Tuesday, 7 June 2022

Bills

Appropriation (2022–2023) Bill 2022

Second reading

Debate resumed on motion of Ms SYMES:

That the bill be now read a second time.

Mr DAVIS (Southern Metropolitan—Leader of the Opposition) (15:24): I am pleased to make a contribution to the Appropriation (2022–2023) Bill 2022 and in doing so to begin by making a few housekeeping comments. The opposition has communicated with the Leader of the Government and will, in the interests of expediting the committee of the bill—whenever that occurs; this week or next week—provide an early list of questions to assist in expediting the committee process. I just put that on the record for a starting point. The appropriation bill is an important bill for the state obviously because it ensures the payment of the public service and it ensures payment for all of our public activities. It provides, through the schedules attached to the bill, the allocation of precise resources to departments and agencies. I put on record a number of points that I want to make about the position the state finds itself in more broadly.

As I said when I talked about the state taxation bill just a few minutes ago, Victoria’s state budget comes with Daniel Andrews in his eighth year as Premier. We are at a point where the Labor Party will have been in power in November, on election day, for 19 of the last 23 years, but this is a budget of tax, deficit and debt. It is a budget that shows Victoria’s weak position. I have laid out some of the taxation issues, and I will repeat some of those because they are very important.

Tax collections have increased by 80 per cent from $16.9 billion in 2013–14 to a forecast $30.5 billion in 2022–23. Land tax has increased from $1.7 billion in 2013–14 to a forecast $4.8 billion in 2022–‍23—a 192 per cent increase—with land tax having risen from 10 per cent to 17 per cent of total state taxation revenue. It is no wonder the small businesses in the suburbs, where they own a property, are squealing and they are feeling the state government tighten the screws on them with land tax. The land transfer duty is a duty that is felt by every family as it seeks to purchase a home, and the take from land transfer duty has increased from $4.2 billion in 2013–14 to a forecast $8.2 billion in 2022–23—a 97.4 per cent increase. It is forecast at $8.2 billion, but in 2021–22 land transfer duty hit a record of $10.194 billion: this financial year there will be a record take on land transfer duty.

Payroll tax has increased from $4.95 billion in 2013–14 to a forecast $6.8 billion in 2022–23, and we heard Mr Gepp and others talk a moment ago about payroll tax. They pointed to some areas of the state where payroll tax is lower than other areas of the state where it is higher, but the assured thing in Victoria under this government is that more tax in aggregate is taken, more tax than ever before, more tax year by year as it goes up and up and up, and as I say, in the case of payroll tax lifting from $4.95 billion in 2013–14 to a forecast $6.8 billion in 2022–23—a huge increase. Again it is important to put in place some comparison with the gross state product (GSP), which has lifted from $399 billion in 2013–14 to an estimated $494 billion in the financial year that we are in. That is a 23.7 per cent increase, and you can see the disparity between the size of the economy and the size of the tax take in that economy.

I made the point earlier about the 40-odd new taxes, the taxes waiting in the wings. Forty new taxes despite the promise made on election eve in 2014 when Daniel Andrews said to Channel 7, ‘I make that promise’ that there will be no increase or introduction of new taxes. ‘I make that promise, Peter, to every single Victorian’, said Daniel Andrews, and the Treasurer made a similar promise about no new taxes and no increased taxes. It is interesting that even the small taxes amongst Labor’s new taxes are impactful. When you look at the amount that is collected, people may not be aware but the more than 40 new taxes are collecting more than $14 billion across the forward estimates period. That is a huge hit on the economy from these small in some cases and planned monster new taxes.

I have talked about Labor’s housing tax, their big new housing tax. I have talked about the waste and mismanagement, and many of the cost blowouts are BC, as I say, before COVID, and many of the cost blowouts have impacted on the more than $28 billion worth of project waste and blowouts that have been the hallmark of this government. It is interesting that the Minister for Transport Infrastructure at the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee hearing yesterday would not rule out more than $28 billion as the size of the cost blowouts on these projects, and indeed she would not take steps to provide an alternate figure for the whole period.

I think it is important to put the debt that we are about to enter into, with the growing debt under this government, in context. Daniel Andrews should be known as Captain Debt, I think, actually. The bald facts are this: Victoria’s net debt will rise to $167 billion by 2025–26. The ratings agencies are pessimistic, singling Victoria out as having the weakest position of all states. The Moody’s summary from 9 February this year pointed to an alarming increase in the state’s net direct and indirect debt as a percentage of revenues. Moody’s has said publicly that Victoria is at risk of a credit downgrade, potentially forcing up the debt servicing costs as a share of state revenues. Even more alarming is the debt-to-GSP ratio. You see, what are seen as very arcane economic concepts actually do have a significant impact.

The consequence of Daniel Andrews’s incompetence is rising net debt, rising from $22.3 billion in 2014–15 to a net debt of $101.9 billion this year. That is more than $100 billion this year, and as I said, rising to a staggering $167.5 billion estimated by 2025–26. Victoria’s debt is growing faster than our comparator states. Victoria’s debt is now 75 per cent larger than the debt carried by the bigger New South Wales economy, whose net debt this year is estimated at $58.1 billion. By June 2025, a date for which comparisons are available, Victoria’s debt is set to reach $154.8 billion. New South Wales, whose debt is then projected to be $103 billion, and Queensland, with a projected net debt of $35.6 billion, will not face the same brake on growth caused by the dragnet of Victoria’s state debt.

If you look at this net debt per head of population, each Victorian currently bears a debt of about $15 300, compared with a little over $7000 for each person in New South Wales. Daniel Andrews and Labor are steering our economy in a direction that will ramp each Victorian’s debt up to over $23 600 in just four years—an increase of 54 per cent. If you accept—and this requires you to accept—Labor’s heroic population assumptions, it is a debt just shy of $95 000 per family of four, more if Labor’s dodgy population projections are not realised. In fact by 2024–25 Victoria’s estimated state debt of $154.8 billion will be very close to the combined debts of New South Wales, Queensland and South Australia. Even with the growth in the national economy and a 4 per cent unemployment rate—and indeed less than 4 per cent now, a welcome fall in the unemployment position—Victoria’s position is far out of kilter with the other Australian states and our main competitor state, New South Wales. We are facing a net debt-to-GSP ratio. Victoria is projected at 26.5 per cent, but New South Wales is likely to be around half of that. The impact of Victoria’s annual interest bill will be significant, with payments rising from just over $2 billion in the early period of the Andrews Labor government to at least $6.38 billion in 2025–26, and this is based on the figures at budget time. It is not clear what account the budget figures have taken of interest rate rises, and we are seeing a cascade of interest rate rises now.

One thing that is clear is that interest rate payments have trebled since Labor came to office. When you look at the sensitivity analysis in the budget, at the back of budget paper 2, you will see that a 1 per cent rise across the forward estimates period leads to a $2.549 billion impact on the position. These are huge movements. The budget does have some things where it does come up front. Budget paper 5, at page 16, states:

Risks to Victoria’s economic outlook remain greater than normal and the forecasts are subject to a higher degree of uncertainty

The population assumptions in the budget, I would argue, are highly doubtful. Few would believe the blithe statements in the budget such as on page 24 of budget paper 2 which say that with border restrictions now eased the flow of migrants and foreign students to Victoria is expected to gradually increase over the course of 2022, reaching around prepandemic levels by 2023–24. These are heroic assumptions. Nobody, as much as we may wish it, believes that those assumptions are likely to be met.

As I said earlier today, the ratings agencies have been very clear indeed. Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s have sounded the alarm. They have blown the whistle on Daniel Andrews and his government. Moody’s said:

Despite the underlying strength of the Victorian and broader Australian economy, we expect Victoria’s debt burden will not stabilise before the end of fiscal 2027, further increasing … pressure on the state’s rating.

Standard & Poor’s said:

The state’s debt levels are likely to soar past 200 per cent of operating revenues by fiscal 2024 due to historically high infrastructure spending, exacerbated by rising inflationary pressures and some project-related cost overruns

As I said earlier, Tim Pallas was crowing back in 2018 about the independent and international affirmation of Standard & Poor’s. He was schmoozing up to the ratings agencies like a good Labor Treasurer does. But in this case it is clear that he has a different view now as the ratings agencies have made very different comments.

I have talked about the tax position, Labor’s plan for the big new housing tax. I have talked about the need for planning reform and I have made the point about the Labor Party’s refusal to contemplate the planning reform that they worked up—it is sitting there on the shelf and we have said it should be implemented with proper checks, proper balances, proper consultation with councils—there is $7 billion worth of savings available there over 10 years. Why would you not, after that work has been done, implement some of those savings and make that flow through into lower housing costs for the community—cheaper, more affordable housing for the Victorian community? Why on earth would we not be using that work that has been put in place? There was a lot of contribution from the property sector but the state government has done some of that work. We think if it is implemented sensitively, with proper consultation carefully with councils, carefully with communities, that the opportunity is there to realise a significant part of those gains and lower the cost of housing in the state. Seven billion dollars over 10 years is not to be sneezed at. Even if only half of that were realised, that is still a very significant contribution.

I also want to again return to my points about productivity. It is clear that the state has a productivity problem. Victoria, uniquely amongst all of the states, has performed very poorly here. There is a general Australian problem with productivity over a longer period, but Victoria is a laggard, a stand-out with poor performance on productivity. I laid out those figures earlier in the day at some length, and it is necessary to think about how we can lift the state’s productivity. New taxes are not a good way to do it. New taxes will likely make us less competitive and less able to retain the population we need to drive growth. We need a growth agenda. We need to go forward. The Premier recognised that we need growth, and I agree, but at the same time he has not put in place the settings that will provide that growth long term.

We have seen the state fail to provide the competitive position that is needed, and that is what we have got to think about. We have got to have a productivity agenda. This is why the opposition has said if we are elected in November we will introduce a Victorian productivity commission, which will be an independent body that will have the job of advising government and putting forward proposals. The Australian Productivity Commission has provided great advice over many years. New South Wales has recently embarked on a similar agenda, and I do not think we should be afraid to take good ideas from other states where other states have put in place mechanisms that can improve the overall productivity of the state. The New South Wales productivity commission model is a good one, and we would use that as a base for how we would go forward.

Obviously Victoria is different, so some of our agenda would be quite distinct. But nonetheless that is the purpose of having such a Victorian productivity commission in place, so that we can actually focus on lifting living standards, lifting household incomes and lifting the position of individuals in the state over the longer haul and doing that in a sustainable way, without borrowing more and more and more, without taxing more and more. We need to have that focus on delivering productivity, and there are critical sectors that will need assistance there. As I said earlier, we do need to deal with some of the workforce shortages, and there are key sectors where there are shortages that will need to be attended to. I think that that is now becoming an accepted fact by many in the community, because they recognise that this can actually become a significant brake on economic growth longer term.

As I have said before, the Victorian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (VCCI) has put out its cost and ease of doing business in Victoria task force report, and it is worth quoting again:

Victoria has a productivity challenge that started well before the pandemic. Productivity growth measured in gross state product … per hour worked has been slowing in Victoria over the last 10 years.

I also pointed out that the Committee for Melbourne, in its recent international benchmarking study, said:

GDP per capita in Melbourne is now 20% below its peer group average, while household disposable income has also fallen relative to others.

It should not be thought that Australia’s more generally faced productivity challenges are an excuse for Victoria. Victoria is a laggard, in effect dragging down the national performance. The state’s position has drifted under the period of the Andrews Labor government. Income per head has hardly moved. It is no wonder Victorian families are very worried about the cost of living, with rising prices and stagnant income under Daniel Andrews and more taxes. They are paying more taxes than ever before—sharply more taxes.

It is important, I think, to look at business because business has faced the new taxes and charges and the harsh new regulations. VCCI, in its study, said:

Doing business in Victoria is harder than it needs to be—not just financially, but in terms of time demands and stress. Nearly 40 per cent of Victorian businesses say time is a bigger cost to doing business than money. This shows that some aspects of government regulations and approach to regulation are cumbersome and poorly administered. Pressures on business owners are particularly acute in parts of regional Victoria. Importantly, the most significant costs faced by Victorian businesses were present well before March 2020 and are likely to persist well beyond the COVID-19 recovery.

Government can do a lot here. My colleague David Southwick has talked at some length about the need to use digital techniques to improve the position of interaction between the state government and businesses. New South Wales has led the way on this. There are so many other areas of this type in the country. New South Wales have innovated and led the way on a number of these key points, and we should not be afraid to pick up many of their ideas. The interaction with licences—I have seen this demonstrated. People from New South Wales have shown me the technique and shown me their ability to apply for licences online on their phone with simple procedures. This is an idea that we need to think more broadly about.

VCCI, the employers chamber of commerce, has said a lot about the need for a business concierge, and we agree with that. The shepherding of inbound investments through regulatory hoops and helping businesses and new startups through the regulatory hoops is part of the answer. Again, New South Wales has done better—much, much better—on this than Victoria. You can see why. I met with a group of very senior businessmen just a few weeks ago, and they related stories of the difficulty encountered talking to ministers and their departments here in Victoria. They counterposed that with the experience in New South Wales. These are national firms that deal with state governments across the country, and they singled Victoria out as the harder area to do business. Importantly, though, that can be dealt with. We can actually get those interactions with departments and ministers a lot sharper, a lot quicker and a lot more effective.

I want to also say something about the growth in the number of executives in the public sector. The share of senior executives in the Victorian public service has grown from 1.8 per cent in 2014–15—that is 647 executives—to 3.1 per cent in the most recent figures. That is 1759 executives—a surge of 1112 executives, or 172 per cent. This is despite Labor’s election promise in 2014 to reduce the number of executive officers and save $40 million. That was the promise in Labor’s financial statement in 2014—that they would cut the number of executive officers and save $40 million. Instead of that they have increased the number of executive officers by 172 per cent. People understand the importance of having more nurses, more teachers, more frontline workers across a whole series of different areas, but senior executives is a different matter—the question of whether we needed 1759 senior executives, up by 172 per cent across Labor’s period, despite their election promise to cut the number of executives in 2014.

