Tuesday, 27 May 2025

Government performance

Wayne FARNHAM (Narracan) (17:31): I grieve for Victoria, and I also grieve for my eardrums after listening to that last 15 minutes of rubbish. Honestly, what a load of rubbish. And let us debunk a few things, shall we? The member for Tarneit is going to walk out of the chamber because he knows I am going to towel him up on this. The member for Tarneit just went on to social housing, and this is part of the reason why I grieve for Victoria. He banged on about our history of social housing and how bad we were. Well, in 2014 there were 13,000 applicants for social housing; now there are over 60,000, member for Tarneit. Yes, I thought you would walk out. Now there are over 60,000 applicants for social and affordable housing in this state. There is the first grievance of the day. I am on a regional committee at the moment, and I will not go too much into it, but this government is failing across the state when it comes to housing. People are on waiting list after waiting list and they cannot get a roof over their head, and that is a fact.

Members interjecting.

Wayne FARNHAM: I am trying to grieve – go away. Okay, it is hard to grieve when I have got a baby smiling at me; it is hard to be angry when that is happening.

Let me get back to the debate. There is no crueller tax than the one the government brought in last week, the fire services volunteer levy, and we heard the member for Gippsland South touch on it earlier. It is a cruel tax on our farmers. At the moment our farmers are really, really struggling – they are really struggling. A lot of those farmers are CFA volunteers, but some of them are not; some of them are not CFA volunteers. Whether they are up in the north of the state, the north-west or even down in West Gippsland, our farming community are really struggling, and they cannot afford this tax – they just cannot afford it. People say to me, ‘You’re not in drought, it’s green in West Gippsland.’ Yes, it is green because we get a frost and the grass greens up, but there is no growth. They are buying in feed every day. They are buying in water every day. It is cruel to do this to our farming community, but it is not just the farming community, it is every household and every business in this state. That is why the Liberal and National Party said, ‘We will reverse it,’ because we know there are cost-of-living pressures across the state in every sector.

You cannot turn around when we have got the public of Victoria in this much trouble and then introduce another tax just after the new Treasurer said, ‘We won’t introduce any more taxes.’ It was the first bill back – it was a tax – and then the next bill, the gambling bill, was another tax just after they said no more new taxes. It is exactly the same rubbish that Daniel Andrews said in 2014: ‘We will not introduce any new taxes into Victoria.’ 61 new or increased taxes later – 61 – how in the hell are Victorians meant to believe this government and this present Treasurer when they break their promise in the first budget with new taxes straightaway?

This state is under so much pressure. People are under so much pressure. We are in so much debt it is beyond comprehension – $194 billion worth of forecast debt. We are getting into some serious territory here with debt. I thought it was bad enough when I got elected – the forecast was at $167 billion when I got elected – but now it is $194 billion, with $1.2 million a day in interest, and that is if we keep our current credit rating. Let us not forget that. That is a very important point, because right at the moment our credit rating agencies are looking at the state of Victoria and saying, ‘It is a basket case; they cannot fix it.’ The Treasurer is going to do some pretty hard grovelling, I imagine, to try and keep our credit rating in check, because if we lose that current credit rating, what is our interest bill going to be per day then, or per hour? It is $1.2 million an hour now. Will it go up to $2 million an hour? That is something this state cannot afford. It is something every Victorian cannot afford. We know that interest going out the door is not delivering any services that we need, and that is a fact.

I just listened to the other side say, ‘All you guys do is cut, cut, cut.’ Well, in the budget the other day, where the West Gippsland Hospital is, there was $12.99 million in reduced project scope, and that means cuts. No matter what way you spin it, it is a cut – a $13 million cut in hospitals, done by this government. It has not been done by us. They are in government, not us.

The member for Tarneit leaned into the public service. He says we cut, cut, cut. I do not think he has been doing too much reading lately. On 19 May 2025 it was announced that several thousand public servants’ jobs will go – that is by this government. So out of the 57,000-odd public servants in this state, whose job is that? Several thousand public servants’ jobs will go. There has been another one that said 1200 jobs will go – that is by this government. This government is cutting the public service – not the opposition, the government. And this is the thing: the government like to make us out to be the bad guys all the time, but they are doing that right now. The CPSU is fighting to save 3000 jobs. So out of those 57,000 public servants, whose jobs are they? Because those 57,000 public servants will be going home wondering, ‘Is that my job?’ And their partner will be thinking, ‘Is that their job?’ So that is going to put a lot of people in doubt about their future in this state, not to mention that the state is in a terrible condition at the moment. It is in a terrible condition.

