Tuesday, 31 March 2026

 Peter WALSH (Murray Plains) (13:09): I want to highlight a crisis the Victorian Labor government seems determined to ignore: a slow, grinding economic exodus across northern Victoria. Businesses which have supported local jobs for generations are being pushed to the brink, not by market forces, not by lack of demand, but by a tax regime so suffocating that survival itself is becoming impossible. Let us be absolutely clear: these are not hypothetical concerns; they are real employers, real families and real communities. People are telling me that they are now packing up and crossing the Murray River into New South Wales because they simply cannot afford to stay in Victoria any longer. Why – because in New South Wales they are not treated like a bottomless ATM.

They are not buried under layers and layers of tax, levies and compliance costs, making it even harder to employ people, harder to expand and harder to breathe. Meanwhile, here in Victoria this government continues to squeeze – payroll tax, land tax, emergency services tax. Every year it is something new, something higher, something harsher. And the result is businesses are not just struggling, they are leaving. What does this mean for towns in my electorate such as Echuca, Swan Hill, Koondrook and Kerang? It means empty shopfronts. It means lost jobs. It means young people forced to leave their communities because the opportunities have dried up. It means the economic hollowing out of entire regions while the government pats itself on the back. This is not just bad policy, this is economic vandalism. The message from northern Victoria is loud and clear: stop punishing businesses and start supporting those who actually drive our economies.