I also want to say something about the need to look at taxation. We have made a clear commitment about the Victorian Building Authority’s new fee rise, the 2 May fee rise. It is not a budget measure, it is a separate measure, but it is a measure that has happened concurrently with the budget. Businesses, companies, building surveyors and others are all paying these huge increases—some 100 per cent, some 200 per cent, some more—in fees. These fees are a real slug to the building industry and a real hit onto the costs that are passed through into housing. This is one aspect of housing costs—it is only one—that we have said should be clearly reversed. We think that that is a sensible step. We think it is a step that is achievable, and we think that in fact there is every reason to believe that these costs should be taken out of the system and actually not fed through to young families.

I do want to return to the issue of some of these major projects, though, because we do need to get a grip on these major projects. What we have seen under this government is more than $28 billion wasted through cost blowouts and squandering on projects where the government has not properly managed and constrained costs or has not properly scoped the projects at the start. Business cases look very different when there is a huge shift in the cost. We have seen how the West Gate Tunnel, originally promised as a $500 million project in opposition, became a $5-odd billion project and is now up over $10 billion. Well, whatever business case was in operation there has been blown out of the water by the mismanagement and the additional costs that the government has allowed to occur. Those costs are being paid for by taxpayers. They are also being paid for by toll payers. Every day they pay more and more and more as these costs are jacked up by the state government—these huge costs. We say that there need to be proper measures to constrain these costs. There needs to be a proper audit of these projects.

Why is it that the state government will not release the costs of the completed level crossing projects? I can understand when a project is in operation they might say it is commercial in confidence, but when a project is finished, done and dusted—there have now been more than 60 crossings removed, yet the government will not release the costs of those crossings. They know the costs. I will tell you why they will not release the costs: because the costs are hugely greater than they estimated. They have massively blown out, and taxpayers are paying for this in a whole range of ways. The same is true across a wide range of other projects like the metro, and we could go on—good projects that have been in some cases mismanaged, in other cases poorly scoped and in some cases both.

The opposition has called for a public works committee, the reinvigoration of the concept of a public works committee. This Parliament used to have a Public Works Committee back in the 1970s and into the 1980s. The large infrastructure projects that were done around the state—dams, trains, tunnels—were all heavily scrutinised by a powerful Public Works Committee that could get to the bottom of costs around these public projects, that could help constrain some of the costs on these projects, that could keep a rein on them. We say there should be a public works committee because money squandered through poor process, money squandered through cost overruns and money squandered through the poor scoping of major projects is money that is not available for other hospitals, other schools and other roads. It is money that is not available to be returned in tax cuts. All of this waste, all of the money that is squandered, all of the money that is spent on projects that ought to have been properly managed is money that is taken from Victorian taxpayers and not used wisely. We say a better process is better scoping at the start, better cost control and keeping those projects on track.

Nobody can excuse a doubling of the size of a project like the West Gate Tunnel. Nobody can excuse the huge surge and blowout in the Metro Tunnel. Nobody can excuse the failure to properly cost something. Let me pick a smaller but very significant project in country Victoria, the Murray Basin rail project. This was a coalition project. We funded half of it; the federal government funded half of it. The state government delayed and delayed its commencement, eventually got going, scoped it poorly and implemented poor contracts, and we saw all sorts of bizarre outcomes. They tore up old track, re-used old rails from 1913. You can see some of these small sections that were welded together as they re-used sections of rail metal from 1913. Yet after blowing out the project—it is now well over $100 million over its original budget—it is only two-fifths complete and the rail speeds are slower than they were beforehand. You have got the worst of all worlds: you have got a partly completed project, you have got recycled steel on the rails in parts of it, you have got slower speeds and axle loads are not better. It is honestly a very, very poor outcome. I think the community is very, very much entitled to be angry about that outcome. I think the community is entitled to say, ‘Enough is enough’. The community is entitled to say, ‘We want proper controls on these services’.

I say this is a government of taxing, it is a government of poor spending and poorly targeted and controlled major projects, and it is a government that has—

Ms Shing interjected.

Mr DAVIS: Even the good projects, Ms Shing, have blown out on their budgets—many of the good projects. I have been talking about the Murray Basin project. Many of these projects are supported across the chamber, but they are not supported where they blow out and where incompetence, mismanagement and waste are the hallmark.

Mr ERDOGAN (Southern Metropolitan) (15:55): I am pleased to rise in support of the Appropriation (2022–2023) Bill 2022. It is important to understand that this will give effect to the upcoming budget for the year ahead, and it was interesting hearing the Leader of the Opposition. I felt it was—interesting is probably being kind to him; I found it quite incoherent, in fact. It went from different place to different place, but nonetheless I think it is important to correct the record for those who are in the chamber at the moment. Before the global pandemic and the financial year leading in—we all understand we have got to set the framework up—in 2018–19 we had a $1.4 billion surplus in our state, so the state financially was travelling very well. But obviously we were affected in 2019 and 2020 by the global COVID-19 pandemic, as many other jurisdictions in our country and across the world were affected. Obviously in WA they have a mining boom from which they were able to supplement, but nonetheless for every other state and territory in our nation surpluses in that environment were not possible. The demand on essential services like health care, the transition to working from home and all the measures that needed to be taken by the states to respond—because we did not have a federal government that responded as it should have—have meant that there were expenses incurred which would not have been incurred, which obviously put strain on our budget. Nonetheless our government does get things done, and along the way there might be costs that increase.

When people talk about the Big Build, I am proud to talk about our record on the Big Build because of the amount of jobs it has created in the supply chain. We all know somebody that is working on a Big Build project, directly or indirectly, whether it be a tradesman on site, an electrician, a plumber or a boilermaker, all the way through to truck drivers and delivery drivers and warehouses. There is a complete supply chain of jobs there, and that is why the unemployment rate in our state is at historically low figures. It is because of projects like the Big Build. Even in domestic construction we are hearing of supply issues and cost pressures every day in the news. I turn on the news or read the daily papers and we are talking about domestic builds, so small-scale projects, where there have been $60 000, $70 000 or $100 000 cost blowouts, and that is an effect of the COVID-19 pandemic together with the uncertain times we live in and the supply chain issues that have resulted in those price increases. So I am not surprised that the cost of construction has gone up, because that is not a phenomenon unique to our state, but it is having the same effect globally. Of course we should not be surprised that we are being impacted in the same way every other state and territory is being impacted. In fact there was an interesting statistic that I saw: construction costs are actually higher in New South Wales per square metre than they are in Victoria. So in fact we are not the most expensive state for construction. In fact New South Wales is. Nonetheless I think it is important to understand the supply chain issues in that process.

Obviously our budget is about pandemic repair, and we are getting on with the job. We are creating meaningful jobs, permanent jobs, and we are building a world-class education system. I think in my first speech in this place I talked about the importance of education being the great leveller, and aren’t I proud to be part of a government that delivers on our motto, being the Education State. The record of investment in our schools—over 1000 schools have been upgraded since the Andrews Labor government was elected in 2014, over 100 new schools have been built and we are building another 50 or 60 that are in the pipeline. Everywhere I go everyone is amazed with the new, modern working environments that students and teachers have. We want to have a modern curriculum, but obviously that is backed up with modern environments that allow the students to make the most of their time at school and with their peers. In my electorate last week I was with James Merlino, the Minister for Education, at Sandringham East in their fantastic new facilities. We built a brand new gymnasium there, and now we are building new office spaces for the historic building. The school celebrated its 91st year recently, a historic school and one that has a beautiful heritage street-facing frontage and a great school community. But like I said, that is just one example. Obviously there is Beaumaris Secondary. The opposition wanted to close it down. They gutted our public school education system across our state, not just in Southern Metropolitan but across our state. It does not matter where you go, you will not see—

Mr Davis interjected.

Mr ERDOGAN: Mr Davis, I think you were in government at the time when those schools closed down and those buildings and those lands were sold off to developers, so I think I would not be talking about public education in Southern Metro too much, because I think people remember. People have long memories, and they do not forget what happened to the public school system during the time when the opposition had say over our state schools. But obviously we are reinvesting, we are rebuilding and parents are returning in record numbers. If you see enrolment figures across our state, the return is amazing. The public school education system is thriving under our government, and that is because of the investment and the correct decisions we have made. The foresight we had was understanding that that was a key point—that to ease the cost-of-living pressure on families, education was a big factor. We invested, and now we are getting the return. Obviously there is a lot more to do. I am the first one to say that. More investment in education; let us do it. I think this budget does a bit of that, but there is obviously more to be done. That is why I am proud to be here and serving in this government. In education I could still speak at length about the contributions we could make, but I do note that we are due for the cleaning break. I will step down.

Sitting suspended 4.01 pm until 4.24 pm.

Mr GRIMLEY (Western Victoria) (16:24): I rise to speak on the Appropriation (2022–2023) Bill 2022. It was pleasing to see that the advocacy from Derryn Hinch’s Justice Party has met with some success in the budget. We were very glad to see funding for cyber safety for children in school, with $3.7 million to be provided next financial year to the initiative, and this was a recommendation from the management of sex offender information inquiry, which we initiated. More police and protective service officers are funded. I am hoping that they make their way to regional and rural Victoria. There is $215 million for the rollout of tasers to all frontline police and PSOs. There is funding for the development of an alternative reporting option for sexual assault, which we were able to obtain government support for last month. There is extensive funding for mental health beds, including across regional Victoria. Expansion of the assessment and referral court to Geelong and Ballarat will support people with mental illness and/or cognitive impairment to address causes of offending before they are sentenced.

A share in $4.5 million for the Geelong Project, an excellent early intervention initiative, will keep kids in school. The Melton hospital and the Geelong women and children’s hospital I will have more to say about later. Six million dollars to speed up the precinct planning and approvals for 44 000 lots in regional Victoria I know will be very welcome in my rural communities. There are 12 new VLocity trains for regional services, and there is new perpetrator intervention funding. I am grateful that the government has paid attention to our advocacy, and it is rewarding when the work we do gets traction and results like this. However, there are several issues that we put to the Treasurer which were overlooked. These are important things, such as the funding for the Defence Community Dogs program and for members of the community seeking alcohol and other drug rehabilitation services. This was disappointing, and I will talk in more detail to this later on.

In relation to alcohol and other drug funding, anyone battling an addiction should be able to get the help they need without delay. This includes the ability to access treatments in their own community with support from loved ones. There is often a small window between the time someone says, ‘I want help’ and the time they potentially relapse and refuse help for their addiction. The availability of services, including detox, is so important and why we cannot accept six-month or six-week waits. These lengthy waits can potentially kill people. In the least, they can send people in the other direction, away from help, if it is not readily available. The number of people seeking AOD treatment was up from 2385 to 3599 between September 2020 and September 2021. This is a 51 per cent increase in a single year. On the latest figures: in December 2021 the Victorian alcohol and other drug agencies surveyed had 4088 people on their waiting lists. This represents a 72 per cent increase since September 2020, just five quarters later.

These are more than alarming figures; they are actual people seeking help. Yet despite this very clear picture being painted, the budget withdraws funding for increasing and training the AOD workforce. The total reduction in funding is to the tune of an incredible $39 million. This includes the discontinuation of the $25.6 million alcohol and other drugs COVID-19 workforce initiative. This provides for an additional 100 AOD treatment workers across Victoria as well as training and upskilling. It is being cut at a time when demand for AOD treatment is soaring. At a time when COVID raised the number of mental health economic strains for Victorians, we should have been armed and ready to fight this battle. There was an inevitable resurgence of addiction, not just to ice or heroin but to prescription medications and alcohol as well, yet the only thing the government did during COVID with respect to alcohol was to make it available through all lockdowns and make it legal to have it delivered to your home without, virtually, any safeguards or record keeping.

I have spoken with parents and families who have described the difficulties they have experienced in trying to access a rehabilitation bed for a loved one. The difficulties are exacerbated for Victorians who live in the country. Victoria has the second-lowest number of detox and residential beds for AOD treatment per capita in the whole country. There is a clear need for more AOD beds to meet the current demand. I welcome the $36 million of funding to construct a 30-bed alcohol and other drugs residential rehabilitation facility, including a withdrawal unit, in Mildura that will service the Loddon Mallee region, and I note this money will be delivered over the next three years, so we could expect the facility to be ready sometime in 2025 at the earliest.

I was bitterly disappointed, though, to see that the western region alcohol and drug facility planned for Warrnambool, the Lookout, missed out on funding. Warrnambool is an area that is desperate for a dedicated AOD rehabilitation facility. Despite us making a submission to the Treasurer to include the facility in the budget and the project having strong local support, with $1.2 million already raised, the project was overlooked. The Premier had planned on and committed to visiting Mildura, but he did not respond to my request to meet with the Western Region Alcohol and Drug Centre down in the south-west, and I suspect this is because he knew the funding would not be forthcoming. The good news is that Geoff Soma, the CEO of WRAD, the steering committee and other local stakeholders are not giving up the fight for this facility, and I will continue to advocate for them in Parliament to ensure they secure this important project. As a development, I am aware that the Department of Premier and Cabinet have since made contact with the health service to obtain more information on the project, which has made me optimistic for an announcement in the upcoming election. So my fingers are crossed whilst I am still awaiting a response to my adjournment request for a meeting between the Premier, the health minister and the stakeholders in Warrnambool.

