Wednesday, 18 March 2026

 Cindy McLEISH (Eildon) (10:24): I am going to make a contribution on the 2025–26 budget estimates reported by the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee in October last year. I am going to talk about two sections. Firstly, I am going to talk about Victoria’s container deposit scheme in section 9.4.1 and the findings and recommendations there. I am very pleased that the relevant minister is in the shadow to listen to me once again raising issues about the container deposit scheme. Finding ‍71 outlines the number of refund sites, 640, that have been established across Victoria, and 1.8 billion containers have been deposited, which means $180 million has been provided to charities, individuals and organisations throughout the state.

In my area people have taken to this with a passion. In fact we have had millions and millions of containers deposited across the electorate. I want to specify a couple of areas where people have taken to this with a passion and reduced litter very much, which is one of the recommendations: recording how much the scheme has actually reduced litter. It has reduced litter – people tell me that all of the time; it is visibly obvious. We have had a couple of issues with Smiths Gully being very difficult, the Eildon container deposit return point and the egg farm in Yarra Junction. For some reason the Eildon container deposit scheme, which needed to be moved, was unable to be approved at a new and better location, and the community was in uproar about this. What does this mean? What has actually happened now? People are hoarding, and that is not a good outcome. They are waiting to know whether a new venue will be approved, because what did happen was they found a location, Visy said, ‘No, that’s not going to happen. We’re not going to approve that,’ and in the next breath advertised in the local paper for new locations. They applied again, and Visy said, ‘No, we’re full.’ That just was not right.

People have been hoarding, and they are waiting. An example was given to me of a little kid who came up to the caravan park there who was returning his containers, and he was saving for a wakeboard. It took him a while, and he actually then got enough money to be able to do this. We also have a lot of clubs and organisations who were participating in this scheme at that outlet who now are holding onto the containers, and that certainly is not a good idea. You do not want people having to drive hours and hours, which is what some people think should happen. We do not need that to happen. Volunteers do not have time to do that.

With regard to Yarra Junction, at the egg farm there were a couple of issues down there. That was a very easy location for people to drive into to drop off their containers. After it was closed Visy opened up a little shopfront, which always has one of the two outlets full or jammed, the same as the one up in Seville – people are always complaining about that. That is never going to be able to take the capacity of the millions of containers that people are collecting in the Upper Yarra. What we have seen when the machines have not been working or there is a queue, because it takes ages, is people have dumped them in the rubbish bin. This is exactly the opposite of what should happen. I urge the minister and the government to have a good look at some of these easily accessible options and make that happen.

I want to touch briefly on whole-of-government recommendations around the risk to financial sustainability, particularly recommendation 5, which says:

The Department of Treasury and Finance create specific targets and timelines for its goal of reducing interest payments on debt as a proportion of general government sector operating revenue …

and they want them published. We have just had, on Friday 6 March, the midyear financial reports, which actually say $3.8 billion was spent on interest repayments in the past six months, up $522 million from the same period last year. What we have got is PAEC having a look at this, saying that government should document its strategy for reducing the interest payments, while at the same time the exact opposite thing is happening. What this means for us is that we have potholes in our roads that are not repaired, we have hospitals that are underfunded and we have bushfire support which is slow to happen. Because we are paying so much in interest because the government cannot manage the books, the taxpayer is losing out.