Wednesday, 19 November 2025

 Tim BULL (Gippsland East) (16:31): Well, what a wasted contribution that was, with all the problems we have got going on in the state at the moment. With all the issues we have got going on in the state, we get a 15-minute contribution on the leadership of another party from someone who has been overlooked for a ministry position, I think, 30-something times, Tim. So it is obvious you are not held in very high regard, mate. Obviously you are not held in very high regard in your own party. But I will get on to some of the issues in the state rather than wasting my time.

The SPEAKER: Through the Chair, member for Gippsland East.

Tim BULL: With all the issues in Mordialloc, we have a 15-minute contribution on that rot.

I will now cover off on some of the issues that are impacting the state. First of all, fire services and the fire season is the first topic I would like to cover. We are now heading into another fire season. One asks: are we better prepared than we were in 2009 when Black Saturday hit? Let us have a look at some figures. In 2009 we had 39,000 operational volunteers in this state, and now we have 28,000, a reduction of 11,000, or more than a quarter of our volunteer firefighters in Victoria. It has come about as this government declared war on the volunteers, including the period when many hung their uniforms outside CFA stations right around the state in protest. Even in the last five years alone we have had a reduction of 5000 CFA operational volunteers. What does that mean on the ground? I will tell you what it means. It means it has a great impact on the surge capacity of the CFA. The ability to send strike teams into areas where fires are endangering communities and lives is compromised when we have this reduction in CFA volunteers. In past years we have relied heavily on strike teams to come from other areas of the state, but that capacity is dwindling under this government.

We had a royal commission that said we needed to burn 5 per cent of the bush to give us a reasonable level of safety. We are burning a quarter of that. It cannot end any other way when you get your summer lightning storms. When you are only burning a quarter of what the bushfires royal commission recommended it can only end one way, and that is in another megafire. The policies of this government have set us up for that. So we have got less firefighters, we are not getting the level of burning done that should be done and now we have the issue with firefighting vehicles – 349 G-Wagons and Unimogs taken offline. We are told that a handful have returned. We are also told that some have been written off.

We are asking the minister to tell the Victorian community what the current situation is. His comments of simply saying ‘Well, we’re ready’ do not wash. I have got in my electorate chambers of commerce, business and tourism groups, individual businesses, CFA volunteers – I have even got Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action staff – asking me what the situation is. Rather than giving us the motherhood statement that ‘We’re ready’ – this is fire season; this is life-and-death stuff – our communities need to know what the situation is. I doubt we have had many fires through the electorate of Oakleigh, and I doubt the minister has seen many fires or experienced firsthand the trauma that comes with them. He tells us to be fire ready, but when we are asking for detail on how fire ready the government is, we get nothing.

We know the minister did not crack the chassis or break the chassis on these trucks. We are simply asking for a bit of honesty to tell us what the truth is. We are told we have had 30-odd replacement vehicles from New South Wales and about 10 from South Australia, but that does not replace 349. We want to know what the real situation is. In relation to our vehicle fleet and the CFA, at a briefing this week we were told we have got the oldest fleet in Australia. In Victoria we have got the oldest fleet in Australia – older than the United States and older than the UK. The renewal is not being done.

I want to get on to housing. The government has talked a big game on housing, but let us have a look at how things have played out on the ground. The social housing waiting list in 2023 was 52,000 – that was only, what, nearly three years ago now or two and a half years ago. It is now at 67,000. It has gone up 15,000 in less than a little bit over two years at the same time that the government is saying it is solving this issue. We are not meeting the promised build targets. In Gippsland, which takes in the member for Morwell’s electorate and the local government areas of Latrobe, Wellington and East Gippsland shire councils, we have got less social housing homes in our electorates than we had in 2016. How is that fixing the problem? We have got less. It is just absolutely out of control.

We can talk about homelessness. Let us look at one of the contributing factors to that, the cost-of-living crisis in Victoria. On power prices, we have the minister coming in here saying the prices are going ‘down, down, down’. That was the energy minister’s comment: ‘down, down, down.’ It is bit like the Coles slogan. But what we are seeing is prices going higher and higher. That is the slogan. I think Jackie Wilson sang that, didn’t he? I think ‘higher and higher’ was the lyric in that song. It is just smoke and mirrors; it is not the truth that is coming. We have seen massive, massive increases and, on top of that, an array of new taxes. At the top of the list is the emergency services levy that is ripping money out of the pockets of people that are already struggling. We had another tax debated in here today, with another $100 million coming out of the pockets of Victorians, and it is all to service this massive debt.

We have got crime that is out of control. We heard from the minister saying that the police academy is full. The trouble he has got is that he is losing police at a rate higher than that at which he can churn out new ones. We support our police, but they are frustrated by the lack of support. I was at a send-off for a local policeman last Sunday. The whole police community was there, and they are sick and tired of locking up offenders and having them released. They are sick and tired of that. They want the move-on powers back. They want sentencing in line with community standards. All this is while we have had a $50 million cut to the police budget. It is just not right. Labor says we have the toughest bail laws. They are not as tough as when Labor came to government. They are not the toughest bail laws that we have had under this Labor government. Since they got wound back, they have not been restored to the same level.