In relation to the defence dogs veterans assistance program, it selects suitable rescue dogs and trains them specifically to become assistance dogs to support veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress injuries. Each dog is allocated to an inmate in a correctional service centre. That inmate is responsible for the care of the dog 24 hours a day and for training the dog under the guidance of a professional dog trainer. Once a dog has completed the training and passed a strict assessment, it is matched with a suitable veteran at no cost. The program is a unique win-win-win situation: the dogs are safe from animal shelters and other rescue programs, inmates participate in a rehabilitation program and give back to their community and veterans are provided with life-saving assistance dogs. The program is unique, being focused on helping veterans who suffer from a PTSI and who are not capable of completing the hundreds of hours required to train a dog to assistance dog level. Many vets also cannot access funding for a dog through Assistance Dogs Australia, which costs around $40 000. Many veterans suffer from anxiety and depression and have become socially withdrawn because of their illness and injuries. The dogs give them purpose, reduce reliance on medication and help reduce the feelings of isolation that many PTSI sufferers experience. Recipients report re-engagement with their community and families, less reliance on medications and better engagement with professionals. Some have even been able to obtain gainful employment after years of isolation due to their condition.

The Defence Community Dogs program is currently funded and run by the Defence Bank Foundation at a Bathurst correctional facility in New South Wales and the Numinbah Correctional Centre in Queensland. I advocated for this program to be rolled out in a Victorian prison as a pilot. I submitted a proposal for $1.9 million to the Treasurer for the pilot as costed by the Parliamentary Budget Office, but Defence Bank’s costings are much cheaper, so we are really not asking for a lot. Despite positive engagement from the Minister for Corrections and the Minister for Veterans, this money was not allocated in the budget. We have missed out on an opportunity to put in place a program that delivers multiple benefits at a relatively low cost. I have been a strong advocate for assistance dogs in this place and will continue to be for this program until it is funded. If we are serious about helping those who put their lives on the line to help us, then this is one way in which the government can show that commitment.

We do welcome the commitment in the 2022–23 budget to provide additional funds over the next four years to address the serious court backlog that we have in Victoria. I am concerned, however, this will not be enough to truly fix the problem. In 2021 the Attorney-General reported the court case backlog being more than 200 000 across all courts. Recent reports in the media point to the backlog taking 10 years to clear. Victims of crime are waiting too long for justice, and, as I say all too often in this place, justice delayed is justice denied. Imagine waiting four years to have a rape case finalised. It is unbelievable. Only a handful of the case clearance targets in the 2022–23 budget exceed 100 per cent, and those that do only aim for 104 per cent. It is difficult to see how this will make any significant impact on the backlog. It may be that 10 years is optimistic. New magistrates and judges are needed, and they are needed quickly. They also need additional court facilities to deliver their services, as we saw from a recent Court Services Victoria report and from insiders speaking to the media. We need to see some more comprehensive plans from the government about their targets for reducing the backlog, what they will need to do to achieve this and how much it will cost. We need KPIs and benchmarks. If we do not have these things, we are flying blind. I will continue to hold the government to account for this.

I was pleased to see up to $1 billion allocated for the new Melton hospital and up to $525 million for the new Barwon women’s and children’s hospital in Geelong, which has been jointly funded with the federal government. Both are much-needed developments. Melton is one of the fastest growing areas in Melbourne, and a new hospital has been a key priority for the local community. The new facility in Geelong will expand existing facilities and ensure the surrounding communities can source essential health services within the region. I am concerned, however, about the time lines for both of these projects. I have spoken about these concerns publicly. Both have project plans that are yet to be confirmed, so we have no idea when these much-needed facilities will be delivered. I may be being a bit cynical, but it seems a bit disingenuous to have budgeted commitments for two major projects without any money committed in forward estimates. It could be an election year.

In the case of the Melton hospital, despite $70 million being previously allocated to get the project up and running, the budget papers indicate a four-year build not commencing until 2024–25, so we will not see the hospital open until 2029 at the earliest. Given the government’s record on recent major infrastructure projects being on time and on budget, our concern is that it could be much later. There is even less information in the budget papers about the Geelong hospital. We certainly do not know when it will be completed, and unfortunately this was made less clear through answers at the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee by the Premier. By 2030 the need for these facilities will be far greater than it is today, and I expect that the local communities will be at that time experiencing difficulties accessing the health services that they deserve. I urge the government to work harder to get these projects up and running and delivered to the communities. We need a solid plan, not just an empty budget announcement.

In relation to crisis accommodation, there is not enough crisis accommodation in Victoria for victims of family violence. For a number of years the demand for housing support for such victims has grown at a far greater rate than available housing. The situation is exacerbated by the broader housing crisis in Victoria, especially in regional areas. How can victims transition from crisis accommodation when there is limited availability in social housing as well as the private market? Victims often face a stark choice: face homelessness or return to live with a violent partner. Too many victims are choosing the latter. The budget provides funding to purchase only six new crisis accommodation properties for victim-survivors of family violence and just two new family violence refuges. This is great to acknowledge the need for these facilities, but single digits are nowhere near what we need. This is not going to scratch the surface of the very real problem we are facing right now, and much more needs to be done. With all the millions if not billions of dollars being spent on family violence, where is all the money going? It needs to be spent on tangible projects like housing and proven programs that deliver perpetrator rehabilitation and support for victims. At the moment there are too many great opportunities to seriously address family violence that are going to waste. In the meantime, there are more victims of crime.

In terms of the additional police budgeted for, this has been something that I have been very supportive of as a former Victoria Police member. I would like to echo the sentiments of ex-member Brad Battin in the other place in noting that this is only one-third of the allocation that the union asked for. The government media release said, and I quote:

The Staffing Allocation Model (SAM), designed by Victoria Police in consultation with the Police Association of Victoria (TPAV), guided the investment of $342 million for the additional police and PSOs needed to meet Victoria’s policing requirements over the next two years while we assess our state’s changed needs post‑pandemic.

I query that. If the SAM guided this investment, there would actually be an additional 1000 police budgeted for. Nonetheless, I am happy to see the new 502 officers budgeted for and committed to, which will relieve stress on the members and better serve the community. Unsurprisingly, I am hoping that we will see regional and rural areas get their fair share of these uniformed police.

Whilst I am here, as I know it has been a point of contention in the house as recently as a motion in this place in the last sitting week, I would like to refer to the integrity agency funding. The Ombudsman and IBAC have been outspoken since late 2020, ensuring they have adequate funding to carry out all the inquiries and investigations that they have been tasked with completing. They do not do their job by halves, so adequate funding is absolutely integral to government accountability. Just look at what is happening federally with the proposed independent commission against corruption. It is a no-brainer. Derryn Hinch’s Justice Party, just for the record, absolutely supports a federal ICAC and it absolutely supports integrity agencies being able to do their job in a non-partisan independent manner, as is their imperative. In this budget I have queried their funding directly with the Treasurer’s office because I wanted to make sure the agencies were satisfied. I have been informed that IBAC has received a 3.6 per cent increase in funding in this budget before factoring in the additional $7 million funding held in contingency. Following last year’s budget, which provided IBAC additional funding for several initiatives, IBAC and Treasury discussed options to provide more certainty of funding for IBAC in response to new and increasing demands. IBAC agreed to a base review process to understand its capability and capacity needs and an operating model to ensure that it had the funding and structure to perform as the leading integrity agency.

In respect of the Ombudsman, base funding for the Victorian Ombudsman will increase by 3.2 per cent in this budget. The Victorian Ombudsman did not submit a budget bid for additional funding in this budget, and after budget decisions had been finalised the Ombudsman requested a Treasurer’s advance of $700 000 for any urgent and unforeseen activities of the Ombudsman, which the government accepted. Whilst it may be purported by some members of the opposition that Derryn Hinch’s Justice Party are opposing additional funding to integrity agencies, this is smoke and mirrors. All the evidence we have been given points towards the agencies being funded adequately.

In summary, Derryn Hinch’s Justice Party had some fantastic wins in this budget with respect to some of our core priorities and policies, such as law and order, victims of crime and cyber safety. Rest assured, we will keep fighting for these important projects, and being an election year, we will make sure that our voices are loud and they are heard. I commend the bill to the house.

Mr ONDARCHIE (Northern Metropolitan) (16:41): I rise today to speak to the Appropriation (2022–2023) Bill 2022, a bill that is designed to essentially pay the bills of Victoria, to meet the requirements in the budget papers and to make sure that Victorians are getting their fair share of what is required. Whilst this is called the Appropriation (2022–2023) Bill, I think it would be much better couched as the bill that provides not much for Melbourne’s north.

Ms Shing interjected.

Mr ONDARCHIE: A few seconds in and an interjection, Ms Shing. This bill, which does not provide much for Melbourne’s north, surprisingly, once again has delivered very little for my community. We have been campaigning for some time with the community for an upgrade for Merri Creek Primary School, for more open space and more building works in Fitzroy North to support the great work of principal Kerri Gibson. There is some money in this budget to support Merri Creek, but I think it only happened because the local community, who gave me the privilege to campaign on their behalf, got the opportunity to make lots of noise about it and finally the government relented and gave some money to Merri Creek Primary School for some upgrade works. Proudly, or sadly in a way, I was the only member of this place who called for it, but we got there.

But I also want to talk about some other things. We have been campaigning for a long, long time about the growth in Melbourne’s outer north, particularly in the Craigieburn-Greenvale area where we wanted some funding for Mickleham Road. The then Morrison government came to the party with $109.5 million for the upgrade to Mickleham Road—I am hopeful that the current federal government will support this—and the state government was dragged kicking and screaming to do something about it as well and put a little bit of money, not the total amount of money required, into the budget to support the duplication of Mickleham Road. It is not going to go the whole distance, it is only going a little of the way, but because of the great work of the Greenvale Residents Association, the local schools and the local community, who offered me the opportunity to campaign on their behalf on this matter, there is some money for Mickleham Road.

But generally speaking Melbourne’s north has missed out. Coburg High School, which was reopened under the Napthine government, is at capacity. It needs more funding for extra buildings. What did they ask for? Through me they asked for some money for a master plan so they can plan out the future of Coburg High School. What appeared in the line items in the budget for Coburg High School? Not a cracker of money. They will feed some money through as part of an overall bucket, but specifically there was no money allocated for Coburg High School’s master plan.

People have a bit of a laugh about me every now and again when I talk about the surveys I am doing in the local community. I have done a lot of work up in Kalkallo, where traffic congestion, because of all the new development, is just out of touch with reality. People are taking half an hour to get out of their estate so they can drive to work. We wanted money for the traffic congestion around Kalkallo, and what appeared in this budget for the people of Kalkallo in Melbourne’s outer north? Zero, not a cent.

For a long time we have been talking about the intersection of Settlement Road and Dalton Road in Thomastown, a roundabout where there is a homemaker centre and a number of retailers, and it is really, really dangerous to get through that intersection. In fact I recall, very late to the party, the member for Thomastown went out there and did a little bit of a video following the work that we have been doing over a number of years about fixing up that roundabout just pre the budget, and I thought to myself, ‘Hello, she’s doing a video just before the budget about this roundabout. Maybe something is going to happen in the budget’. Well, she got sucked in by her own people because there is nothing in the budget for that roundabout—nothing for that very dangerous intersection. Somerton Road, which abuts Roxburgh Park and Meadow Heights and leads into places like Greenvale and Craigieburn and Somerton, got no money. There was no money for Somerton Road support—once again Melbourne’s north being taken for granted.

I touched on Mickleham Road a little earlier. What has happened is there is a school, Greenvale Secondary College, and a wider estate, and the kids and mums and dads—you have heard me use this expression in this house before—almost have to play that old game Frogger to get across the road so they can get their kids to and from school. We have been calling out for a pedestrian crossing for that area for a long time, and we even said, ‘If you’re not at the point of being able to formally put a pedestrian crossing in, put in some of those temporary lights they use when they’re doing road upgrades so that people can cross the road at some point’. And what was in the budget? What was in the budget for the safety of the parents and the children of the school that abuts Mickleham Road? Nothing—not a cent for them and their safety.

The AAMI crash index analyses roads run across this country, and in Melbourne’s north the three hotspots identified were Plenty Road in Bundoora—interestingly enough, right outside the member for Bundoora’s office; Cooper Street, through the major activity centre of Epping; and Bell Street. They were identified as bad hotspots in this country, and I think Plenty Road in fact was number one for traffic incidents and accidents. We were looking for things like smart upgrades to the traffic lights, some support for those roads to prevent Victorians having accidents or getting injured, and in this budget—and no doubt members on the other side will talk about how great it is—there was nothing for those major traffic hotspots.

Many years ago a previous Labor government outlined the new estate of Aurora and promised them a whole lot of stuff in Epping North. You were going to get a train line, you were going to get all those great services in Epping North, you were going to get these wonderful internet connections. There is nothing that has occurred for Aurora, and it goes all the way to Wollert. So we have been asking, as have the community, as have the local municipality, as have the local emergency services: can we get a feasibility study done on extending that train line you promised all those years ago from Epping to Wollert? In the budget, for a feasibility study for that train line, there is not a cracker—not a cent.

When I look at places like Broadmeadows, that intersection of Johnstone Street and Mickleham Road with the large roundabout that has been there for a long time is really a bit of a challenge for professional drivers in transport, for couriers, for taxis and for passenger vehicles to get through there. It has been difficult. Prior to this budget the people in my community in that area had one wish—one wish only—as they contacted me many times about this: could you at least investigate the traffic flow and do something about fixing up this very unsafe and congested roundabout? Disappointingly in the budget there is nothing—not a cent—for that roundabout.

