Wednesday, 23 September 2026

 Peter WALSH (Murray Plains) (18:28): To start off, I promise today not to say any profanities about the member for Brighton, just to put that on the record –

James Newbury interjected.

Peter WALSH: unless he chooses to interject, and then I may break that rule.

We come to this place with the help of many people and we get re-elected to this place with the support of those same people, and this contribution today is about thanking many of those people. Being a local MP is a team sport, and I have been blessed with the great teams that I have had over the journey. I start by thanking Neil Pankhurst, Elaine Lees and Damian and Karen Kelly for their outstanding leadership of my electorate council and all the volunteers who have manned polling booths for the last six elections to help me.

I also thank my predecessor Barry Steggall both for the fact that he asked me to run for Parliament rather than pursue the president’s role at the National Farmers’ Federation and then for convincing the person who was going to run for preselection against me that it was a futile exercise and a waste of his time. So there was no preselection, but there was a very fierce three-cornered competition against a Liberal candidate for the actual election, because that was pre-coalition and we had those three-cornered contests. To Barry and to Barry Bishop, the former member for North Western Province – they were colloquially known locally as B1 and B2, and do not even start to work out which one is B1 or B2, because it was a constant debate – I thank them for their friendship and their support.

[NAME AWAITING VERIFICATION]

My transition from the Victorian Farmers Federation to this place was also made a lot easier by the fact that Fay and Janet, who worked for Barry, stayed on, which gave the electorate the continuity of corporate memory and let me hit the ground running, although I had to do a day in the office with them before the election so that they could interview me to see if I was suitable for them to work for. Fortunately I passed, and we worked great together. As an MP you are only as good as the staff in your office. I was blessed with Fay and Janet, then Ken, Sharon and Linda in my time as the member for Swan Hill, where our focus was always helping those who contacted us for assistance.

My first two terms in this place were dominated by the millennium drought and the issues that come with drought: poor crop yield, the need for fodder for livestock and the price and availability of water. These issues impacted not only farmers but also the economies of the towns. The saying that water is life is just so true and emphasised in a time of drought. That drought spawned two major policy changes which still create division in country communities today. The first was the Commonwealth Water Act 2007 and the Murray–Darling Basin plan. Because water is constitutionally a state issue, the Commonwealth used their external treaty powers to draft the Commonwealth Water Act legislation, which means it is effectively environment legislation rather than water legislation. Subsequently that meant that the Murray–Darling Basin plan has a significant environment bias, to the detriment of the irrigation sector. The Commonwealth has purchased large quantities of water from irrigators for the environment under its powers under the Murray–Darling Basin plan, significantly reducing the available consumptive water pool, which means the next drought will be catastrophic for our nation’s ability to produce food. Mark Twain’s saying that whisky is for drinking and water is for fighting over may well become the reality in the next drought.

The second was the proposal by the Brumby Labor government to build a pipeline from northern Victoria to Melbourne. The infamous north–south pipeline project galvanised regional Victoria against the Brumby government. In my opinion there are similarities between that time and the VNI West renewable energy debate that has galvanised regional Victoria against the current government. But one of the satisfying things about being the water minister in the Baillieu government was winning the argument with Helen Silver, the head of the Department of Premier and Cabinet, as to what the future operating rules of the north–south pipeline would be. Can I say they still apply today, so thank you to the current government for keeping those rules. May that pipeline rust into the annals of history without ever taking water from northern Victoria to Melbourne.

There are many people to thank for that fight, including Jan Beer, Chris Harrison, Guy Duncan and Andrew Leahy, to name just a few. Andrew, from Murrabit, had the indignity of his young son seeing him on the nightly news being bundled into the back of a police divvy van at one of the Plug the Pipe demonstrations. They thought it was a hell of a laugh.

It is the challenges that our community face that we remember most, and one of those was the Kerang rail disaster of June 2007, where 11 people tragically lost their lives and 23 were injured. It occurred while question time was actually taking place in here. After question time Lynne Kosky, the Minister for Public Transport, came across to tell me what had happened, and putting politics aside, she offered me a ride to Kerang with her that afternoon. I thank her for what she did for the community through that harrowing time, when most people knew either the victims or those who helped with the injured and the recovery of the deceased.