On crime, the latest figures that came out in the last month have total offences up 47 per cent and crimes against people up 63 per cent. The anti-mask laws that were promised have been watered down. They have not restored the move-on laws, which the police want. We have got more experienced officers leaving every day, so we are getting a younger and more inexperienced police force to deal with these issues. We know police across the state are down 2000 in numbers, so you cannot correct this. The deficit of 2000 police cannot be corrected when you have got more leaving than are coming through the academy. It is only going to get worse. To prove the point, in 2020 we had 16,284 full-time police. Now that is down to 15,909. That is 375 less, when the Victorian population has grown by 460,000 – nearly half a million more people and 375 less police. They are very, very damning figures.

What has been interesting over recent times is that we have had members coming into this chamber talking about a new type of crime, with youth crime and aggravated attacks. I mean, who are they kidding? It is a great attempt to rewrite history – but a new crime? Youth performing aggravated attacks – I think we have been talking about that in this chamber for a long, long time.

But I will tell you what has changed. What has changed is how we hold people to account. I was rather alarmed this week to see reports that two youth offenders serving time on community corrections orders for very violent crimes had a trip to the Gold Coast to visit the theme parks.

A member interjected.

Tim BULL: Yes, a trip to the Gold Coast to visit the theme parks. And it is not the first time it has happened. When the Premier was asked about this at a media conference, she said, ‘Oh, that was a federal decision.’ Well, it was done with the authorisation of the state government. The state government facilitated it. When it got uncovered the Premier wanted to blame the federal government, but it was the state that did this – sending violent youth offenders to the Gold Coast’s theme parks. I mean, goodness gracious, what has this world come to?

Before I finish, I want to talk for a little while about roads. I note that the Minister for Roads and Road Safety is at the table. A couple of years ago we had the member for Eltham stand up in this place and say that the poor condition of our roads was an imagined fantasy. That was the commentary that she used. Now we have had a similar brain fade. This time it was Sonja Terpstra, a member in the other place. I will just provide a little bit of background before I talk about what she said in the upper house.

We had a massive pothole that damaged the rims of 20 cars. They were all pulled over on the side of the road. There was video evidence of this posted far and wide; I am sure the minister saw that. The people who were impacted rang in to talkback radio and spoke extensively about their experience. Some blew out two tyres and had to be towed away, because they obviously only had one spare. There was a lot of damage done to the rims of these vehicles. There were people saying they could not afford to pay for the repairs, that the costs were excessive, they simply were going to be out of pocket and it was a bill that they could not afford. But Ms Terpstra got up in the other place and actually questioned whether it happened. She spoke about it like it was some sort of conspiracy theory. She said that she saw no potholes on the road, and had driven the road weeks before to collect some chooks, I believe – I do not know how that was relevant – but never saw any potholes. And her comment was that now there is ‘magically’ some ‘outrage’. So we have got Victorian families who have had their cars damaged and cannot afford to pay on the side of the road ringing tow trucks to tow them to the nearest garage – magically some outrage, she described that as. Is she inferring that they called the tow trucks when they did not have to? I am not sure. Is she inferring that the road crews out fixing the pothole that some described as half a metre deep – there might have been a bit of mayonnaise on that, but it was clearly a very serious pothole – were out fixing a pothole that did not exist? Is she inferring that the damage to cars at a combined cost of tens of thousands of dollars is fantasy – because she referred to it as it ‘magically’ creating some ‘outrage’.

I note in his previous contribution the member for Mordialloc was indicating that he would like to know if members of the Liberal Party stood by the comments of some other members of the Liberal Party. I would be interested to know if members of the Labor Party would stand by the comments of Ms Terpstra in the other place, because I will tell you what, they are very, very interesting comments. How do some people get in here?

Anyway, I will finish up by saying that on every count that I have mentioned here today, and there are a few that I have not gone into, this government has failed. We have got a lot less emergency services workers, the CFA volunteers, to protect our country communities. We have got cars off the road that we rely on over summer, with the minister not telling us when they are coming back. The fuel reduction burns have not been done. Government policies have created another recipe for disaster in relation to this summer. If it does not happen this summer, it is inevitable, because you cannot have these policy positions and not have any outcome other than a megafire. On housing, the issues are the public housing waiting list has grown 15,000 in the past 2½ years. In some areas like Gippsland, we have got less public housing homes overall.

Power prices have gone through the roof despite the promise that they would be coming ‘down, down, down’. We have got police leaving at a greater rate than we have police coming through the academy at a time when we are already 2000 police down in this state – not 20, not 200, but 2000 – in the face of a crime wave. It is an absolutely damning statistic. And then we have roads. I know a lot of truck drivers and bus drivers from my electorate; we do a lot of freight in my electorate. I see a lot of these drivers socially, and they say they have never seen the Victorian roads in a worse condition. We get 20 mils of rain and our roads fall to bits. It is not even floods that are causing the issues.

I have not mentioned a whole range of other areas. I have not mentioned the cuts to parks and our fisheries offices, which is leaving a greater scope for those poachers who want to do the wrong thing to go about their business. I have not mentioned our health services and the crisis that we have within our health service, which we are all hearing about in our electorate offices every week. The point I am making is that no matter what measure you apply to this government’s performance, it has failed on every count. And that is why I grieve for the people of Victoria.