Tuesday, 13 May 2025

Emergency Services and Volunteers Fund

Emma KEALY (Lowan) (13:16): I rise today to urge the Allan Labor government to urgently reconsider its desperately unfair emergency services and volunteers tax and immediately scrap the tax. We have just had a thousand or more people standing on the steps of Parliament. They are farmers, they are CFA volunteers, they are people who have been on the back of fire trucks all summer helping to fight bushfires, and they are desperate in their calls to scrap the tax. For my electorate of Lowan, it is about $30 million of additional taxes our people will have to pay. For Hindmarsh it is an additional $2.1 million; Yarriambiack, an additional $3.4 million; Moyne, an additional $5.9 million; Southern Grampians, an additional $4.1 million; Glenelg, an additional $3.6 million; Horsham, an additional $3.3 million; West Wimmera, an additional $3.2 million; Ararat, an additional $2.8 million; and about an additional $3 million in Northern Grampians. This is an enormous amount of money out of our small regional economies, and it could not have come at a worse time. With so many parts of my electorate facing urgent drought conditions, this will push our businesses to the wall. Local jobs will be lost. We will see money taken away from our charitable organisations and volunteer groups. I urge the Labor government to see the impact this surrogate land tax will have on country communities and scrap the tax.