Wednesday, 15 October 2025

 Will FOWLES (Ringwood) (10:30): I rise to speak about the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee (PAEC) 2024–25 budget estimates report, and I will be focusing my commentary today around one main issue, which is the delivery of the promised Maroondah Hospital redevelopment. There are three questions that I can only attempt to divine from this report: (1) is it actually happening, and to what extent is it being afforded priority; (2) who is actually responsible for delivering the thing; and (3) when might it actually be delivered? I would say broadly the investment in health in the financial year 2025 budget was terrific, but I would query whether it is being directed to the right spots. Most health services around the state at the moment are running deficits, and the government continues to push off upgrades because of the government’s overcommitment to a bunch of ego-inspired infrastructure projects put about by the former Premier. That has hamstrung the government now and made it very, very difficult for the government to prioritise necessary projects, and that is most clearly the case in relation to the commitment around Maroondah Hospital.

My community feels left behind, both constituents and healthcare professionals alike. I was speaking to a nurse in the area the other day and she said – it is direct quote – ‘I wouldn’t even take my dog to Maroondah.’ That is the extent to which the service has been run into the ground. You have got a Minister for Health who is in constant conflict with Eastern Health. Every time Eastern Health announce changes to their service, it seems they very quickly have to back-pedal on those changes because the minister’s office comes down on them like a ton of bricks. There is clearly no coordination going on, no alignment of interests and no alignment of plans in relation to that facility, and that is very much to the detriment of my constituents in Ringwood. Maroondah Hospital is critical to my community. It is the backbone of health care in the eastern suburbs, and my community is continuing to feel left behind because these desperately needed upgrades are frankly just in the never-never, because trying to divine from this report or from the budget papers exactly where this project sits is frankly an impossibility. That is not a reflection on me or my staff. Any reasonable person could not work out from anything the government has published exactly where this project is up to. That arises from two problems, the first of course being the steady change in what has been promised in relation to this, but also the query around who is actually delivering the thing.

So let us just recap what was promised and what has actually happened. In 2018 Labor pledged a kids emergency department. In 2021 $100 million was budgeted to build paediatric EDs at five hospitals, including Maroondah, but as of now none have been delivered. That is publicly verifiable of course. In 2022 the election promise was to rebuild the Queen Elizabeth II hospital with a new ED, and since then government documents have only shown planning and feasibility work, and they have shown it only in an aggregated way. That comes about because of this somewhat opaque change where the Victorian Health Building Authority, the VHBA – which I guess was probably modelled on the Victorian School Building Authority, the VSBA – was merged with the Victorian Infrastructure Development Authority. So VIDA obviously has a much broader brief than just health infrastructure, and I just do not know why this change was made. It adds opacity. It is an agency responsible for delivering other infrastructure, and I just genuinely query – generally query and genuinely query – whether health is getting enough attention. And then there is the question of when this commitment might be delivered. According to this committee report, over a fifth of the Department of Health’s existing capital projects have been delayed by more than a year, and this is based, of course, on the FY 25 budget. We are expecting PAEC to bring down its next report reasonably soon, and I am sure that will confirm what I suspect – that there have been additional delays to the delivery of these important bits of health infrastructure.

That is largely driven by budget pressure and, again, is a reflection of the out-of-control ego of the former Premier.

What do we say about this? Well, in 2022 the then member for Burwood got up and said:

Construction on the new hospital is expected to start in 2025, and around 2500 jobs will be created during construction alone.

He said, in this place, it will be a $1.05 billion project. Now that of course was me, and I was speaking from Premier’s Private Office notes and that was the government’s position then. That was the commitment they made, and I call upon the government to now deliver on that commitment.