Wednesday, 12 August 2026

 John PESUTTO (Hawthorn) (17:01): This afternoon I rise to grieve for the state in which this Carroll Labor government will leave Victoria at the expiration of its 12th year in office. Victorians would have every right to ask: what were the last 12 years all for? This government will, at the expiration of its 12 years, have left a state where trust in government, trust in institutions and trust in the statements of a Premier and ministers has been totally trashed and where our prosperity and our performance as a state have left us well behind the pack when compared with states and territories around the country. It is the case that Victoria and Victorians are worse off for this government. I will go through those issues as I address the house this afternoon.

Whether it is the rotten Big Build, which has been the principal source of financial haemorrhaging which has led to that explosion in debt – and debt is not just some remote number. This debt, which has been racked up by this Labor government under this premier, Premier Carroll, and his predecessors, will see nearly $1 in every $10 go simply to bondholders around the world. Money wasted – and wasted, I should add, because in large measure this government did not oversee, as it was responsible for overseeing, nearly $200 billion of new and existing projects, which were riddled with corruption at the hands of the CFMEU and those who were complicit with the CFMEU. The truth is – and Victorians will know this – the cost of living has gone up under this government, and our standard of living is going down under this government.

Let us just look at what is happening on the interest rate front. I want to focus on interest rates because this state’s performance – among other states but principally this state – has driven increases in interest rates. We know that because agencies like the Reserve Bank of Australia and the IMF have spoken about the impact of subnational debt in Australia adding pressure to inflation, which has translated into higher interest rates which millions of Victorians, and even more Australians, are having to contend with. Although we saw the Reserve Bank yesterday hold the official cash rate at 4.35 per cent, it has warned that more interest rate rises could be coming if we cannot tame inflation, which is something this government, given the corruption that has occurred on major projects and its generally woeful performance, is helping to fuel. Interest rates are having an enormous impact on Victorians, and this government could and should have done something about it, and it has not.

On employment, this state is performing worse than anywhere else in the country: 5.1 per cent. The Statement on Monetary Policy yesterday that the RBA released does not make for happy reading because the RBA, amongst other economists, is pointing to increases in unemployment in the months and year ahead. What does that mean for Victoria, whose unemployment rate went from 4.9 to 5.1, seven percentage points above the national average? If unemployment in this country is going to go up, which many economists and the Reserve Bank of Australia are forecasting, one wonders how many more Victorians and how many more Victorian households are going to suffer through increasing joblessness in this state. This government has nothing to say on that. It has nothing to say about how it will fuel economic growth in the future. It is only worried about its own safety and security as a government, and it is doing nothing on that front.

On housing, the picture is as pessimistic. Housing approvals were down. We were the only jurisdiction in the ABS’s last publication of data that went backwards on approvals and on completions.

Nick Staikos interjected.

John PESUTTO: Nearly 2 per cent, I say to the minister at the table. We went backwards nearly 2 per cent while everybody else went forward on housing approvals. On housing completions Victoria is performing worse than it has in the last decade. So much for achieving housing completions of 80,000 a year. It is not going to get there. We will be lucky if we get to 55,000, and that number is going down because sentiment, not only among homebuyers but among builders and developers, is crashing, not just because of this government but because of its counterpart in Canberra, which seems to have the same DNA as this government.

This government has left this state strangled with regulation to the point where people do not want to do business here. I was speaking to a banking leader just this week, who said that they are noticing on their books many employers in Victoria looking to relocate, and that is a consistent theme throughout. After 12 years that is only part of the very pessimistic canvas this government will leave the Victorian people.

This government thought that it could address it by changing the leader. Although I was not the best student in religious education classes, I do remember Jeremiah 13:23: can a leopard change its spots? Can someone so accustomed to doing wrong then do right? Well, I say changing the leader from the member for Bendigo East to the member for Niddrie will change nothing. This new Premier was there at every major decision, and this new Premier talks a big game on integrity and being different to Mr Andrews and Ms Allan. Well, he may be right, but I fear he may be worse, because someone who pretends to hold to a higher standard, given their involvement in the past, often proves to be worse than the people they replace.

If the Premier is really faithful to the comments he has imparted in recent weeks since ascending to the top job, well then, let us go through the facts. The Premier says he wants to on the one hand continue with Suburban Rail Loop East and at the same time expedite airport rail. Okay. The first thing this Premier can do is be up-front and consistent with the words he speaks, take the Victorian people into his confidence and release the updated costings for the Suburban Rail Loop. Do that today, Premier. If he is really faithful to the words he has spoken, will he share the advice he says he is seeking on either cancelling or deferring the SRL? If you defer the SRL, what are the costs of deferring? We know there would certainly be costs of cancelling. What are the costs of deferring it? Is he really pretending – this is the Premier – to the Victorian people that he is now doing both? He is going to proceed with SRL and proceed with airport rail, having been delayed in 2023 until the early 2030s. How is he going to do that with a straight face?