One of the challenges we have had in Melbourne’s north since the closure of the Ford assembly plant and the downstream supply chain is jobs. Jobs have been a big issue for a long time in Melbourne’s north. One of the things that we have been talking about and we have been talking to the federal government about for a long time—because we have the Hume Highway, we have the rail corridor, we have all that stuff coming into the port of Melbourne—is a multimodal freight interchange in Beveridge. A freight interchange would provide 20 000 jobs—a freight interchange that the Morrison federal government had committed to supporting—to support the people of Mitchell shire, of Hume City Council, of Whittlesea and beyond, as well as taking trucks off that very dangerous road 5 kilometres back into the port of Melbourne and using that multimodal freight interchange to be able to move our goods around Victoria safely. In this budget, which is sometimes lauded by this government, there is not a cent for 20 000 jobs in Melbourne’s north—not a cent.

I recall during the 2018 state election campaign standing at a polling booth in Craigieburn, and across from me was the member for Yuroke. She was talking to the people waiting in the line about her view and the government’s commitment to build the Craigieburn community hospital. I said to somebody standing in the line, ‘I’m not sure you should accept this. They’re not going to do it’. She looked straight across at me and said, ‘We are going to do it. We’re going to build the Craigieburn community hospital’. That was prior to the election in 2018.

That Craigieburn community hospital is much needed. If you go to the west of Melbourne, there are hospitals. If you go to the south-east of Melbourne, there are hospitals. If you go to the east of Melbourne, there are hospitals. If you go to the north of Melbourne, there is one hospital—the Northern Hospital—and it is packed. The emergency department waiting times are long and ambulance ramping happens because there are just not enough facilities in a hospital that is serving such a great variety of communities. In fact on Australia Day the year before last I went to the hospital to try and welcome Australia’s newest person. I said to the nurse at the time, ‘Show me the newest baby of the day’, and she said, ‘Pick one of 20’—20 babies born in that 24-hour period, such is the growth in Melbourne’s north.

We thought a community hospital in Craigieburn might help with some of the burden. What has happened since 2018, when I challenged the member for Yuroke about not building the Craigieburn hospital? They have had some community meetings since 2018. Four years on they have had some community meetings. Where is this Craigieburn community hospital they promised? I tell you what, it is still a fair way away because there is no money in the budget for it. The people in the community have been conned with things like Craigieburn Road, Somerton Road, Mickleham Road, the community hospital, health services and education services. This budget does nothing for Melbourne’s north. They continue to ignore Melbourne’s north.

With the work that is being done around the Epping hospital at the moment, there has been a significant budget blowout. On O’Herns Road, which has just been finished—a budget blowout. Looking across this total budget, the West Gate Tunnel project, $4.7 billion over budget; the Metro Tunnel is now between $3 billion and $4 billion over budget; the Mordialloc bypass in the south-east, $148 million, 40 per cent, over budget; your much-lauded Melbourne heart hospital, which was announced at $150 million, is now $400 million over budget, and it is late.

Net debt is rising significantly in this state. By June 2025 Victoria’s net debt will be worse than that of New South Wales, Queensland and South Australia put together. This is a government that thinks the only way it can deal with this is to tax its way out of trouble. Most businesses—and let us face it, Dan is running Victoria’s biggest business—would look at the cost line—

The ACTING PRESIDENT (Mr Bourman): Order! Mr Ondarchie, appropriate parliamentary names would be more suitable than the Christian name of the Premier, thanks, such as ‘the Premier’, ‘Mr Andrews’ or ‘the member for Mulgrave’.

Mr ONDARCHIE: Okay. Thanks, Acting President. I will remember to do that in future and call him the Premier. When those opposite call it ‘the Andrews Labor government’, should they be calling it the Premier Labor government’ rather than using the term ‘Andrews’? But I will pick up your point.

In terms of taxes from the Premier of this state—the Premier’s taxes—$15 billion has been raised from land tax and stamp duty affecting property buyers, an extra $58 million a year from July 2020 as windfall gains hit developers and landowners. Businesses have been required to pay a billion dollars a year for a mental health levy to support a $246 million package. Future taxpayers are facing over $167 billion in debt. The Treasury expects petrol prices to remain elevated, and there also remains some uncertainty about this VicRoads privatisation—this from a government that opposed privatisation but is now looking to privatise parts of VicRoads. They will say it is not that. They will say it is not privatisation; it is outsourcing or it is something different—it is consulting—but we all know what it is.

They announced an additional 502 police and 50 PSOs in the next two years as part of an investment, but the Police Association Victoria has previously called for 1500 more officers to be introduced. They are not catching up. They talk about additional police, but we are not adding up the police who are leaving, who are retiring and who are taking long-term PTSD leave. They are not backfilling them, so to claim there are extra police in this state is a total furphy. I know in my own electorate there are nights the van does not go out because they have got no-one to drive it.

This government has ignored Melbourne’s outer north. It has ignored the people of Melbourne’s north in this budget. They owe those people the respect they deserve. They get it from me, but they do not get it from the Labor members in Melbourne’s north and they do not get it from this government. This bill is about servicing the needs of all Victorians, but what they have done through this bill is ignore the people of Melbourne’s north.

Ms SHING (Eastern Victoria) (16:56): Well, talk is cheap from those opposite—it is very, very cheap. And what we have heard today—

Dr Bach: Debt is not.

Ms SHING: Actually I am going to pick you up on that, Dr Bach, because what you would know if you had a granular sense of economic development over the course of recent years is that debt is a prudent way to aggregate expenditure and opportunity for the state and that in fact we have been able to borrow against record low interest rates in order to fund a record investment in infrastructure. So, Dr Bach, I would suggest that perhaps you would be well informed to go back to what it is that the Reserve Bank has said, go back to what it is that the Productivity Commission has said and go back to economic theory 101 in order to understand that debt has been very, very cheap and that in fact has informed a fiscal strategy that has enabled Victoria to invest record amounts in infrastructure and record amounts in evolving the opportunities that exist for Victorians right across the state, making sure that we have been able to invest across the board in programs, services, job creation opportunities and indeed a better, brighter future for the state as a consequence.

What I want to do with the time that I have available to me today is talk about the budget and what it means for Victoria but also to have a focus on Eastern Victoria and in particular regional Victoria. There is a lot of hot air that comes from across the chamber and that floats its way over from the other place claiming that in fact this is—what is the phrase?—a Melbourne-centric government. What I did when I heard those claims most recently against this year’s budget is I went back and had a look. I had a look at the averages between 2010 and 2014 and between 2015 and 2022. And what I have seen very clearly, and it is there in the budget papers for all to see, is that between 2010 and 2014—it was a coalition government then—there was an average spend of $1.8 billion in regional Victoria. $1.8 billion—it does not sound like a bad amount until you turn your mind to the size and the challenges and the diversity and the opportunities that exist throughout rural and regional Victoria. And then you counter that $1.8 billion under a coalition government in average expenditure across regional Victoria per annum with $4.5 billion, which is the average that the Andrews Labor government has spent in regional Victoria—$36 billion of funding for regional Victoria since we were elected in 2014. These are important figures, and they are important figures because we hear a lot of hyperbole—a word that Mr Davis has only recently learned how to pronounce—which relates to claims from those opposite that we are not providing—

Members interjecting.

Ms SHING: It is nice to get a laugh from those opposite. It is nice to get a laugh, because otherwise you would think that their faces of grief and sadness and extravagant melodramatic dismay were immovable, when we know they are not. We know they are not because they are also very happy to celebrate the gains that have been delivered to their communities. The reason for that is that the Premier committed, when he was elected, to govern for all Victorians, and that is precisely what has occurred.

When I look at the expenditure that has been issued throughout Victoria—throughout our metropolitan areas, our suburban areas, the peri-urban areas and the interface regional and rural areas—there is very clearly a historic investment in the growth, in the support, in the recovery and in the opportunity for an enormously diverse range of sectors, of businesses, of families, of communities and of infrastructure. And when I think about fiscal management, when I think about the way in which responsible financial decision-making has occurred under this government, I think about the way in which prudent debt has been part of this strategy and I think also about the Treasurer’s speech and the contributions that he has made over the years. Dr Bach, you would be well informed to go back and read the Treasurer’s speeches in this regard. I look at the process of pandemic recovery and of response and return to surplus, which has been a big commitment that has been put in black and white, which we are well on track to achieve. I think about the fact that in this budget, now that we have delivered on the first step of creating jobs, reducing unemployment and restoring economic growth and then returning to an operating cash surplus, we are in a position to return to operating surplus under step 3 of our fiscal plan in 2025–26 with that operating surplus of $650 million.

Those opposite cannot have it both ways. You cannot on the one hand say that we have incurred a record level of debt whilst also ignoring on the other hand the fact that it is precisely investments in areas such as large-scale infrastructure which have delivered a record number of jobs; that in fact Victoria has been the engine room of jobs creation between the two waves of the pandemic and now is again; that it is precisely because of investments in health, investments in rail, investments in road, investments in infrastructure—including the Big Build, including $5.2 billion in public and social housing, including a record investment that has made sure that over the course of our commitment to education we have either rebuilt entirely or upgraded every single special development school across Victoria—that we have delivered those jobs; and that we are making sure that in this year’s budget there is $2.9 billion in health infrastructure and a record continuing investment in mental health to implement every single one of the recommendations of the royal commission. It is easy to see that the priorities of this government extend to people first: people first through job creation, through recovery, through the importance of providing stability, through making sure that every family can provide their children with an equity of opportunity in education and in training. We have seen the continuity of free TAFE. We have seen the upgrade of TAFE campuses and facilities, which continues apace throughout the state. We have seen schools reopened. We have seen new schools being built.

One of the things that I was pleased to be able to celebrate in the lead-up to budget day in Eastern Victoria was that a range of schools that have needed investment for a really long time have been effectively prioritised in this year’s budget, following record investment across the state in previous years. I think about $6.6 million for Warragul and District Specialist School, I think about $3.7 million for Officer Specialist School and I think about land being purchased for Pakenham north west primary and for a new Officer Brunt Road school. I think about $2.4 million for Coldstream Primary School. I think about $4.75 million for Traralgon Recreation Reserve, something which my Nationals colleague across the way conveniently neglected to mention in any of her commentary around how the government needed to come to the party—a blooper on her end, indicating she could not read the budget papers when in fact the only thing missing was the commonwealth government coming to the party to fund the balance.

Ms Bath: Or a bit of selective quoting from the government.

Ms SHING: ‘Selective quoting’? We would never hear selective quoting from those opposite, would we, Minister Pulford? There is a first time for everything. I think of $7.5 million to continue the work of the Latrobe Valley Authority and to continue the work of the Ladder Step Up program, which to date has facilitated 19 programs for at-risk young people who are vulnerable for a range of reasons to complete a program of wraparound care, mentoring and positive role modelling. And I think about the fact that of the 178 graduates of those 19 programs, more than 85 per cent have either returned to education or training or indeed are in employment. These are the sorts of measures that involve investing in people.

When I think about what it is that Mr Davis loves to go on about when he is on his feet—more adjectives than a bookstore on a good day—he very, very conveniently talks about the range of costs associated with public sector employment. One of the things that Mr Davis loves to talk about is the numbers of people in the Victorian public service, and he loves to talk about the numbers of people in the various higher grade levels of the VPS. When I heard Mr Davis talk about this, what it reminded me of was a report from the Ombudsman, I think in 2015, that criticised the government, of which Mr Davis was a part, for potential breaches of the fair work laws investigated by the Fair Work ombudsman following—get this, right; this one is good so you should probably remember this—cutting 4000 jobs from the public service and then spending $1 billion, billion with a ‘b’, on consultants.

So before those opposite get it in their heads that they can pop their halos on and walk around on the high ground as it relates to management of the public sector, let us not forget that when they were in government they paid lip-service to public service and public sector service delivery and program delivery—the sorts of things that result in initiatives like the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System or the implementation of the 227 recommendations from the Royal Commission into Family Violence. Let us not forget it was those opposite who closed schools, who closed TAFEs, who slashed public service numbers and who made it nigh impossible for people to actually get a go with education unless they were prepared to spend tens of thousands of dollars every year on selective and private schools. Let us not forget the sense of privilege that seeps into every single sentence that those opposite ever utter. Let us not forget the idea of ‘getting a go’ when you have already got privilege on your side. Let us not forget that those opposite have steadfastly refused to support progressive initiatives that have helped to provide opportunities for Victorians who have needed them and have deserved them. Let us not forget that the sick pay guarantee was opposed by those opposite. Let us not forget that a range of initiatives that are extended to provide healthy and safe workplaces have been opposed by those opposite: nurse-to-patient ratios, industrial manslaughter and long service leave across different sectors within the community. Let us not forget that it is moral high ground, some sort of pious commitment to trickle-down economics, which leads those opposite to say, ‘We support what you are doing, but—’. And again, as I have said in this place before, with the coalition there is always a ‘but’ and with the coalition there is never any commitment to actually invest in people. It always comes down to a cheap line, to a throwaway slogan or to some self-aggrandizing idea that only in fact the coalition can provide a meaningful way through the pandemic.

Well, here is the news: the way through a pandemic is to invest in people, to invest in growth, to invest in job opportunities and, as a corollary to that, to invest in education and training pathways. These are the things that will see us in a position to flourish. These are the things that will increase and improve our resilience in relation to further challenges of a public health nature into the future. It is not the carping of those opposite that will deliver these sorts of investments in infrastructure. It is not, in fact, if we were going to be specific about it, the verbiage of people like Mr Davis in this place that is going to make a difference to the cost of living for people who cannot afford to choose between their heating on the one hand, their grocery bills on the other and the cost of their mortgages on the other. That is three hands, but you know what I mean.