The drought ended in 2010, as did the Brumby government. Dorothea Mackellar’s poem My Country, describing Australia as a place of droughts and flooding rains, was proved true again, with floods in September and December of 2010 and a flood for the record books in January 2011. I must admit that being in government made it easier to help the response than being in opposition, like when I was standing on a burst levee near Kerang, arguing with the North Central Catchment Management Authority about getting the levee fixed. In desperation I rang Ted Baillieu, explained to Ted what we wanted, passed the phone to the CMA guy and let Ted tell him what we were going to do. We got some action finally there. Tragically, you cannot do that from opposition. Although the Treasurer at the time, Kim Wells, who unfortunately is not with us today, turned white every time we talked about the cost of the recovery after that flood, because it topped $2 billion. It was a huge amount of money.

Not only were seasonal conditions good through those years, but regional Victoria also benefited from our government’s $1 billion Regional Growth Fund, which meant nearly every country community got its fair share of state funding, with record investments in CFA sheds, fire trucks, community buildings, sporting facilities upgraded and significant investment in health infrastructure, with my electorate getting a new hospital in Charlton because of the floods, Rochester hospital being rebuilt again because of the floods and new hospitals in Kerang, Echuca and Boort, where I was born. And after 50 years the new bridge in Echuca finally started. Regional Victoria needs that sort of investment again, and I hope the Leader of the Opposition becomes the Premier in November so that we can have that investment in regional Victoria.

It was a privilege to be a minister of the Crown, especially in the portfolios of ag and water – the areas I spent my life in before Parliament. I know that knowledge of the sector and the people would drive the department spare at times, because they would tell us something, within minutes we could reality check it and, more often than not, our intel was better than theirs. And do not ever believe the department saying to someone, ‘It’s sitting on the minister’s desk. That’s why you haven’t had a response,’ because I had numerous calls from people I knew, saying, ‘Can you please just sign that letter and send it back to us?’ and I would say, ‘Haven’t seen it.’ It is a ploy – I notice the nods from current ministers – it is an excuse from the department for what they have not done, not what the minister has not done.

Like my electorate office, I was blessed with the staff in my minister’s office, who were genuinely committed to doing good things for Victoria, and they went above and beyond with the hours they put in to get things done. That was quite often despite the department resisting because it did not suit their agenda, like the kangaroo harvesting scheme, which had to be developed in my office because the department could only come up with reasons as to why it would not work. When it worked without a glitch, there was only silence, but the protein that was going to be left to rot on the ground was used for pet food consumption. Now we have those same carcases left on the ground to rot or feed wild dogs.

[NAMES AWAITING VERIFICATION]

The team supported whatever we did, like accepting an invitation from Lyndall Sachs, the Australian ambassador, to lead a trade delegation into Iraq during the 2014 war, because she felt that the French and the Germans were taking market share of us by dealing directly with Iraq rather than going through Kuwait, as was the accepted practice at the time. Even when they wanted to know our suit size to get the bulletproof vests fitted and our blood type so they had some blood on hand in case we needed it, both Luke and James Flintoff from the department came with me, and yes, we sold more dairy; yes, we sold more grain; and in addition we sold a lot of grain handling equipment because their equipment in Iraq was so antiquated. So to Luke O’Sullivan, who was the state director of the Nats leading up to the 2010 election, then my COS: thank you for being part of all that journey. I was as devastated as you when you lost your upper house seat in 2018, and I did genuinely feel that I had failed you when you lost, so I really empathise with that time. To Deb, who was in my minister’s office, then COS as leader, thank you, as so to Simon, Steph, Tanya, Sarah, Monica, Kirsten, Yvette, Melanie and Tom. Thank you for everything you all did. We were a formidable team that worked hard and enjoyed each other’s company.

The 2014 election saw a major redistribution of electorate boundaries in Northern Victoria, with the old seats of Swan Hill and Rodney abolished and a new seat of Murray Plains formed, which follows the Goulburn and the Murray rivers from Undera, in the east, to Wood Wood, north of Swan Hill, a smaller electorate than the old seat of Swan Hill but 250 k from end to end, with the office transferring from Swan Hill to Echuca, the larger population centre of the electorate. Thanks to Sharon for coming to Echuca to help with the relocation before Grandma Judy was required to go back to Swan Hill. Two Nats, two Nat seats, two Nat MPs in the one electorate was always going to be a challenge, and I thank Paul Weller for making it easier by choosing to return to dairy farming and not creating a preselection.

One year rolls into the next, and as all members would attest, there is never a shortage of issues that come into the office – ministers to write to, issues to raise in members statements, constituent questions or adjournments.

