Wednesday, 15 October 2025

 Martin CAMERON (Morwell) (16:31): I rise to contribute to this grievance debate, and this is my first grievance debate that I am doing since I have been elected to Parliament. I stand here today to grieve for the people of the Latrobe Valley. The Latrobe Valley has been the hub of our energy production for over 100 years. And we sit here at the moment, as power stations are scheduled to be shut down, with not a lot of words or hope coming out of the Allan Labor government as to the workers that currently work in the power stations as to what jobs are going to be available in the Latrobe Valley. As the member that was just up on her feet said, communities do change and you need to change with them, but being in the Latrobe Valley, we have people, generational families, that do not want to move away and shift anywhere. They want to stay in their home towns, and I think that is only fair. The government has gone through in the last five years (1) shutting down the timber industry, causing grief to many, many families in the Latrobe Valley and across Gippsland, and (2) rapidly shutting power stations. As I stand here today, in 2028 Yallourn will shut, then following that early in the 2030s Loy Yang will shut. We do need that hope of what manufacturing is going to be coming to the Latrobe Valley, so I grieve for those families and workers.

I also grieve for – and the Minister for Roads and Road Safety is at the table at the moment – the people of especially Traralgon, with an intersection which I have spoken about often, a dangerous intersection, the Bank Street intersection opposite the Traralgon Golf Club, where works have been carried out by the government to provide a brand new crossing, but it is without traffic lights. The way the government are making sure that it is safe is they have actually turned down the speed limit, which was 80 kilometres an hour, and it went to 70 and now it is 60. But we do desperately need these traffic lights, and I grieve for every single family member and every child that is travelling on a school bus through this intersection at times. We have had one incident at the intersection, with a school bus that was hit. For these traffic lights to go in, it seems that the people of the Latrobe Valley are the forgotten people of Victoria. The government is taking multiple things away from us. We are a very resilient population down there, and we do want to keep living and growing our families in our community down there, but we also realise that decisions that have been made here in Parliament are actually costing people their jobs and their livelihoods.

One of the things that I want to talk on today and that I do want to grieve about is people that are living in their houses, people that are walking the streets and people that used to walk the streets in the Latrobe Valley – and I know that this does go on right around regional Victoria – fearing for their safety. We have had families that have had to endure people breaking into their houses and stealing their cars. We have had tradies who, when pulling up at people’s houses to go to work, have had to endure their utes being stolen. But worse than that, we have had certain families in the Latrobe Valley who have had to go through the pain – and I do grieve for them; I have grieved with them privately and I grieve with them now in the Parliament – of actually having family members that have been killed either on the streets or in their homes, because of the Allan Labor government’s failure to protect them through tougher bail laws. All these people who have lost family members have done so because the perpetrators had been arrested and were then released on bail.

I speak of the Gordon family, and of Dr Ash, who was tragically killed here in Melbourne. His family, every single day, wake up grieving the loss of their son. They are the ones who have to go through family occasions – weddings, Ash’s own birthday, Christmas – without him. Then there is the Wright family. Harry, who was 90 years old, was killed in his own home. It is unthinkable that we need to be protecting our local community because of the failure of the government to be able to make sure that people who have been arrested multiple times are not back out on the streets.

Today we had a massive funeral in Traralgon. With the greatest respect to the family, I will not mention the name of the young adult that was laid to rest today, but once again the government and the system have failed this family and this particular child. Today the family had to go and lay him to rest at a funeral for their son. It is unthinkable that as we stand here in this chamber we should be made to go through this – not once, not twice, but three times, just in my community of the Latrobe Valley. And it goes on everywhere. I am not naive enough to think that there are not other people in the city and also around regional Victoria that have lost their life because of the crime wave that is currently going on in Victoria. I grieve for those families terribly, and I think everybody here in the chamber, because we are all decent people, grieves for these families that have paid the ultimate price of losing a loved one because we cannot keep them safe.

