Wednesday, 4 March 2020

Public Accounts and Estimates Committee

Report on the 2019–20 Budget Estimates

Mr T BULL (Gippsland East) (10:28): I rise to make some comments around the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee report on the 2019–20 budget estimates. There are a couple of elements that I would like to discuss in this report. The first one of those relates to page 186 and the Minister for Local Government’s comment where he stated that $2.7 million is contributed to local government to control roadside weeds and pests. There are two elements here that I want to cover off. The first is roadside weeds in relation to fire risk and the fuel loads that are on many of our roadsides, both on local government roads and VicRoads roads, and the other relates to tree clearing on our major highways.

Now, we have had a situation in East Gippsland of recent times. All members of government I think, or 90 per cent, would have been to East Gippsland in the last couple of months, and they would have seen where these roadsides that have not been maintained acted as wicks for the fire. We had some farms that were not burnt out, and the fire travelled along the roadside because it had not been maintained with fuel loads. Then it would go off again in either a neighbouring farm or forested area. But if it were not for the unmaintained roadsides and the high fuel loads and vegetation levels, that simply would not have occurred.

Now, what we have heard in the past is that these roadsides are wildlife corridors of significance. In many cases the only wildlife that they are harbouring are feral animals like foxes or rabbits and the like. They are road reserves and they should be maintained as road reserves, not as an area where we can have massive fuel load build-up under the guise of being a wildlife corridor—because we have seen what occurs when we allow that to happen. So we must have a stronger focus on achieving that, and $2.7 million to all the local governments—41 rural councils to share $2.7 million amongst themselves—to maintain their roads is simply not good enough.

The other aspect of that that I have touched on was roadside clearing. We had our Princes Highway closed for all of January—it closed on 29 December and opened on 3 February—because we have large trees growing right up to the side of the road. When we have a storm event or a fire event like we had those trees take a lot of clearing. Now, some great clearing work has taken place, and I mentioned in this chamber last week that we need to continue that and make sure that it progresses to the appropriate level so we never have a repeat of what occurred.

The second element I want to talk on is on page 230 of the PAEC report, and it relates to a comment from the tourism minister. He said:

… the fact is that we are going through a range of reviews at the moment, including the regional tourism review which is occurring, and one of the things that is within the remit of Visit Victoria is that they fund those regional tourism boards.

Now, as of a week ago, we do not have an East Gippsland-specific tourism campaign operating. We had the Premier in East Gippsland last week and a couple of times in January saying he will stand by these communities, he will help these communities recover and he will support their economic wellbeing—and here we are a week after the region has been declared fire free and we have no specific East Gippsland tourism campaign. We had $200 000 put up up-front, and that campaign finished at the end of February. What we now are facing as a region is that we have the Labour Day long weekend coming up, we have got the Easter holidays coming up and we have got the two weeks of the school holidays coming up, and our businesses that were decimated in that January holiday period are trying to salvage what they can from the remainder of the warmer months of the year and the Easter and school holiday period. It is now when we really need to have that focus on having a specific East Gippsland tourism campaign to promote the entire region, and what do we find? It finished five days ago, that tourism campaign. So we need the Premier to be true to his word when he said he would stand by our local towns and businesses and help them to recover. A large part of that is running a tourism campaign for our region, and I would strongly urge him to do that.