Wednesday, 26 August 2026

 Tim BULL (Gippsland East) (10:20): I want to make a contribution today on a couple of different elements of the PAEC report on the 2023–24 budget estimates. The first area I want to cover off on is page 195 and the reference to roadside weeds and pests. We do not think it has been so bad in East Gippsland as what we see now. When you drive our roads in East Gippsland we have blackberries just out of control, there is African lovegrass everywhere harbouring pests and feral species and there are rabbits everywhere and foxes, and talking to the member for Mildura on the other side of the state – you could not get any further away from East Gippsland – it is no different up there as well. The roadsides are just out of control.

There are a couple of issues that I would like to raise on that. The first one is: how have we got ourselves into such a ridiculous scenario that when we have a road reserve full of blackberries, African lovegrass and pest plant and animal species and we want to widen the road, we have got to pay millions of dollars in offsets on a road reserve? That prevents those roads from being developed for community safety. And then we have a scenario in summertime when they are unmaintained and they create fire wicks. We saw that in the 2019–20 fires in areas up around Buchan and Gelantipy where the overgrown roadsides acted as wicks, which assisted the spread of the fire. There was no grass in the paddocks because we were at the end of a drought, but the fire travelled from one area of vegetation to another along the unmaintained roadsides, so the government needs to do more in that space. When you contact VicRoads they say, ‘We only do a metre behind the white post, and then it’s not us,’ and then you contact the Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action and they say, ‘Oh, we don’t really have the resources to maintain it.’ It is just not good enough.

I want to make reference also to page 145, and it is relative – it is fire management practices. Here we just have not had the required levels of burning done in our rural and regional areas that we need to have done to provide a level of community safety. We had a royal commission, nonetheless, that said, ‘You’ve got to do 5 per cent annual burning.’ This government came in and threw out the findings of the royal commission – ‘That’s a bit hard; that’s a bit costly. We’ll have our own inquiry that recommends a lot less.’ With the greatest of respect to the inspector-general for emergency management, I think I will go with the royal commission that had the pre-eminent bushfire experts in the world. We are getting nowhere near our 5 per cent, and what it does is it makes our communities vulnerable. We will have another horrible fire season, if not this year coming then in the coming years, and those on the other side will be shocked. They will be outraged when we have another situation like the 400 homes in my area that we lost. They will say, ‘This was a disaster. This was global warming – this was that.’ If we do not maintain reduction of fuel loads, we are going to have a megafire. There is no other outcome. We have not learned the lessons of 2019–20, and we need to. So for goodness sake, let us not blame global warming, let us not be surprised, let us not be shocked. If you do not do the fuel reduction burning to keep communities safe, then you are going to have a situation like this. Fuel loads equal a megafire. They must be controlled.

Before I finish I want to touch on page 97 and finding 56, and it says this:

The 2023–24 Budget allocates $2.3 billion in output and asset funding over ten years –

10 years –

to the Road maintenance and renewal initiative.

It is clearly nowhere near enough. It goes on to say:

It is unclear what proportion of funding for the initiative is allocated to roadworks in inner metropolitan Melbourne, outer suburban Melbourne and regional Victoria.

Who on earth would think that that amount is going to meet the needs of maintaining our roads in Victoria? And here we are, with the advent of time, seeing the outcome of that. Our roads have never been worse, hence the commitment to spend $5 billion over the next four years from those on this side of the house. That is what is required. Not only do we have to catch up, but we also have to maintain. We have allowed our roads in this state to get into a deplorable state through lack of input, lack of funding and lack of attention, and it needs to be fixed.