Our mums and dads that own businesses in the Latrobe Valley constantly have people walking through their doors if they have got shops, or if they are in our plazas and shopping centres and they have opened up businesses there where they are putting in their hard-earned money and spending their time, stealing stuff off their shelves and walking out, because there are no consequences at all for these particular individuals. Now, we talk about having the toughest bail laws in the country. Well, newsflash for the government: they are not working, because they are not tough enough. We are letting people commit these crimes not once, not twice, not 10 times, not 20 times, but up to 30 and 40 times. They are being put back onto our streets and making sure that families are living in fear. I have elderly people come into my office and beg me, ‘Can we please clean the streets up and make them safe?’ We have people that no longer will get on public transport and travel to the supermarket to get food.

They will only go at certain times of the day when they can rely on family members. I grieve for those people. They have lost the way of life that they should be living. They have worked hard all of their lives, and now in their later years they are locked up in their homes because they are scared to go out on the streets, so I absolutely grieve for them.

Also, as I touched on before, I grieve not only for the people of the Latrobe Valley but the people of Victoria that are relentlessly being told how wonderful it is that the SEC is coming back –

Sarah Connolly interjected.

Martin CAMERON: They say it is back. What is the SEC going to do? It is going to lower our power prices; it was a guarantee. The minister for the SEC stood there, and I remember she went, ‘Our prices are going down, down, down.’ I am yet to have one person come through my office with their power bills and tell me they think the minister was right and their bills are going down. It is not right. I grieve for those people that are planning for these prices to go down in their family budget and all of a sudden they are going without feeding themselves so they can put food on the table for their children, They are working two and three jobs, which is taking them away from their families. I grieve for those people, those family members. We say we need to make sure that our family time is safe and protected, but we are forcing people to work longer hours.

I grieve for them and for everybody in Victoria, especially in the Latrobe Valley, that has to watch television and see the smiles on the faces of politicians on the Labor side telling us that we are safe, telling us that our power prices are going down and telling us that everything is going to be all right, because that is not what we are seeing on the ground or, pardon the pun, at the coalface of people coming through my office door. I could ask any member here in the chamber, especially on the Nats’ side, and they will be getting these people coming through all the time, whether it be emails, whether they be walk-ins, because this is the mood of how people are. They have had enough of being frightened and being scared. I think it is not too far away that the silent majority, the people that are going to do the right thing most of the time, are going to become loud and find their voice. We always seem to pander to the really loud minority, the noisy minority, of people and the silent majority is pushed to the background, but I think the longer that this government is in charge, the louder and louder that is going to be.

As I said before, we spoke about homes being built around Victoria and the plan that the government has with the Big Housing Build. I grieve for land developers in the Latrobe Valley, because we have coal overlays that are archaic – they are 40 or 50 years old – and we have shovel-ready home developments such as this one development I will make a point of. Over 2000 houses are shovel ready to go, but they are waiting for a coal overlay that was extended 10 years ago to be wound back so this development can go ahead. What do we do? We continue to ask ministers to help us out with this coal overlay so we can build more houses, because we are not immune to having people that are living on the street and need houses over their heads. We are not immune to having first home buyers, newlyweds, that want to build their dream home. I grieve for them. For the government it is a stroke of a pen to change these coal overlays. We are not asking for them all to be changed, only a certain few to be changed so we can have the opportunity to have houses built in the Latrobe Valley and through regional Victoria. I have spoken with developers, and they are sitting on their hands. They say they can start tomorrow with these developments.

As the government talk a big game on their Big Housing Build, why are we being left behind in the Latrobe Valley? What we really need to know is why that is.

As I said, I do grieve for the people of the Latrobe Valley. In my time in Parliament, as I have engaged with them as a politician, as someone that has a voice here in Parliament, I have learned only too well – and I have known this because I have lived in the Latrobe Valley all my life – that people are doing it tough. They are worried about their industries closing down there, including the white paper industry, which had to close because of the timber industry shutting – an unforeseen circumstance, because the government did not do their due diligence to see what would happen if you just shut and cut and stopped a whole industry overnight. So we lost the white paper, and now we are transitioning out of the coal-fired power industry, without any leadership telling us what the new industry is going to be. So I grieve for the people of the Latrobe Valley, and hopefully they have only got a little bit over 12 months until there is a change of government.