The bottom line is we need to make sure that as a government we are taking steps to reduce the cost of living; to reduce energy bills, and the energy saving power bonus is a really, really important example of this; and to assist people with adapting to climate change. It is a dirty phrase when you are listening to those opposite, because until very recently they did not actually believe in it, and until very recently they thought that you did not need to talk about it. Climate change is in fact an important part of the conversation that is guiding our encouragement and incentives toward uptake of renewable energy. It is these sorts of discussions that we are having with communities, with constituents, with stakeholders and with various industries, businesses and geographic parts of the state that are guiding the development of policy which is setting us up for long-term recovery and indeed prosperity. What we do know is that unemployment in this state, in regional Victoria—save for a couple of areas, particularly around youth unemployment—is at record low levels. What we do know is that employment opportunities are at record high levels, that skills shortages can be met by appropriate pathways to education and training and partnerships with industry and that we are leaving no part of the state behind. It would do those opposite well to consider, in the event that they do ever wish to be a viable government—a viable alternative government—turning their minds to ways in which they too could put people first.

Mr HAYES (Southern Metropolitan) (17:11): Last year during hearings on biodiversity and ecosystem decline we heard many witnesses call for this state to declare a biodiversity and ecosystem emergency. Our ecosystem decline is of great concern to me and the Sustainable Australia Party and, I hope, of great concern to the government, so I will begin my look at the 2022–23 budget with this emergency in mind.

With our precious ecology and our future in mind, I welcome the government’s $16.9 million in funding to improve our marine and coastal ecosystems. But is this commitment to the environment enough? One of the witnesses to the inquiry by the committee of which I am deputy chair, the Environment and Planning Committee, into ecosystem decline was a marine biologist, Dr Matthew Edmunds of Australian Marine Ecology. He told the inquiry:

The communities all through the marine environments provide really important ecosystem services to our society, not just in terms of their intrinsic values but in terms of processing nutrients for us, providing habitat and production for fisheries and aquaculture, waterways for shipping and all sorts of other services.

Unfortunately there have been some ecosystem declines all through the state in all of the types of habitats that we know of. And a lot of those, or nearly all of those, are human related and usually a compounding of the pressures that we are putting on them.

Dr Edmunds spoke of the poor quality of scientific processes in Victoria in the marine field, low standards and the absence of checking of these standards and their review. To quote Dr Edmunds again:

… scientific standards are a way of trying to provide factual, reliable evidence that you can make decisions on, as opposed to advocacy, marketing or just straight-up corruption.

When one considers evidence like this, one wonders if $16.9 million is enough to make a big difference in this vital sector. But let us call it a start anyway.

Last year during the ecosystem and biodiversity decline inquiry a number of expert witnesses said that given the extent of our environmental damage and challenges the budget for the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning should be set at at least 1 per cent of state budget spending. This 1 per cent is a drop in the ocean compared to other budget commitments. With DELWP spending at $780 million and the total budget spend at $99.3 billion, spending on the environment is around $200 million short of even this modest 1 per cent goal. I stress we are in a climate and biodiversity emergency, and I call on the government to urgently increase spending on the environment.

There is also $7 million to deal with coastal erosion. I feel this is going to be an area of increasing concern as global warming causes sea levels to rise. I hope valuable lessons are learned through this $7 million of funding because in future budgets much more money is going to be needed. The Environment and Planning Committee last year also heard about the poor state of facilities in our national parks, so the $9.5 million allocated to improve and maintain these facilities is sorely needed. Once again this funding is welcome, but it is just the start of what is needed. I also note the $2.5 million allocated to the bushfire safety program. This is an important program that protects regional and rural communities from bushfires caused by fallen powerlines. We have got to find a better way of moving high-voltage transmissions around the state, and I think microgrids and things like that might be a way to look at safer electricity transmission.

I welcome the government’s $16 million in spending on preserving the state’s heritage icons such as Werribee Mansion and the Point Nepean forts. Many people believe there is a lot more that needs doing to protect heritage in this state. Here I will mention a couple of spending allocations which are welcome in Southern Metro Region, some of which I advocated for at the behest of local councils who also pushed for all of these. I am very pleased to see the $18 million allocation to deliver critical works on local piers and jetties, including Hampton Pier. I have advocated for this vital spending and also for the Middle Brighton Pier, where work has been continually going on, but much is needed to be done. We really need an urgent rebuild of this pier. We cannot keep patching it up. Also, there is $12.9 million for Berendale and Katandra special schools, $3.8 million for Sandringham East Primary School, $10.6 million for the bus network reform in Oakleigh and Southland, $2 million for the Shipston Reserve and $1 million for Elsternwick Park lighting and pavilion upgrades.

The $27.8 million in the budget to improve the state’s building sector is also very welcome but again urgently needed. Recently I hosted a round table of mayors and councillors from councils in my electorate. One of the main topics of conversation was the state of building standards in the apartment sector and the heartbreak of people who had invested their life savings in these failed constructions. The large number of apartments suffering severe building defects is a massive problem in this state, and I do not believe the $27.8 million in spending in this budget will be the end of it. What we see here is corner cutting by private sector developers, the effects of deregulation of the planning and building supervision duties, which used to be in the hands of councils, and now the Victorian taxpayer is being asked to foot the bill caused by a developer-driven system. It is a product of deregulation gone wild. Will the government find the guts to take the power of oversight back into public hands? The Sustainable Australia Party is firmly of the view that supervision of building surveyors should be returned to the hands of local councils, with appropriate funding to provide a high-quality supervision and inspection service in the interests of the public and not those who are primarily seeking super profits.

This budget also contains some welcome funding for sustainable water and recycling investments. But make no mistake, the government plans to have 10 million people in Victoria by 2050. That is the agenda behind a good deal of water spending—to try and accommodate many, many more people living in this state despite the widespread and deep unpopularity of this policy. A shortage of water is going to be an issue. This is an arid country. It is not Europe, but the government’s property developer friendly population policies pretend that it is, so water will be in shorter and shorter supply. Money needs to be spent on water. The $4 million funding for water access for Victoria’s traditional owners is especially welcome.

I thought this budget contained some good initiatives for renewable energy and for helping Victorians deal with surging energy costs. Much like the 1973 war in the Middle East caused a surge in energy prices, the current one in the Ukraine is doing the same. While the opposition, representing the big donors from the fossil fuel industry, will claim energy price increases were caused by too much reliance on renewables, the real culprits are gas and coal producers profiteering from the war in Ukraine. They are enjoying an export bonanza. If there were more renewables and battery storages in the system, energy costs would be less, not more. Many of these companies do not pay tax in Australia, and they are making huge profits from now cheap gas at the expense of the Victorian taxpayers. What we urgently need here is a domestic gas reservation scheme like sensible Western Australia has put in place. Once again, will the government find the guts to upset a powerful and rich industry like the gas and coal producers? I do have great concerns about the massive rise in electricity and gas prices, and while measures in this budget are there to assist, I call on the government to listen to bodies like the Australian Council of Social Service that represent people on fixed incomes and low incomes. It is these people who are going to be most hurt by these increases. If further measures are needed after this budget, then the government must stand ready to act, but in no way can this be a permanent solution.

I now turn to social spending in the budget. Last sitting week my colleague in this place Dr Catherine Cumming made a pithy remark about the government’s poor record on health and social services, especially on the failure to keep the promise from the 2018 election to build or upgrade 10 community hospitals. This is a failure I have recently asked a question about myself. Dr Cumming rightly asked for more money for the ambulance system, for hospitals and for more money for building these community hospitals. If Dr Cumming does not mind, I wish to quote her:

Hurry up. Throw the money there. Get them built immediately. Pretend it is a tunnel or a level crossing. Just pretend for a little moment that a hospital is more important than a level crossing or a tunnel.

That was rather funny at the time, but just there I believe she hit the nail on the head. This government is very focused on big projects, those ones where their top people can don a hard hat and an orange vest, get all that media attention—‘Getting things done’, all that sort of thing. There is nothing wrong with that, but what is not getting done is maintaining the social fabric of this state. We saw out the front of Parliament late last year how frayed that social fabric is. I know Labor has a proud tradition of funding social services, but currently I believe they are dropping the ball. All those tunnels and level crossings are very expensive. The cost blowouts on these projects are astronomical.

Public housing is also an area that is important to our social fabric and needs more funding. The government is playing an enormous game of catch-up here. For its first term and part of its second term its record of provision has been very poor. At the same time it has failed to mandate a minimum amount of affordable housing for big developments. Many councils in my electorate are calling for mandated inclusionary zoning to be inserted into the planning scheme, but even more important to our party is to see government directly intervene in the housing market and build public housing for the public—not investors—on publicly owned land.

The lack of a real vacancy tax is also contributing to our housing crisis. Let us call it what it is—it is a housing crisis. We have a huge public housing waiting list, yet the think tank Prosper has said that there are 70 000 properties sitting empty in Melbourne, presumably investment properties. Prosper Australia has said the vacant residential land tax is ineffective in curtailing property vacancies in Melbourne and that housing policy must prioritise housing as a human right, not just a profit-generating tool. Maybe if we banned donations from property developers such a focus on housing as a human right would significantly increase affordable housing. At the end of 2020 Prosper director Karl Fitzgerald said:

… it appears the Vacant Residential Land Tax was built to fail, with no oversight and no fines issued for failure to self-report. Vacancies have increased by 13.3% since the tax was introduced.

Mr Fitzgerald said if there was a proper residential vacancy tax, the government would have raised $150 million to $500 million instead of the $6 million it has raised. The government is running a huge deficit, so why isn’t this revenue-raising measure being introduced? It would have a positive financial and social benefit, so the absence of an effective vacancy tax is something I find rather baffling.

At the same time we are seeing cost-cutting in our social services. They are clearly not meeting demand. The Victorian Alcohol and Drug Association, the peak body for treatment and rehab services in Victoria, expressed alarm at the budget cut of $39 million in service funding for alcohol and other drug treatment and prevention. Alcohol and drug use soared through the lockdowns. The government has not only tolerated but encouraged home delivery of alcohol. This is very disappointing. VAADA said there was an 11.2 per cent cut from the budget for alcohol and drug treatment. The CEO of VAADA, Sam Biondo, said:

People experiencing alcohol and other drug dependency have been forgotten over the pandemic. With sales for alcohol increasing by 29 per cent over the pandemic, it is not surprising that 70 per cent of Victorian agencies have seen an increase in the prevalence and severity of alcohol presentations.

We saw in the recent federal election that trust in governments and politicians is at a low ebb. That explains the fact that the two major parties registered less than 70 per cent of the primary vote, a stark decline from the heyday of the fabled two-party system. Listening to donors, not the people, is at the heart of this move away from the Lib-Lab duopoly. Given this decline in the relationship between the people and their elected representatives, the role of the corruption commission in Victoria is vital. Victorian IBAC Commissioner, Mr Redlich, said in 2021:

As Commissioner, one of my most important roles is to ensure IBAC has the powers and resources required to fulfil its legislative obligations. As calls on the organisation to do more to expose and prevent corruption and police misconduct continue to grow, additional funding will be required in coming years.

If the government believes there is such a thing as society, then it needs to look closely at how to heal divisions and pain from man-made natural disasters, including the pandemic, and that means more money for social spending, including mental and physical health, as well as on the environment, and less on major project cost blowouts.

Dr BACH (Eastern Metropolitan) (17:27): It is good to rise to also make a contribution on this important bill. Whether it is the escalating cost-of-living pressures or fixing the health crisis, the Andrews Labor government has failed to address the needs of people across Melbourne’s east and north-east, the people who I represent. There are a range of things that I would like to briefly touch upon in the time that I have allocated to me this afternoon on this bill. I would like to talk about a few local measures and a few measures that sit within my shadow portfolios and then to make some holistic comments.

‘Talk is cheap’, said Ms Shing, and she was quite right when she said that. When I quipped back, ‘Debt isn’t cheap’, Ms Shing took exception to that. Debt is of course historically cheap, but it is becoming more expensive. Indeed it became more expensive to service debt just today when the Reserve Bank decided to raise interest rates by a significant half a percentage point to 0.85 per cent. Most economists—indeed all economists—are predicting further interest rate rises over the course of the year as inflation continues to rise, so in a respectful way I would take issue with Ms Shing’s characterisation of the government’s strategy. She said it is a strategy that we move towards $170 billion in debt, and she called that debt ‘prudent debt’. Again, respectfully I would disagree. As we move towards $170 billion in debt, as is made plain through this bill, we will have debt here in Victoria that is greater than the debt of New South Wales, Queensland and South Australia combined.

To take on some debt in order, for example, to invest in infrastructure that stacks up is something that I would support. However, I will not be lectured on economics 101 by a member of a government that has put $28.1 billion of waste on the credit card. $28.1 billion in blowouts are made plain through the budget papers. Debt to service spending on infrastructure, debt for productive spending, I understand at prudent levels can be a good thing at a time when interest rates are historically low. But I would argue that it is never a prudent strategy to increase debt levels simply to fund waste, and we see so much waste in these budget papers.

For example, the blowout on the North East Link, which the Minister for Transport Infrastructure visited in her high-vis and hard hat—to come back to some comments of Mr Hayes just the other day—has increased now to $10.4 billion. That is simply the waste—the difference between what the Labor government said this project would cost and now the Labor government’s own budgeted figures. The West Gate Tunnel really does not need any further commentary from me about how badly that has been managed by this government. The blowout there is very significant: $4.7 billion. That is a vast sum. Ms Shing understandably took the opportunity to criticise the former Liberal and National Party government for what she said was the waste of $1 billion. Well, I agree with her broad proposition that $1 billion is a vast amount to waste. $28.4 billion is of course much, much worse.

Now, just briefly continuing on Ms Shing’s contribution before I move on, I was interested that she took the opportunity again to have a whack at the opposition over what she called selective quoting, and then true to form she criticised the former Morrison government for, she said, not partnering with the government. Look, it has been entirely legitimate over time for the government to want to take issue with some of the decisions of the Morrison government. That is fine. However, now there is a test: was that simply partisan politicking, another opportunity to bash up a Liberal government? Because if it was not, let us see the same fervour now that we have a Labor government in Canberra.

