Wednesday, 19 February 2025

 Sarah CONNOLLY (Laverton) (10:27): It gives me a great deal of pleasure to rise and speak on the Environment and Planning Committee’s report on the inquiry into securing the Victorian food supply and to be able to follow my very good friend and my very close neighbour the member for Point Cook, who I know has talked so passionately here in this place time and time again since being elected in 2022 about Werribee South and the food that is grown there. I am sure the member for Point Court will not mind me saying for him, as a proud vegetarian, I am sure that he and his family each and every single day have food on their plates at home on their dinner table that is grown in Werribee South.

It is fantastic to be able to rise to speak on the inquiry into securing the Victorian food supply. The goal of this inquiry was to examine the challenges facing Victoria’s agriculture and food supply as we deal with a growing population and an expanding city. It is a perfect opportunity to talk about the tremendous and awesome growth that is happening in Melbourne’s outer west, and right next door is one of the largest food supplies and food bowls. In Queensland, where I spent quite a few years living, we called it the salad bowl. The dirt was as red as anything and could grow anything, and a lot of the food grown there in south-east Queensland was in fact grown right next door to where I was living. The same thing as was happening up there in Redland Bay all those years ago is happening in Wyndham, and that is that more and more houses and precinct structure plans are coming through and are getting closer and closer and creeping closer and closer towards where our food supply is being grown and coming from. It is incredibly important to have an inquiry to look at not only the impact of that on food supply from a security perspective but, as the member for Point Cook spoke about, the importance of simple things such as rubbish being dumped in those farmlands where we are growing some of Victoria’s best food so that it does not continue, and I join him in calling on Wyndham City Council to do a better job of picking up the rubbish, which the community is tired of seeing scattered across its local community. To think that it is in the farmland where their food is grown and produced is just appalling.

We know that here in Victoria the agricultural sector plays such an important role in our state’s economy, accounting for over $10.8 billion and about 2 per cent of the state’s gross state product. Just as our government looks at how we are going to create more housing, better housing, more sustainable housing and how we are going to build the infrastructure to support a growing population, we also have to consider, most importantly, how we are going to continue to feed them. The question is more serious than perhaps it sounds, especially as we balance the expansion of Melbourne and outer-regional cities and towns into areas which were traditionally considered viable agricultural land. I know that Werribee South is but one of many examples, but it is important to talk about Werribee South, because the report tells us that this agricultural land adjacent to Melbourne, like the farms we see a stone’s throw from here in the city and the CBD, where we are now, has serious implications for the resilience of our food supply and in fact is more vulnerable to disruption, as opposed to farmland further afield in regional Victoria and rural Victoria.

The report makes a total of 29 findings and an additional 33 recommendations. It recommends a whole-of-government, whole-of-food-system response to the multifaceted challenges facing Victorian farmers, and this strategy must recognise that farmers are at the heart of Victoria’s food system and that an agricultural sector that produces healthy and nutritious food is central to the health and, importantly, the wellbeing of Victorians that this sector feeds.

I do want to acknowledge and credit the work of the members on the Environment and Planning Committee – I used to be one of them – including my very good friend the member for Wendouree, who chairs this committee. I know this would have been a topic that is very close to her heart. I also want to acknowledge the work of the committee secretariat. As the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee chair, I know that a tremendous amount of work is done by the secretariat staff. This is a really great report, and many, many hours would have gone into the preparation of it. I recommend that everyone have a read of it, and I am happy to commend it to the house.