Victoria. In the budget there is $98 billion in the forward estimates for infrastructure projects. I might do a quick poll of the house: how much money do you think is for regional Victoria out of that $98 billion? Two billion dollars. The government put out a press release crowing how great it was that they are putting $2 billion of infrastructure into regional Victoria when they are putting $96 billion into metropolitan Melbourne. They are treating country Victorians with contempt. The issue around our roads could have been solved very easily if the government had not wasted $40 billion on cost overruns on major projects.

The next issue I want to grieve for from regional Victorians’ point of view is the housing crisis that we find ourselves in. I think every member in this house would know that there are people in their community that cannot get a house to live in – they cannot get a rental and they cannot get public housing. The public housing waiting list just continues to get longer and longer and longer. I think the waiting list for public housing is about two years now – if you are on the priority list. If you are not on the priority list, who knows when you will get a public house. It is government decisions – it is Labor Party decisions and it is Allan government decisions – that are driving the housing shortage in Victoria. It is the tax regime that is driving this particular issue.

Juliana Addison interjected.

Peter WALSH: A small fundamental taxation principle of economic argument, for the member that wants to keep interjecting: when you have got 55 new or increased taxes in the state and 27 of those 55 new and increased taxes are taxes on property, that means that people do not want to invest. Somehow those on the other side of the house think that private capital and private enterprise are a magic pudding that you can just keep taxing and taxing and taxing, and somehow those taxes will be spent wisely by this government. No-one has any faith that this government will spend taxes wisely. Look at the $40 billion in cost overruns on major projects. Is that spending Victorian taxpayers money wisely? No, it is not. If you actually want to help solve the housing crisis in Victoria, you reduce the tax burden on private capital to build the houses that are needed here in Victoria. Over a third of the price of a house and land package is state government taxes and charges. If young people who are saving up for a house knew that they were paying the Allan government more than a third of the price of their house and land package, they would be horrified. They would be absolutely horrified, because somehow the Allan government think that people are a magic pudding you can keep taxing and taxing and taxing and there will be no consequences.

We are seeing that people who had rental properties are selling them. They have got the land tax bill. They are saying, ‘Why do I want to own this when I’ve got this huge land tax bill?’ I talk to real estate agents. People are selling rental properties in this state and investing their money particularly in Queensland because they have got a more attractive tax regime. It is the rust bucket state of the 1990s. People are leaving Victoria to do business interstate because of the policy decision of the Allan government and because of the taxes that the Allan government is putting in place, particularly around property. We need to free up private enterprise to solve the problems, because government will not solve the problems. We have seen how much the cost blows out on any government project on those particular issues.

Juliana Addison interjected.

Peter WALSH: Can I suggest to the member for Wendouree that she might go back to night school and do some basic study on economics and how you get private enterprise to invest to solve the problems. You do not tax them so they leave the state and are no longer here to actually do something for Victoria. A simple night school lesson on economics might be very useful for the member for Wendouree.

The other thing I want to grieve about is the health crisis that we find ourselves in in this state. The communities that I represent find it abhorrent that their health services in the future may be bundled together and run from Bendigo. It equally applies to Gippsland, it equally applies to north-east Victoria and it equally applies to the south-west of Victoria. We have actually seen an example of this where Grampians Health is now run out of Ballarat and services are leaving regional Victoria. The members for Ballarat might be happy because they have now got the services that were delivered further west in Ballarat and people have to drive there to get a service. You have only got to talk to the member for Lowan, who was the former CEO of the Edenhope hospital, and she has described all the services that have left that hospital, have left Horsham, and people now have to travel to Ballarat.

There was a myth painted that if you put this together as one great big business, somehow there will be more services delivered in regional Victoria. The fact is that is not happening. The fact is that the example of Grampians Health is flawed. That is what is going to be forced on the rest of the state, and I find that abhorrent on behalf of my communities. How can the Mildura health service, 2 hours away from Bendigo, be run from Bendigo? How can Swan Hill hospital be run from Bendigo? How can Echuca hospital be run from Bendigo? How can the fantastic new hospital in Boort, which we built as a government, be run from Bendigo? Why should the local board and the local involvement be taken away to actually have a board in Bendigo of most likely Labor Party apparatchiks running those hospitals right across north-west Victoria?

There is a real issue with the health services in this state for the minister to say, ‘This is how much money you’re getting. It doesn’t matter that you’ve got more clients coming in, more services to deliver; you’re not getting any more money.’ If they cannot deliver the services with that amount of money, those services are going to be lost. I think that is wrong and very bad for the health of our regional communities, because no-one can determine what the demand is over a 12-month period. There is a set budget. If I am a hospital CEO delivering services and I get my budget on 1 July and by 30 March I have run out of money, I cannot deliver any more health services in my area. That is effectively what the Minister for Health has said. It does not matter how many people come through the door and it does not matter if there are issues in my community; there is no more money to actually deliver that. The way this government have funded health services, they have always run them far too lean, and they have relied on a letter of comfort at the end of the year to cover that particular deficiency.

Can I say that our communities – my communities, communities in Gippsland and communities in north-east Victoria – will be absolutely outraged if this government amalgamates all those health services into one health service that is coming out of the major regional cities in those areas, because you take away autonomy and you take away community involvement. A lot of those hospitals were originally built by the local community fundraising, running cake stalls and doing all the things that were necessary to get those health services started decades ago. Effectively what they are going to be forced to do in the future, those health services, is start running cake stalls again and start doing fundraisers down their main streets to pay the bills on those hospitals so they can actually get the services they need in their particular town.

The livability of our communities for the people that live there, to attract more people to fill the jobs that are available in a lot of these particular communities, is driven by a couple of key fundamentals. The first one of those is having a good health service in that particular community, otherwise people are not going to want to live there. The next is, obviously, having schools. In a lot of cases the jobs are already there, but it is hard to get people to come out and fill those jobs, because they look at the community. Now with all the publicity of the government saying, ‘We’re going to merge your hospitals. We don’t really care about your hospital; you’re going to be told what to do by someone 200 kilometres away,’ people that you are trying to attract to come to those communities to fill vacancies will go, ‘What’s going on here? The Victorian government doesn’t care about those health services. I’ll reconsider whether I move to that particular town.’ If they actually take a trip out there to have a look at the town to get a job, they are just as likely to blow a tyre, they are just as likely to smash a rim on the potholes that are on those particular roads, so it is not necessarily an attractive place to go out there.

So the key message that I would like to deliver on behalf of regional Victoria through this grievance is: we actually want to see a fair share of money spent in regional Victoria. Twenty-five per cent of the population of Victoria lives in regional Victoria. We deserve to get 25 per cent of the capital budget ‍– not $2 billion out of $98 billion – and to not have our health services merged and to not have our roads in such a deplorable condition that people find it dangerous. It has been quite often said that to drive a car in Victoria it actually has to be roadworthy. You would think the government would make the roads roadworthy so you could actually drive on the roads. They are spending more money on 40- and 60-kilometre-per-hour signs to put on the roads than they are to actually fix potholes. I grieve on all those issues on behalf of regional Victoria.