Throughout my time in Parliament the team always got a special thrill out of solving constituent problems that came about because of deficiencies in the bureaucracy – although for those that may have fallen foul of the law, the separation-of-powers defence was invoked many times, where we politicians make the laws and we cannot interfere when the judicial system is implementing them. If you are caught speeding, you are doing it by choice. We all have many interesting inquiries in our offices. One of my more challenging was from a mother whose son was living at home and had moved his girlfriend in, but Mum did not think she was suitable for him and rang the office to say she wanted her MP to speak to her son about finding a more suitable girlfriend – true story. It took a while to convince her that was not the role of an MP.

A member: How’d it go, though?

Peter WALSH: I do not know the answer. Then there was the lady who rang after the Harcourt fires had destroyed the Mount Alexander transmitter and wanted me to go and reprogram her TV to the Shepparton transmitter. Again, those that know my IT skills would know that was not something I was qualified to do.

No contribution would be complete without mentioning COVID times, when our office was the busiest it had ever been. Not only did we have the constantly changing Victorian rules and lockdowns but because we are a cross-border electorate we had to keep up with the New South Wales rules as well. Was it a hard border enforced by the police, or were we in various iterations of cross-border bubbles? Thanks to my staff we became the go-to place for plain English explanations of the ever evolving rules. Because libraries and neighbourhood houses were closed we assisted all those without computers and/or IT skills to get and print their permits to cross the border to travel to medical appointments. And just do not mention funerals, because not being able to attend them really upset people. We assisted with business support applications and particularly the follow-up, because the departments just would not return emails or phone calls and the businesses had bills to pay. We actually sent chocolates to Martin Pakula’s office at that time because his office did help us through those particular processes and they were great to work with, so thankyou to Martin’s office. Hopefully the statute of limitations has expired when I say that some days I actually felt like a people smuggler, suggesting to grey nomads returning from Queensland what time a particular bridge crossing may not be manned. One lovely young lady rang me the next day to say they had gotten home safely, helped by her saying prayers for her and her husband to protect them from the police. Locking people like that out of their own homes was an absolute travesty. Thankyou to Shan, Fleur, Andrew, Helen and Sarah for all you have done to help me do my job and for making the trip today here to share this moment with me.

[NAMES AWAITING VERIFICATION]

I am proud of what the Nationals achieved in the 2022 election, where we now have more women than men in the party – no quotas, no rules on who should have what seat, just preselecting strong, articulate community champions who have done their community and the party proud over the last four years. My challenge to the group is: the girls now have the numbers; let us take the next step and have our first female leader of the party. To my COS of that time Grady and then state director Matt Harris, we made a formidable team that helped change the face of the National Party parliamentary team in one election and set it up for the future. To Luke, Emma, Mark, Xavier, Georgia, Connor, Dominic, Madeline, Adrian and Ben, thank you for what you did as part of the team when I was leader.

There is always unfinished business, and one of those is better flood mitigation for Rochester. They were badly flooded in 2011 and then smashed in October 2022, when nearly all the houses in town were flooded. There was an upper house inquiry that made recommendations after that flood, and there is an overdue flood strategy for the area stuck in the bureaucracy that should be finished. It is totally untenable that Rochester is now stressed again because Eppalock is full and a significant rain event will see them in trouble again. We do not want the Rochester hospital having to be rebuilt for the third time because better flood mitigation has not been put in place.

To all the parliamentary staff, the catering team and especially the IT team, who must shake their heads in wonder at the issues we get them to solve – what seems so simple for them is so hard for me sometimes – this place in what we do is something that is very special and you all ensure that everything functions so well, so thank you.

[NAMES AWAITING VERIFICATION]

For those country MPs who have had ministerial drivers, we probably spend more time with our drivers than anyone except our immediate families, so to Paul, to Ray – or Grumpy, as he liked to be called – and to Andrew, or A2 as we have called him, thank you for your driving skills and professionalism as you kept me safe across more than 1.5 million kilometres of travel over 24 years. To Brett Hosking, the Nationals candidate for Murray Plains, I am sure you will represent the people of the electorate with distinction if given the privilege by the voters.

Lastly, to Liz, who is here also today in the gallery, as you can hear: thank you for your love and support. The true test will be me being home more often. Maybe that interstate truck driver’s job might not be so bad after all!

God bless to everyone who has been part of the last 24 years:

May the road rise up to meet you.

May the wind be always at your back.

May the sun shine warm upon your face,

The rains fall soft upon your fields.

And until we meet again,

May God hold you in the palm of his hand.

Members applauded.