Selective quoting is something we were accused of on this side of the house. Ms Shing was deeply selective when she wanted to criticise the Morrison government that is not the government anymore. As I said earlier today, the budgetary position of Victoria would be better if the new Albanese government had not broken its promise to give $4 billion in infrastructure funding—Ms Shing talked a lot about infrastructure—to Victoria. Nine days before the election, in a strategic drop to the Herald Sun, Ms King, the then Shadow Minister for Infrastructure, said that she would unlock $4 billion of funding for Victoria. That funding had been set aside by Mr Frydenberg and Mr Morrison. She promised that, of course, to win votes in Melbourne’s east. Undoubtedly she was successful. It was described in the media as a $4 billion power play, unlocking money to partner with the Andrews Labor government—quite right—and she made the point in the media that should the opposition be successful in November, well then, she would want to work with us on projects that we thought were meritorious. However, on her second day as a minister she ripped away that funding from Victoria. And yet even though we still hear criticisms of the Morrison government from those opposite—a government that is no longer the government—we have heard not a peep about $4 billion being ripped away.

Ms Taylor interjected.

Dr BACH: The $4 billion was ripped away on the second day after the government was sworn in, to take up Ms Taylor’s point. So to take up Ms Taylor’s point, maybe another member in this debate would like to tell me at what time they will criticise the Albanese government for ripping away $4 billion dollars that they promised. Ms Taylor said it has been two weeks. Okay, fine. I will wait patiently. I do not ever recall that members opposite waited to criticise the Morrison government. I do not ever recall that happening, but if the proposition is that we should wait before sticking up for Victorians, I do not accept that. But if that is the government’s position, let us get a time line. When will members of the government come out, fly the flag for Victoria, stick up for Victoria and fight for that $4 billion of funding that the Albanese government when in opposition promised? When will we see that?

In my electorate of Eastern Metropolitan Region I was disappointed to see that there was no funding in the budget to deal with the Box Hill interchange. The Box Hill interchange in my electorate is such an important transport hub. For many years I caught the train to the Box Hill interchange and then the bus out to Doncaster, but it has fallen to rack and ruin, and when in opposition the Labor Party promised to fix it up. I would like to start a dialogue with the Minister for Public Transport and the Minister for Transport Infrastructure regarding when and how we will see funding and a plan to fix the Box Hill interchange.

I was also surprised that we did not see any targeted allocations for Box Hill Hospital and Eastern Health more broadly. I do not doubt that every other member of this place is in the same boat as me regarding the amount of correspondence that we receive from our constituents about health at the moment. In my neck of the woods we are deeply proud of Box Hill Hospital and deeply proud of the doctors and nurses, allied health staff and other support staff who work at Eastern Health. Nonetheless, they are being let down by the Andrews Labor government. In particular what we have seen is so many examples of ramping, and that means that deeply sick people, people in a crisis situation, are not able to get the care that they need and quite frankly that they deserve from the state health system, so I was surprised by that.

On infrastructure, once more we did see an ongoing allocation of some funding for the Suburban Rail Loop, but I am keen to understand the figures somewhat better than I do. In budget paper 4 it is noted that there has been an announcement—that was the language of budget paper 4—of $11.8 billion for the Suburban Rail Loop, and yet when I interrogated the budget papers I could only see an allocation of $2.359 billion. There is a gap there of almost $9.5 billion. Some members of the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee recently sought to ask questions about this of the minister, and still I am not entirely sure whether that money has been allocated. It is not a criticism. I am simply seeking to understand the situation with that project, the first stage of which the government says will cost somewhere between $30 billion and $34.5 billion. I do not understand whether over $11 billion has actually been allocated in the budget or whether it has simply been announced.

That is important because I will always give the federal Labor government credit where credit is due. Ms King has said a whole series of very sensible things about the Suburban Rail Loop that will cut through my electorate. She has said that the reason that she has offered the Andrews Labor government so much less than the previous federal Labor pledge is because she is not sure that the whole loop ‘stacks up’. Those were her exact words. There is not a business case for the whole loop. There are no costings. There is no designated funding stream, and of course the project has not been ticked off by Infrastructure Australia. When Mr Albanese was infrastructure minister, he set up Infrastructure Australia, and again credit where credit is due. That was never a principle that was adopted by those opposite to the previous government, but credit where credit is due: it was a good thing that Mr Albanese set up Infrastructure Australia. Infrastructure Australia, for example, continues to say that the east–west link is a high priority. Well, they have not carried out an assessment of the Suburban Rail Loop, so again credit on this occasion to Minister King for holding the line against the Andrews Labor government and for saying, no, there must be a proper process.

One of the reasons why we have seen such extraordinary blowouts that are all now on the state’s credit card—$28.1 billion—is because at the outset of so many of the Andrews Labor government’s big projects, so-called Big Build projects, there has not been a proper process. Those were the findings of the Auditor-General in two significant reports last year, so I do think it is very important that expert bodies like Infrastructure Australia are engaged early and carry out proper assessments to then ensure that projects stack up before significant funding is allocated and before work commences.

Overall, given the fact that in my electorate I hear on a daily basis that so many people are struggling with the cost of living and that our state’s health crisis, whether it be ongoing ramping or whether it be a vast elective surgery waiting list, is detrimentally impacting so many people, I was disappointed with this budget. In particular I was disappointed to see such additional blowouts on major projects that will now make it so much harder to engage in tax reform, to engage in tax relief and to finally fix the problems that have beset our health system in particular for such a long period of time.

Ms TERPSTRA (Eastern Metropolitan) (17:40): I am pleased to rise to make a contribution on the Appropriation (2022–2023) Bill 2022. In researching this and listening to others in the chamber, I want to make my contribution with a sense of optimism, because following that you would think that everything was terrible and bad and that the sky was falling. I do not know—maybe they were reading from different notes than what I have got. Wow! It seems to be such a dark and bleak picture that has been painted by those opposite, but what I can say is that it is possible to have a budget that puts people at the centre. The investment, in broad brushstrokes, around this budget has at the heart of it delivering our pandemic repair plan, creating meaningful jobs, continuing to build on a world-class education system, getting Victorians home sooner and safer, helping families, making Victoria fairer and building strong communities. Having just heard Dr Bach’s speech, you would think that all of those things that I just mentioned were bad things. I think Dr Bach’s contribution heavily focused on criticising this government’s Big Build program and a range of other things. But the fact remains that those opposite built nothing. They did nothing and built nothing.

Ms Pulford: They put tiles in a room at Ballarat train station. Just a room.

Ms TERPSTRA: That is it. Yes, just a room. This government is serious about getting on with building things. Part of the central core of the Big Build program is, as I mentioned before, getting Victorians home sooner and safer. That is why we invest in public transport. In my region, in the Eastern Metropolitan Region—Dr Bach talked about this; he talked about the Suburban Rail Loop—is the North East Link, building that missing link. I will touch on that for a moment. The North East Link will remove 15 000 trucks from roads. I live in the footprint of the North East Link project. This is my local community that is being affected by the trucks that are on the roads. Rosanna Road is being used by trucks. As I said, 15 000 trucks will be removed from the road. I am very happy about that. I would like to not be stuck in traffic jams where there are multiple trucks on the road, and this is what the North East Link is going to do: take 15 000 trucks off local roads. It will slash travel times by 35 minutes.

The first dedicated busway down the Eastern Freeway—I was out with Minister Jacinta Allan just yesterday and we attended the Bulleen park-and-ride. That is going to be completed four years early. Who does not want to have better public transport and more accessible public transport right in the suburbs, right on your doorstop—delivering 34 kilometres of walking and cycling paths, planting 30 000 trees and delivering 10 000 jobs? That is all just a part of the North East Link project.

The contributions of those opposite, and Dr Bach’s contribution as well, were very heavy on mythologising the fact that there are blowouts with all of these projects and mythologising around blowouts. But the fact remains that if we want to talk about mythology, look at what happened just recently as soon as Catherine King became the Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government in the federal government. She has come out and said the $4 billion that the federal government talked about—

Members interjecting.

The ACTING PRESIDENT (Mr Gepp): Order in the chamber, please. I would like the member to be heard in silence.

Ms TERPSTRA: Thank you. There are 10 conversations happening here at once. Anyway, the $4 billion was promised by the federal government. I noted that there were billboards put up by Michael Sukkar in his electorate of Deakin saying that he promised $4 billion for the east–west link, and the federal minister for infrastructure has now said that that simply did not exist. It is a myth. ‘It’s a … fraud’ were her exact words, so it is really a little bit rich to be lectured by those opposite today about these mythologised blowouts on projects. I mean, we are building things. We are getting on with projects that Victorians back and that they voted for. The North East Link project was a project we took to the 2018 state election, so Victorians back these projects. Whether it is a large project like the North East Link—as I said, it is in my region, the Eastern Metropolitan Region—there are a range of other things that are going to benefit people in my region.

Recently I also attended the opening of the Doncaster ambulance station, otherwise known as the Templestowe ambulance branch, with Minister Martin Foley. We need to reflect on the fact that it was the previous Liberal government that closed the Doncaster ambulance branch, and we are now proudly reopening that so people in my electorate and certainly people who live in the Manningham area and surrounds will have greater access and better access to ambulance services should they need it. Again, those opposite can talk about cost blowouts, but their whole schtick is that they want small government and less services so that their rich mates can profit from it when they run businesses for profit. We get on with supporting communities by building important infrastructure projects and investing so that people can get to local jobs and go to TAFE and those kinds of things. That is what our government does.

Again, locally, I will talk about our commitment to public education. I could not have been prouder to be part of a government that made a commitment to rebuilding our special development schools. There are 36 special development schools, and I was very proud to visit with the Minister for Education, James Merlino, the other day the Croydon Special Developmental School. In fact that school was opened by Joan Kirner in 1992. It was an amazing thing to see, and I hope we can preserve that plaque on the wall so it does not get lost in the rebuild of the school, because it is very important. But as I said, that school was opened by Joan Kirner in 1992, so it has been a long time between drinks—or money—for that school. I was really pleased to be able to attend with the Minister for Education, James Merlino, and talk about the $11 million investment that will be given to that school to upgrade it and to rebuild it. Kids who attend that school have moderate to severe disabilities, whether they be intellectual or physical disabilities. Like I said, that is actually putting heart in our budget. We talk about infrastructure, but we need to also connect these commitments that government has made to people and understand what a difference they can make to people’s lives. The teachers at the Croydon Special Developmental School are amazing teachers and such dedicated teachers. I have visited that school on a number of occasions, and I have been very fortunate to also sit in a classroom and watch the teachers educating children with these severe intellectual or physical disabilities or challenges. It is amazing to see the joy on the children’s faces as they are learning and having access to a world-class education right here in Victoria. The money that is going to be invested in Croydon Special Developmental School will be amazing, and I cannot wait to see the outcomes for those children.

But another really good news story for people in my region, the Eastern Metropolitan Region, is Croydon Community School—what an amazing school—with $18 million to actually rebuild that school on a different site. Again I visited that school with the Minister for Education, James Merlino, the other day, and what was really great to see was that the Croydon Community School takes students from all over nearby areas; it is not just for Eastern Metropolitan Region and not just Croydon. But these are kids who have either lived in residential care or lived in out-of-home care and have come from very challenging circumstances. Perhaps family life has not been the best for those children. They are disadvantaged. They may not receive funding that they might have ordinarily got. They may not fit criteria that gives them funding. But this school turns lives around.

If I can just talk about Marcus, one of the students who we met with the other day, Marcus is a student who had been out of school for quite a number of years. He was enrolled at Croydon Community School, and after not attending school for a couple of years he has now been reintegrated into Croydon Community School. He is now in year 12. Marcus was successful in securing an apprenticeship as a landscaper, and he is now working as an apprentice landscaper at Croydon Community School, planting the new plants for the new school, which is an amazing story. It is a lovely story; it is a success story. Again, it connects real people with the story of this budget, which is investing in people and giving people opportunities.

Marcus will be able to attend TAFE and obtain his apprenticeship. Another signature commitment of this government is the massive investment that we have made in TAFE and in our skills and training system just in this budget alone—$103.1 million in our skills and training framework. People like Marcus are able to not only finish their secondary education but come out of school with an apprenticeship. Marcus’s employer, who has got the contract for the planting at the school, is so happy with what Marcus has been able to achieve but loves him as an employee as well. What another great news story, for him to be able to complete that apprenticeship and walk away as a skilled tradesperson. So these are the things this government does and invests in.

Another really good news story in the skills and training space is the $12 million of targeted support for the apprenticeship support officer program, which will help more apprentices complete their apprenticeships—again, putting real stories and faces on the investment in this budget; $2.8 million for certificate IV in teaching an Australian First Nations language to increase the number of Aboriginal language teachers in Victorian kinders and schools, making sure that our First Nations students and children can have education delivered by teachers in First Nations languages; and $4.8 million for the diploma in Auslan to be added to the free TAFE list and to review TAFE campuses to ensure that they are accessible for students with disability. Auslan is added to the free TAFE list so more and more students can have education delivered to them in a way that is meaningful for them and to remove barriers, so that increases equity and accessibility of education.

The budget goes from the large projects that I have talked about in terms of the North East Link even down to what is still a large investment by this government but at a local level more meaningful to people who might be struggling: the energy saver bonus. I know other people have talked about that in the chamber today, but what a great help that is with the cost of living. If you were eligible for the last one, you can access that bonus up until 30 June; I think it was $250. But we are opening up a new round on 1 July, so you can access it under the previous scheme and then access it again after 1 July. That could be an amount of up to $500 off just your electricity bill in one calendar year. That is a significant assistance to those who might be struggling with the cost of living. As we know, electricity prices are going up and up, and it is critically important that these investments are made. It is winter, and obviously during winter people need to access more heating to keep warm and to be comfortable in their own homes, so we are very pleased and proud to be able to make that investment for people to assist with the cost of living.