When we talk about housing and building and our social housing, it is all spin by this government. Eighty thousand houses a year, 800,000 over 10 years – we have not reached that target at all. Was it a factual target? Was it an aspirational target? Who knows. I am tipping it was more aspirational than factual, but they have not reached that target. We have a building bill going through the upper house this week that will, if passed, hamstring the building industry. It will mean less homes delivered because you will have less builders to deliver homes, because this bill will push builders out of the industry. This is why I grieve for Victoria – because nothing this government do they get right. There is nothing they can do. They cannot deliver a project on time or on budget. $48 billion in budget blowouts – that is an amazing, obscene amount of money to mismanage.

This government is not brave enough to stand up to the CFMEU to get projects under control. The other side were having a go at us, saying we will not do projects, we will not do this and we will not do that – we will. But the difference between us and them is we will do them on budget because we will not be beholden to the CFMEU – a criminal, corrupt organisation that this government has just let run riot in this state for the best part of a decade. They have done nothing to address it. Yes, the CFMEU has been put into administration by the federal government, but that is still not stopping the behaviour on the ground. We have seen that time and time again. We have seen news articles. We saw it on television, where we saw women getting abused on CFMEU sites, which is disgraceful behaviour. I have said it before in this chamber and I will say it again: I have got good friends that are in the CFMEU and they are good people, but this government has done nothing to get the criminal element out of the CFMEU. They have refused to bring in police checks to protect the good men and women of the CFMEU – blatantly refused. We tried to introduce a bill to do that, to protect the good workers, but the government, who is meant to be for the worker, refused to do it because they are too scared that their donations will dry up from the CFMEU. We know the CFMEU give the Victorian Labor government a fair bit of coin. But I tell you what, this government actually needs to stand up for the workers like they used to, not be beholden to the corrupt thugs of the CFMEU. ‘Doing what matters’ – that was one of the government election slogans in the 2022 election. The member for Laverton touched on it earlier. ‘Getting things done’ and ‘Governing for all Victorians’ – they were the slogans. The problem is this government is not governing for all Victorians.

Talking about infrastructure delivery, the Gippsland rail line down in my patch runs through to Morwell all the way down to Bairnsdale in East Gippsland. They were meant to duplicate the whole line. It was about a $490 million investment from the federal government and about $40 million from the state. They have not completed the project. Not only that, they went back to get another $380 million from the federal government. Guess what, they still have not completed the project. They still have not duplicated the line from Bunyip to Longwarry, which was in the original scope of works. Guess what, they have cut that out. There is a cut they do not want to talk about, and they do not want to talk about it because they cut it based on a report that does not exist – an environmental report that has not been done and does not exist. It was the Premier that gave me that statement when she was the Minister for Transport Infrastructure. I have done my research; that report does not exist. She has misled my community about that rail line. Why has not it been done? Because they constantly run out of money. This government goes back to the feds, puts its hand out and says, ‘We need more money because we can’t manage it.’ This government is like a petulant child – a child you give $100 to and say, ‘Go spend $100,’ but they go out and spend $200 and ask for more, with no accountability. That is a problem. This is why I grieve for Victoria, because with every budget blowout and every bit of waste somebody misses out.

In my community, with this budget that came through, the West Gippsland hospital is delayed again. It was meant to start in 2024, and it is not going to start until the back end of 2026 at best. It is meant to be completed by 2028. A hospital that size will take four years to complete. We are not going to see that at best till 2030, and by then our population would have grown by about another 7000 or 8000 people, which is going to put Latrobe Valley hospital under pressure and any other surrounding hospital under pressure – not to mention the pressure that exists in that hospital, and those staff work in terrible conditions. That is why I grieve for Victoria, and I grieve for my electorate. Our roads and intersections are poor. I have asked the Minister for Roads and Road Safety on several occasions about an intersection in Bunyip where there is accident after accident, and it will not get fixed. All I get is a press release and a little line at the bottom that says, ‘We’re monitoring the situation.’

The government cannot even get the surplus right. It was reported we were going to have a $1.5 billion surplus; well, all of a sudden $900 million went missing, and we only had a $600 million surplus. Where did the $900 million go? More waste and more budget blowouts, or is it all getting funnelled into the Suburban Rail Loop, the very project that could bury this state and the very project that the ratings agencies are warning against by downgrading our credit rating? The government has to seriously rethink the Suburban Rail Loop, because this state cannot afford it. It was originally announced in 2018 at $50 billion, but in 2018 we did not have the debt level we have today – nowhere near it. Now it is $214 billion with a debt of $194 billion, and we are paying $1.2 million an hour in interest.

I grieve for this state because this government, in a word, has stuffed it. People are hurting all over the state. Yes, the government build things, but they waste so much, and that is what is costing Victoria. This is why I grieve for Victoria, because the waste of this government is going to cost jobs and is going to cost the community the services they desperately need.