Wednesday, 19 November 2025

 Rachel WESTAWAY (Prahran) (17:31): I rise today in concern for the direction of our state under a government that has absolutely lost its way. I am grieving for Victoria with Melbourne Grammar students here today. We are all grieving. I am grieving for them and our future. The Allan government’s decade of failure has driven Victoria to the bottom of every national ranking that matters, while creating an environment for corruption in construction that costs taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. There was a time when Melbourne was the envy of Australia. Sydney was green with jealousy at our vibrant laneway dining, our nightlife, our thriving hospitality sector and our new businesses that chose to invest in our state. We were destination number one for business, for talent and for ambition. While this government has sleepwalked through a decade of waste and mismanagement, other cities have looted our best and brightest with lower taxes and less regulation. Sydney has reclaimed the crown, and Brisbane is booming.

The evidence is damning. For the third consecutive year the Business Council of Australia has ranked Victoria dead last for doing business, and that is just outrageous – eighth out of eight states and territories. This is not a close call; this is not margin-of-error territory. Victoria is comprehensively the worst place in Australia to run a business because of the Allan Labor government’s mismanagement. The BCA’s chief executive Bran Black was blunt: Victoria’s business environment has deteriorated significantly. He pointed to our regulatory burden, tax settings and infrastructure chaos. In Victoria a cafe owner needs 36 separate licences and approvals before they can pour their first cup of coffee – that is 36 separate licences. This is not an exaggeration. This is from the BCA’s Better Regulation Report of 2025.

Other states streamline approvals, but what does Victoria do? It adds red tape. Other jurisdictions attract investment, and Victoria simply drives it away. And this is not just about large corporations; this is about the small business owners in my electorate who want to expand their cafe into the neighbouring shopfront but face lengthy planning approvals and costs that make it commercially unviable, this is about the hospitality operator who cannot justify hiring additional staff due to payroll tax and compliance burdens and this is about the retail businesses facing onerous requirements that make additional trading hours economically impossible. Chapel Street was once Melbourne’s premier retail and hospitality destination. Today small business operators are closing their doors because this government has made Victoria uncompetitive, unsafe and unworkable. I have witnessed family businesses that have operated for decades close – not startups that failed to find a market, not businesses that were poorly managed but established operations, some family-owned for decades, that simply cannot afford to operate profitably under this government’s regulatory and tax regime.

Victoria now carries the highest state debt in Australia, both in dollar terms and per capita. The 2024–25 budget projects net debt will reach $187.8 billion by June 2028. Victoria’s net debt is growing by more than $2 million an hour. That is $48 million of debt a day. Victorians are paying $17.8 million every single day just in interest on this debt. And what have we received? Cancelled projects and cost blowouts: the Big Build became the big botch-up; the North East Link, originally at $15.8 billion, now tracks towards $26 billion; the Metro Tunnel, late and over budget, serves fewer passengers than projected; and the West Gate Tunnel has blown out by more than $4 billion. Project after project, there is cost overrun after cost overrun.

Let me put those numbers in perspective for the families and businesses in my electorate of Prahran. These infrastructure blowouts are equivalent to building dozens of new hospitals. They are equivalent to employing tens of thousands of additional new nurses and teachers for the next generation of kids coming through. They are equivalent to funding essential services for years. Instead, it is a debt that will be serviced by our children and our grandchildren while core services in my electorate go unfunded. This budget’s mismanagement has real-world consequences. A hospital bed shortage means a grandmother waiting 12 hours in the emergency room. A teacher shortage means overcrowded classrooms. A police shortfall means a Chapel Street business owner robbed three times and no longer able to get an adequate response.

A Liberal government will be smarter with the budget, investing in frontline services and preventative measures that save money in the long run, investing in preventative healthcare education so that every child reaches their potential, and community policing so crime is deterred. But this is challenging when interest expenses were $272 million higher than budgeted for the 2024–25 period and employee expenses were $2 billion over budget. Meanwhile essential services in my electorate go unfunded. Local schools are waiting for maintenance. Community facilities are deteriorating. St Kilda Primary School needs a new multipurpose hall. Prahran Mission need additional support for their homelessness services. Our local sporting clubs need facility upgrades, but there is no more money. The money has been spent on cost overruns, cancelled contracts and projects that were never properly costed in the first place.

This is a government that prioritises vanity projects over core services, debt over delivery and photo opportunities over fiscal responsibility. How does this government respond to its debt crisis? Well, by hitting Victorian families and businesses with more taxes. Payroll tax thresholds have not kept pace with wage growth, dragging more small businesses into the net. The congestion levy expands to capture more businesses without improving a single road. The interest bill on state debt now exceeds what we spend on TAFE, and we are borrowing to pay interest on borrowing. This is mortgaging Victoria’s future to pay for Labor’s failures today, and it is not fair. These are the issues that I am grieving about for our next generation.