The Premier says he wants to do things differently, but he has not released the identity of the royal commissioner or the royal commissioners he intends to appoint to the royal commission. How hard is it to release terms of reference to a royal commission that ought to be all encompassing? You almost do not need terms of reference for such a royal commission. We all know what the problem is – just get on with it. But he is delaying because he knows and we know that every day that passes is one day less that this government has to have an operating royal commission. I doubt it will get very far before the writs are issued and we enter into caretaker.

A third example: if this Premier says he wants to watch the pennies and do it better than his predecessors, then why doesn’t he come out and say what he intends to do about the government’s fiscal strategy? On employment, step 1: unemployment is deteriorating at 5.1 per cent, and it may well go higher, as the Reserve Bank and others are forecasting. What is his plan for that? Operating cash surpluses: what does he say about improving those and including the fiscal cash deficit, which is what the then Treasurer Ms Symes from the other place told PAEC a few weeks ago they would include? What is he going to do about net debt as a proportion of gross state product? Is he going to maintain the fiction, like his predecessor did, that the growth numbers stack up when everybody here and around the world are pointing to a deterioration in growth outcomes over the next year and beyond? We will be lucky if we have a 1.5 in front of that number. Is he going to be honest, as he says he will, with the Victorian people and tell us the true proportion of state debt to GSP? If he is going to say these things, he ought to be up-front. But as I said when I quoted Jeremiah earlier, I do not think anything is going to change, and I will tell you why, ultimately: because corruption and the propensity to enable it, turn a blind eye to it and pretend it does not occur are in the DNA of this government.

This government, even before it took office, was exhibiting that propensity. Red shirts, you might recall, actually was born of the 2014 campaign. And the one thing that I regret about the Ombudsman’s report and the other reports is they actually did not nail the real issue. Yes, as bad as it was – the government and those candidates misused public funds for political campaigning purposes – there was something deeper and more rotten going on. There were members of Parliament who certified documents to this Parliament about working hours by staff who they knew were campaigning in other seats, and they never answered for it – that was the real and deeper controversy in red shirts.

Operation Daintree: another case of government largesse and, I would argue, corruption, where money was just handed out to a union that had no capacity or capability internally to run the training programs for which it received more than $2 million. Daintree was another stain on this government’s record. You had the Ombudsman report on the politicisation of the public service – that lies at the heart of just about everything that has gone wrong in this government. You had Operation Richmond, which the member for Berwick spoke about at length and I will not rehash at any great length other than to say that it only touched the tip of the iceberg, in my view, about the rotten nature of this government.

You then had the Victorian Auditor-General’s Office report – remember that – into the Commonwealth Games. The now Premier sat around the cabinet table and secretly increased the envelope for the Commonwealth Games in April 2023 from 2.6 to $3.6 billion – and they told no-one. Three months later, they would come out and famously cancel the Comm Games. The Auditor-General has also spoken about this government – I am not using the Auditor-General’s words; I do not want to put words into the auditor’s mouth – and has delivered at least two reports saying unequivocally that we can no longer rely on the budget papers of this government. It said that when you look at the costings for major projects in Victoria, budget paper 4 is no longer a reliable guide to government spending. What does that tell you about integrity under this government?

The new Premier pretends he is an agent of change. Well, I say to the Victorian people: the new Premier Ben Carroll is a double agent if that is the case. He is pretending to be an agent of change but represents everything that has gone wrong in this government. So I say to the Victorian people: are we better off after 12 years? Certainly not. What we are left with is a government that has been trashed by the Labor Party. It is a government whose institutions and standards, whether they are of accounting, in the case of proper budgeting and provisioning for services, or whether they are in the management and oversight of major projects, have completely been discredited.

This government, with this Premier in charge, has made itself an object of shame around the country. Does anyone look at Victoria under this government anymore as a benchmark, or is it a stain? I fear for the Victorian people, and I grieve for them this afternoon about the behaviour of this government, whether it was as described in red shirts, as described in Daintree, as described in the Auditor-General’s Commonwealth Games report, as described in the Auditor-General’s major projects performance report or as described in the Ombudsman’s report into politicisation. Wherever you look, this government deserves to lose the next election. Under Jess Wilson, the Liberals and the Nationals, I say to the Victorian people, are ready to fix our state, not just the budget and our economy, and to restore the confidence and faith of the Victorian people in a government that works and is honest, accountable and transparent.

The SPEAKER: I remind members about calling people by their correct titles.