We heard Dr Bach talk about how terrible our government is and how terrible our infrastructure projects are, but again, in putting a face on and heart into this budget I must make mention of the government’s previous commitment to the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System. In the 2020–21 budget we invested $869 million to lay the foundation for the new mental health and wellbeing system, and this was followed by a record investment of $3.8 billion in last year’s budget to support Victorians and speed up the nation-leading and life-saving reforms.

I could go on and on and talk so much more about all the investments and what they mean to people in my region of the Eastern Metropolitan Region, but you can see this government has laid the foundations to make sure, as I said earlier, people can get to where they need to be sooner. We are implementing our pandemic repair plan through the investment in this budget. We are creating those meaningful jobs. We are supporting and building our world-class education system, making Victoria fairer and building stronger communities. As I said earlier, the investments that we are rolling out in this budget continue to build on previous budgets. Those opposite can criticise all they like, but they built nothing, they invested in nothing. With the new, incoming federal government, as I said, the federal infrastructure minister has criticised the mythologised $4 billion for the east–west link that was never there. It was a dud project; it never stacked up. Again, I commend the bill to the house.

Ms MAXWELL (Northern Victoria) (17:55): I rise to speak on the Appropriation (2022–2023) Bill 2022. I spoke in the last week about the wins for my electorate of Northern Victoria and particular projects I have advocated for and those that are still on my wish list—those that I hope will be election commitments, from both sides, before November. As does Dr Bach, I also like to give credit where credit is due, and we are very appreciative of some of the funding that was committed to my electorate of Northern Victoria in the budget.

This budget I feel is pitched mainly around health—entirely appropriate, given the time, as never has good health been so important and perhaps so elusive as right now. I feel disheartened for the thousands of healthcare workers who continue to operate in very stressful conditions. The pandemic has certainly been a once-in-a-century challenge, but I hope it provides a strong lesson in knowing that we have to build and maintain systems that can endure strain. The economies of scale are harder to prosecute in regional areas, but our regions deserve a much stronger healthcare system than we have right now. This is not a reflection on the people that work within the system, for we know they give it their all and they do it with great compassion and care each and every day. But we do have shortages right across the board—and it is not a new story; however, it is one that is getting more pronounced—from GPs to allied and community health, ambulances, hospitals, mental health support and aged care. The future design of our system and recurring investment in it must include building a workforce as strong in numbers as it is in capability and care—one that can sustain challenges and pivot to avoid a crisis situation, as we currently see. If the budget is about health, I think the next one and the one after that will need to be as well, until our system is back on better footings with delivery of early intervention and increased home-care programs.

Our smaller regional areas need continued investment and services, and the process of master planning and approval for hospital upgrades needs to be clear and collaborative with communities. Not another hospital should endure what Swan Hill hospital has. For years their emergency department staff’s only available break area was a plastic chair outside next to the bins. There was little room to move equipment, and their waiting room was completely unsafe, yet it took four iterations of a master plan for them to get the starter funding towards a new hospital. It is hoped that only one master plan will be enough to secure a new hospital in Mildura. The same applies for Albury-Wodonga, where we seem to have a conflict between the local certainty that a master plan has been submitted and the government, which is adamant that it is not finalised. Both cannot be correct, but what is certain is that a new hospital is desperately needed, and a single site is what the community healthcare workers want.

I hope the change in federal government will allow the state to collaborate on a strategy to address the critical shortage of GPs in regional areas. Some towns in my electorate have no GP, and families moving into a new region are resorting to telehealth with their metropolitan doctor because they cannot get into the books of a local clinic. If someone rings Nurse-on-Call for their child, the likely advice they are given is that their child needs to see a doctor, but that is pointless when you cannot get in to one. Recruitment of healthcare workers is also diabolical, due to housing shortages. We all remember Maslow’s hierarchy of needs—that begins with housing, and we do not have anywhere near enough in regional areas. To be honest, housing all of the workers that are in short supply across industries in regional areas is a big and ongoing challenge. Families escaping family violence are increasingly unable to source crisis accommodation. Only this week Wangaratta reported a 14.3 per cent increase in the number of households seeking assistance to find or sustain private rental housing. Half of them had never needed support before.

A lot will be riding on the big numbers that were released in this budget to support our healthcare system, including up to 7000 health workers, more paramedics, more ESTA call takers, 40 000 extra surgeries to reduce the waitlists and $1.3 billion to deliver mental health reforms. Funding for 82 new mental health beds includes additional beds at Northeast Health Wangaratta and Goulburn Valley Health, and that is incredibly welcome news. I raised in March the need for an acute mental health service for the 12- to 15-year-old cohort, and I hope the rollout of the mental health reforms will address that critical need, particularly in our regional areas. I am hearing many stories of people needing to attend a mental health facility to be triaged only to be sent home with no health plan or alternative supports. They go home and then are taken again the next day by an ambulance or police vehicle to that same facility. It is a revolving door. People are feeling the impacts of COVID, and our young people are particularly susceptible to anxiety and depression in numbers not seen before.

Mildura has welcomed an investment of $36 million to deliver a 30-bed residential alcohol and other drug rehabilitation unit. I am concerned that the overall spend on AOD rehabilitation services seems to have been cut. When our courts are littered with accounts of crime linked to substance abuse, it makes a mockery of community correction orders that mandate drug treatment. If those services are not readily available, where do they go? More importantly, it does nothing to properly intervene and assist people to improve their lives and to improve their health.

We are now a couple of years into the reform of our fire services, and it is disappointing that the CFA is being squeezed out of funding to upgrade and build stations. There are 1200 CFA stations to share only $49.6 million of funding in this budget, yet Fire Rescue Victoria has been allocated $120.6 million across 80 fire stations. This contrast is quite clear when you consider the brand new $12 million Derrimut FRV station compared to Rochester’s CFA station that was built in 1963. It has no change rooms and no shower. The brigade has to run their own fundraisers to buy all their training equipment, yet the income the state collects from the fire service levy continues to increase—$800 million in this budget. I recognise that the Treasurer has slightly reduced the rate for primary producers, and that is greatly appreciated, yet the offset reality for most farmers is that they will still pay more. I note that the Victorian Farmers Federation has called for a review into the fire services levy, and this is something we support and hope the government will give further consideration to.

While I am on the topic of parity, my colleague, Stuart Grimley, requested the Parliamentary Budget Office last year investigate the split of assets between regional and metropolitan areas. This revealed that regional Victorians were at least 11 per cent worse off than their metropolitan counterparts when it comes to asset investment. There can be quite a bit of smoke and mirrors in all politics. It is what some say the masters do well, but frankly it is what the public despises. There seems to be a bit of smoke and mirrors in this budget with some big figures touted, but the fine detail raises questions about what has already been expended or represents co-funding which has been listed in one area but cut from another. The opposition has indicated that this budget delivers half of the investment into regional areas compared to the investment per person for people residing in metropolitan Melbourne. I would like the government to respond directly to this claim. If the figure of $7142 for every person residing in regional Victoria is not correct, then what is the figure? The budget papers each year provide a regional summary of announcements, but I think our communities would benefit from the government issuing a detailed regional impact statement, one which gives some real comparisons and quantifies the parity of spending proportionate to population for both assets and services, because there is no doubt that the nature of geography and topography often makes the claim for us needing more and not less.

With respect to funding related to the justice and child protection systems, which of course our party is always very interested in, we are pleased to see funding for more police and PSOs and the rollout of tasers to frontline police officers. I raised police resourcing in question time last sitting week, and while I finally received a response to that question earlier this week, I did not really get an answer on how many of the 500 police announced in the budget would be allocated to Northern Victoria. My colleague, Mr Grimley, also noted that we are pleased to see funding for cyber safety for children in school, which was a recommendation from the sex offender inquiry that Mr Grimley initiated.

Funding has been allocated to developing an alternate reporting option for sexual assault, which we obtained government support for last month. There is funding for new perpetrator interventions and the continuation of therapeutic court programs, including the Shepparton Drug Court and a Specialist Family Violence Court in Bendigo. This is something I believe would be of great benefit in Mildura, and I hope a drug court for the Mallee will be committed to before the next election. As Mr Grimley said during his contribution, we are concerned that funds to address the court backlog simply will not be enough, and we need to see a comprehensive plan.

In the portfolio of child protection, I am confused by the report from the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee that since 2014 an additional 1180 child protection practitioners have been funded and the minister says that the government has continued to deliver on its promise to protect Victorian children in the last 12 months, yet the commissioner for children and young people, while noting that there is considerable investment now, says the system is still not fit for purpose and the wraparound supports needed for complex care are simply not there. More than 2500 children in March were waiting to be allocated a caseworker, a 10 per cent increase on the previous year. The department spokesperson tried to justify this with a response that just because they are not allocated does not mean they are not being assessed, but a week later a former child protection worker revealed the reality that even if a child does have a caseworker, that does not mean they are being given much face-to-face time. These children cannot continue to be lost in our system as they have previously been.

I must say that personally I would prefer to see a hold on the Suburban Rail Loop and those funds go to addressing what the commissioner noted as probably decades of underfunding. Maybe we should hold that infrastructure for at least another term of government until our health and child protection systems are functioning properly. Ms Terpstra raved about taking 15 000 trucks off the roads and conveyed the safety and time savings for drivers. Perhaps the Murray Basin rail could be completed and there would be significant savings to be made from the reduction in the number of trucks carrying heavy loads on our rural roads. That would certainly address safety and reduce time frames for travel.

I could go on. However, in closing I would like to make a comment on the extension of the Navigator program and the new intended pilot program. Navigator is clearly not an early intervention program. The criteria to participate require a high rate of absenteeism and disengagement from school over many terms, so I ask: why is this being piloted for 10- to 11-year-olds? That is an age where early intervention must be provided to ensure continued school engagement, not grappling to catch them long after the horse has bolted, so to speak.

Ms BATH (Eastern Victoria) (18:09): I rise this afternoon to make my contribution on the Appropriation (2022–23) Bill 2022. I have been very interested to listen to various members’ speeches, noting the different flavours and the different perspectives that people have. One of my thoughts on this budget, and I go to it all the time, is about being a steward of the state and that government should be a good steward of this state. The Andrews government should—any government should—provide fairly and equitably for all Victorians. But this budget does not do that. I would like to, in reading the Treasurer’s speech, pull apart some of his second-reading speech in the lower house and see what that means for rural and regional Victorians in the context of his comments. One of the first comments of his that piqued my interest was him spruiking the 4 per cent statewide unemployment rate, which he said was:

… at its lowest since … records began.

The regional unemployment rate is even lower at 3.2 per cent.

Now, that is great. It is great, without a doubt. In my electorate of Eastern Victoria Region, Wellington has an unemployment rate of 5.1 per cent, Bass Coast 5.7 per cent and East Gippsland 6.4 per cent and the Latrobe Valley LGA 7.8 per cent. That is over twice the unemployment rate of other regional centres such as Ballarat, Bendigo, Geelong, Mildura, Shepparton and Wodonga. He also went on to say:

Workforce participation is now near an all-time high.

But over the past 10 years—and I am being fair, 10 years—the Latrobe City Council LGA has lost over 4350 jobs, while on average those other six regional centres that I have just spoken about have gained approximately 10 000 jobs each. Labor has failed to keep its objective of growing jobs in the Latrobe municipality, and it is at the epicentre of what we have seen in transition from the forced and rapid closure of Hazelwood: the fallout of those jobs that were lost—these are people at the end of those jobs that were lost—and then the reverberations both socially and economically. It is absolutely imperative that all sides of government—all levels of government—work to address this challenging situation. The transition that Latrobe Valley is going through cannot be put to the side and just propagandised. Let me look at one area that I feel that the government continues to propagandise. Unfortunately—and it brings me no joy—the Latrobe Valley Authority has not kept its mandate to grow jobs and sandbag this region. Indeed in this budget, the 2022–23 budget, $7.5 million has been allocated. Over the time about $290 million has been allocated. In the report tabled today in Parliament, the Labor and independent committee report—and I will say that because I did not vote for this recommendation—recommended:

That the Latrobe Valley Authority identify gaps in community awareness of its work and continue to address these gaps or misunderstandings by promoting its work, including as it relates to the 2022–23 Victorian State Budget’s allocation of $7.5 million …

Well, the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee tells us $5 million of that $7.5 million is going to wages and staff. So that is $2.5 million left over in this year’s budget, and what this report is recommending is that we have self-promotional activities. Well, this area deserves more. It is a disgrace.

What we also know, looking at the budget, is that there is a fairly large, gaping hole where regional Victoria should be, and I state to the chagrin—or entertainment—of my Nationals colleagues that every one of the ministers in the lower house got up today and spoke about regional development and regional Victoria as if it was an afterthought and had to be then shunted into the Parliament. Now, over the last two years Regional Development Victoria has had budget cuts of 68 per cent—indeed this year, 32 per cent and $8 million have been cut from the budget.

Our regions—food and fibre—are the powerhouse. We feed and clothe people, and we are happy to do it. They actually did a survey recently, and regional people are far and away the most content people or happy people. And we understand why: because we live in a great region wherever we are in country Victoria. And we love Melbourne. Melbourne is a great city and we love our Melbourne cousins, but we have done the heavy lifting over the time. Indeed Victoria has about $18 billion in gross value of agricultural production; that is about a third of Australia overall. We see the cuts to the budget, and indeed Agriculture Victoria is not even a department now, it is a statement. It is a part thereof in a megadepartment. Agriculture Victoria has had its budget slashed, and they are chopping people out of this AgVic department. Now, there are bills coming through this house. We see them; we debate them all the time. There is actually important work that authorised officers are doing et cetera. There is important work about biosecurity, yet there has been a slashing of these people. Indeed I know my colleague the Leader of The Nationals, Peter Walsh, made reference in his contribution to how the Department of Premier and Cabinet almost has more staff and spin doctors than the entire realm of Agriculture Victoria. Now, what does that tell you about priorities?