It is not just businesses feeling the squeeze. Victorian families are struggling with the highest cost-of-living pressures in the nation. Electricity bills have skyrocketed. Council rates are rising faster than inflation. And every new state tax, every fee increase, every regulatory impost flows through to the family budget. This government talk about supporting working families, but every policy decision makes life harder for the people they claim to represent. Now this government wants to extend the congestion levy to Stonnington, capturing Chapel Street and Prahran businesses. This levy is designed for the CBD, not for suburban shopping precincts that the community and businesses are striving to revitalise. This is not congestion relief. This is a revenue grab. Chapel Street vacancies are sitting at up to 16 per cent. We are working hard to revitalise this iconic precinct, and the government’s response: ‘Let’s just make it more expensive.’

James Newbury interjected.

Rachel WESTAWAY: Absolutely, member for Brighton: ‘Let’s just tax us all and make it more expensive for customers to visit.’ While Chadstone shopping centre offers free parking, this government wants to slug Chapel Street visitors with a higher cost.

My traders are telling me that they are trying to negotiate with Stonnington to get better deals on parking because their retail staff who come from other areas and cannot always take public transport are feeling the hit because the cost of parking has increased. Sixty-four per cent of spending in Prahran comes from visitors outside of the area, and they drive here. This levy will send them elsewhere, killing the precinct we are fighting to rebuild. The consequences are absolutely clear: Victoria is losing businesses to Queensland and New South Wales. Businesses are voting with their feet. The amount of people that tell me they want to leave Victoria and move to Queensland is astounding. That is not what we want for this beautiful state. We want to retain people. We want to grow. We want people to enjoy what Chapel Street, Prahran and Victoria once were. Companies that built their success here are relocating. Startups are bypassing us absolutely entirely. The professional services firms that once anchored our economy are opening Brisbane offices. The technology companies that should be driving our future prosperity are establishing in Sydney. Young professionals graduating from our universities are looking interstate for opportunities. Even students are going to other states so that they can study there. It is cheaper and life is better in other states, the way this government is pushing this state.

In Prahran I have witnessed family businesses that have operated for decades close, not because they have failed commercially but because the regulatory burden, tax imposts and operating environment made continuation impossible. Business owners in Prahran tell me the regulatory burden has become overwhelming. One hospitality operator walked me through their monthly compliance requirements. Listen to this: licensing renewals, payroll tax calculations, superannuation reporting, WorkSafe documentation, food safety audits, council permits – hours chewed up that could be spent more productively in their business. That is the reality. That is testimony I hear week after week in my electorate office. Time and money that could be spent on growing their business, hiring additional staff or improving their customer experience is instead consumed by navigating bureaucratic processes that add no value and create no jobs.

Then there is the CFMEU scandal, which exposed not just corruption but economic sabotage: bikies employed as union delegates on Labor’s Big Build, systematic workplace thuggery, violence and intimidation as a standard operating procedure. Every dollar extracted through dodgy deals is a dollar not spent productively. Every delayed project is economic activity foregone. The Premier received a letter in April 2022 from an Indigenous labour hire firm detailing violence and intimidation by CFMEU officials. Her office took six months to formally log it in, and it did not get logged until October 2022. The public only learned of this correspondence in July 2024, when Nine newspapers revealed the extent of the CFMEU corruption and the two years and three months during which Victorian projects became synonymous with cost overruns and delays. A government that tolerates corruption has lost its mandate to govern, in my view.

I must briefly address the crime crisis, because it directly impacts our economic recovery. A criminal offence occurs in every Victorian retail environment at least once every 5 minutes. Workers are leaving the hospitality industry because they no longer feel safe, and Chapel Street businesses have installed costly security measures, reducing their capacity to invest in growth and employment. New South Wales has had online crime reporting since 2016, and what do we have? Nothing. While other jurisdictions invest in preventative policing, Victoria plays catch-up with announcements that never materialise into action. Business confidence requires community safety. We cannot rebuild Victoria’s economy while businesses and workers operate in fear. Earlier this week our leader Jess Wilson set out a clear vision for Victoria, a vision built on four priorities: getting the budget back under control, ending the crime crisis, ensuring access to quality health care and giving every Victorian the opportunity to own their own home.

Getting the budget under control means living within our means. It is what we have all been taught we need to do. It means prioritising core services over vanity projects. It means ending the waste and corruption that has characterised Labor’s Big Build. It means budgets based in reality, not budgets designed for the sound bite and press release, only to be found wildly inaccurate.

When we control the budget, we can ease cost-of-living pressures and invest in police, nurses and teachers rather than servicing debt and funding union slush funds. Victoria’s economic decline is not inevitable. It is a result of policy choices – policy choices that can absolutely be changed. We need to cut red tape, not create more of it. We need to attract businesses, not drive them away. We need competitive tax settings, not the highest impost in Australia. A Liberal government will tackle the regulatory burden that is strangling Victorian businesses, will examine payroll tax settings to support small and medium enterprises, will fix the planning system so businesses can invest with confidence and will deliver infrastructure that serves the community: roads that reduce congestion, public transport that works, not vanity projects with cost blowouts that cripple the budget for absolutely decades. The next election is just 12 months away. Victorians have an absolutely clear choice.