Also in this budget climate change has been cut—$19 million. Environment and biodiversity has been cut. We have just completed in this upper house an inquiry into the decline in ecosystems in Victoria, and some of those key recommendations I agree with; I disagree with others. But I note the importance of ensuring that our vulnerable species are not continually exacerbated and moved to more threats and extinction, and yet we see budget cuts in this realm. Also if we look at that, the Andrews government again is taking away the very foundations around how we protect the regions in terms of public land management. I think there are also budget cuts in the public land management space, around $64 million. Now, if you ask anybody in regional Victoria, in Gippsland in my patch, they will say there are not enough boots on the ground. There are far too many people working out of the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning based in the city. We need more field officers doing more work keeping weeds and pests down. It is a rhetorical comment for The Nationals, but it is a very important comment that we cannot have our public land space being choked by these pests and weeds. They only exacerbate the ongoing threats to our vulnerable species. Solar Victoria had its budget cut. I have made reference to Solar Victoria and how the GovHub in the Latrobe Valley was supposed to be staffed by Solar Victoria and you can also work in Melbourne and live in Melbourne if you are in that space.

The Treasurer also went on to sort of cite and cringe and lament about what the federal government was and was not doing in terms of infrastructure, and he said ‘despite us having 26 per cent of the nation’s population’ in relation to that. Well, let us have a look at what is happening in Victoria. We, regional Victoria, constitute 25 per cent of the population; 75 per cent are in the larger environments of Melbourne. But the capital spend of this government on Melburnians is $15 000 per person in round figures, and the capital spend for regional Victorians, that 25 per cent, is $7000 per capita. These figures are coming out of independent Parliamentary Budget Office figures. These figures are not mine. They have not been workshopped, these have come directly from the PBO. In 2021–22 only 11 per cent of the capital spend of this Andrews government actually went to regional Victoria. In this year’s budget it is 13 per cent of the capital spend. So the Treasurer is lamenting on one hand—he is using that as an argument—yet his own budget short-changes regional Victoria. If we look at our—The Nationals’ and the Liberals’—regional infrastructure guarantee, we will guarantee that 25 per cent of government capital investment will be on infrastructure projects in regional Victoria. This is our commitment for when we are elected in November 2022. We make that commitment, and it will be held.

The Honourable Mr Pallas said, ‘We have always believed in putting patients first’—indeed that is the whole frame of this budget this year. So what have we got? Non-admitted services have had a $160 million cut; emergency services, $25 million cut; aged care support services in our society, $35 million cut; drug and alcohol rehabilitation has had a $36 million cut; and mental health community support services has had an $18 million cut. Indeed one of the things I have raised in this house before is that—and this is not a word of a lie—my Moe constituent said to me that when she rang up to get a community health service appointment for her son, the very hardworking person at the other end of the line at the children and youth community health service said, ‘Your next available booking is 2025’. Now, I just do not know how either of those people can cope—the son and also that person who was at the end of the line trying to provide a service in very, very challenging situations. Also Lifeline Gippsland is a very, very important support system, and I know the wonderful people there do an amazing job. They have some funding, but by comparison it is certainly not enough. I know Mr Merlino, the Minister for Mental Health, the other day spoke at a Public Accounts and Estimates Committee hearing and said that $59.4 million is no longer needed for the pandemic. Well, I know many people are still suffering the results of that pandemic.

There are other things. In terms of the road maintenance budget, it has had a $240 million cut over the past two years, and you only have to drive around Gippsland and up the Great Alpine Road to see how bad that is. There are many things. The other thing that the Treasurer came to was that by the year 2026 the state budget will be back in surplus. Now, I am not sure which sort of fairyland Mr Pallas was in, but nobody believes that. We have got massive blowouts—we have got $28 billion now in blowouts. We want to see more investment in our CFAs. We have seen $800 million in fire services levy accepted into the coffers of the Victorian government and only $7.16 million in capital spend for the CFA. We in the country know how very important our CFA volunteers are at the forefront. Our emergency services do the most amazing job. I think it is offensive to them in absolute terms. They need to see more. We could list off a whole raft of infrastructure that could be built around the state for our fabulous CFA. Just finally, on Ms Shing, she talked about $4.5 million for the Traralgon Recreation Reserve and Glenview Park—it needs $10 million. You cannot give somebody half a renovation. It needs $10 million, and the government has only put in $4.5 million.

Business interrupted pursuant to sessional orders.

Ms TAYLOR: I move:

That the meal break scheduled for this day be suspended.

Motion agreed to.

Mr MELHEM (Western Metropolitan) (18:25): I also rise to speak on the Appropriation (2022–‍2023) Bill 2022. This budget is about doing a few things; one is getting us out of the pandemic. We are trying to get out of the pandemic. We still have a lot of people dying in Victoria and a lot of infection in a lot of people, and not just from COVID-19—there is the flu on top of that. So we have got a difficult time in the next few months, during this winter, to get through. But this budget is about—

A member interjected.

Mr MELHEM: I am in good time. It is okay. We just dismissed the dinner break, and we dismissed the clock. This budget is about creating jobs, keeping existing jobs, reducing unemployment and restoring economic growth. This budget also has a plan to have an operating surplus, and I think it is important to set a target for when you are going to have an operating surplus. It is about returning to an operating surplus, which the budget outlines—I am not going to go through that—and stabilising debt levels.

I want to talk about a number of things in the budget which are part of the repair plan. I want to spend a bit of time talking about health, because health, education and employment are very important for us to make sure we are looking after our people. That is what this budget is about: making sure we are putting an end to the war that has been waged on paramedics and ambulance response times from the worst pandemic in our history. I just want to take the opportunity to thank our nurses, doctors and paramedics for the great work that they have done. That is why we are investing heavily in the health sector. An additional $12 billion has been invested to make sure we have got a decent health sector, and we know the health sector is struggling. It is struggling for the reasons I outlined earlier. People just forget we are coming out of a pandemic; in fact we are still in a pandemic situation. Whilst we do not have restrictions, we are still in the middle of it. Other speakers spoke about mental health issues.

For probably the next 10 minutes I will focus on my electorate. For example, as part of the health investment, the Melton hospital will be built. We committed to starting the process in this term of Parliament to build a hospital in Melton, in my electorate, and we are now delivering that. We have got the planning going, we have got the land identified, we are working with the Melton City Council and stakeholders and now we have got $950 million locked in to make sure we construct a state-of-the-art hospital to service the region of Melton, Caroline Springs and Wyndham. That is to complement the service that is currently provided by the Mercy Hospital in Werribee and by Sunshine Hospital.

I am looking forward to the completion of the new Footscray Hospital—$1.5 billion. We are going to have four teaching hospitals in the western suburbs of Melbourne. I am very proud of what this government has done and delivered in the west, particularly in relation to health. We do need it because we have got significant population growth in the western suburbs of Melbourne. I hear a lot of people asking about what we are doing in the west. These are the things we are doing in the west. We are going to get everyone covered in the west as far as health goes. We are going to have major hospitals that people can access without necessarily having to travel to the city or the other side of town. That is a very welcome investment, and I want to congratulate the member for Melton, Steve McGhie, for his advocacy and good work to make sure we locked that in, and now we are getting on with it.

The other one is the cost of living. It is a big issue, and today there was another reminder. Interest rates—mortgages—are going to go up by 0.5 per cent. We are doing some of the things we can control, like the $250 one-off payment, for example, to alleviate the pressure on Victorians’ cost of electricity. That is something we are working towards.

I just want to go to specific investments in this budget in my own electorate. I can talk generally about the whole budget, but I will leave that to other people. I just want to talk about some of the benefits that my electorate will get out of this budget. For example, the Footscray Community Arts centre will receive $8.7 million. I want to acknowledge the work of Katie Hall, the local member for Footscray. She has been working on that, and I worked with her to make sure we got that in the budget. She has done a great job, and so that is there.

I want to talk about education. A lot of schools are going to be built or land is going to be purchased or schools are going to be refurbished as part of the heavy investment by the Andrews Labor government in the west. I am going to name some of the schools which are going to receive money, and I am going to go to some of the new schools. Aintree secondary school, for example, will receive part of the $527 million investment in new schools, as will the Aintree specialist school, which will also receive a share to build a new school. Other new schools are Black Forest East primary school and the Lollypop Creek secondary school. There is another special school, which is the Lollypop Creek specialist school. The Riverdale secondary school, the Tarneit North primary school and the Truganina North primary school are all new schools to be built in the western suburbs of Melbourne, because we have got the fastest growing population in the state. It is important that we are investing in education and making sure our citizens in the west are able to send their kids to school to learn.

There are a number of places where we are actually purchasing land. Plumpton primary school and the Riverdale North primary school land acquisitions will take place as part of this budget. In Tarneit Plains we are going to purchase land for a primary school there as well. Truganina North secondary school, which is an interim name, will receive an additional stage to the construction that has already commenced. The list goes on and on of the many schools in the west. Jennings Street School and the Western Autistic School will get $6.83 million as well. Diggers Rest Primary School—the list goes on. I will not go through them all, but I just wanted to give an idea about the investment the Andrews Labor government is actually putting into the west in my electorate. That is in addition to other projects we have that were part of previous budgets but for which ongoing construction is taking place.

The West Gate Tunnel Project is taking shape. If you drive along Footscray Road, you can see the new elevated road. It is coming together. It is going to connect to CityLink. The two tunnel boring machines are now digging the tunnels for the West Gate tunnel, and there is the expansion of the West Gate Freeway to six lanes each way. This week they finalised the strengthening of the Millers Road bridge and Williamstown Road bridge as well. So it is a whole west–east transformation. This budget has picked up on a number of roads which need either new intersections or duplications, and I will go through the list. A number of roads have been earmarked for redevelopment, I suppose.

The investment by this government is basically ongoing. How can I describe it? There has been a lot of criticism by the other side about what this government has done and what the government is doing. We have not stopped, since we came into office in November 2014, investing in things that actually matter to Victorians—whether it is public transport, whether it is education, whether it is health. In fact we just launched new zero-emission electric buses in the western suburbs of Melbourne, by Minister Carroll, only last week. So we will continue our program.

I think there have been some discussions about waste, about debt et cetera. Unlike the federal level of government, we are actually investing in the things we need now and for tomorrow. We did not give $20 billion, for example, to companies which did not need any help during COVID because they were making heaps of money but nonetheless were just dished out $20 billion by their mates. This government is about investing now and in the future in the four areas I have talked about, and it will continue doing that.

Again I cannot wait to see the conclusion of the last of three level crossings which are being worked on at Fitzgerald Road and Robinson Road in Deer Park and Ravenhall. They are long overdue, but construction is progressing really well. The Sunbury line upgrade, which is another example which is taking shape, when the Metro Tunnel is completed will give additional timetables and resources, and people will be able to travel more often on better timetables with more trains when they need them.

I will finish off by saying this budget is about making sure we continue the process we started eight years ago. We will continue building on what we did during COVID. The only reason we were able to invest heavily and make sure we softened the impact on businesses, workers and people in Victoria during the pandemic is that we are good managers. We manage a good budget. In fact I go back as far as a Labor government led by Steve Bracks in 1999. We had a surplus year in, year out. Mr Davis, in trying to be the new Treasurer, was just talking about how we cannot manage money and how in 2019 the budget was not in surplus. I am not sure what planet he is on, and I am not sure which book he was reading or what spreadsheet he was looking at. But the facts are that we had a surplus budget year in, year out, since 1999, and certainly under the Andrews Labor government and Treasurer Pallas we have had a surplus budget every year since 2014. That is on top of a significant investment in infrastructure. You can have a surplus budget by not spending any money. We were spending big, yet we maintained a surplus. I remember the last time this lot were in government. For four years they sat there and did nothing. They did nothing for four years, and suddenly they woke up and thought, ‘Oh, we’d better do something. Let’s come up with the east–west link’—no assessment, no business plan. Basically I think our record speaks for itself.

I am pleased this budget has invested heavily in my electorate of Western Metro, and I commend the Treasurer and the Premier on the good job they have done so far.

Ms PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) (18:39): I rise to speak to this cognate debate and in doing so respond to the state budget, and I think it is not surprising that the headline issue on this budget is the state’s health system. We know that this budget does go to trying to ease some of those pressure points that the pandemic really brought to the front, but we know that the health system has had those pressure points for a number of years and certainly COVID and this pandemic have exacerbated that. Our healthcare professionals have worked tirelessly through this pandemic—tirelessly—but as we all know and as our constituents tell us day by day, our hospitals are stretched and our staff are absolutely exhausted. Let us not forget the allied health workforce as well. They are working just as hard with the same patients, with the same conditions and with the same PPE, and their contributions are significant. The $2.9 billion in health infrastructure, the $2.4 billion for emergency staff and new wards, the 7000 healthcare workers, including 5000 nurses, are really good for Victoria. It is probably what the community expected. When I was out there asking people about the budget I do not think anyone was surprised by it. I do not think anyone was terribly excited, but I do not think anyone was surprised that the budget had a health focus. I think given the last two or three years we have had that is not surprising.

But what was surprising were the cuts in alcohol and other drug services, to the extent of $40 million. We know that during COVID people’s alcohol consumption increased. We know that during COVID people’s drug issues were exacerbated, alongside their mental health issues. We know this, but we saw cuts in this area. I think this is a kind of short-sightedness or—I probably should not mention this—the ambulance being at the bottom of the cliff rather than there being a fence at the top. The alcohol and other drugs sector has been starved of resources. We know the waiting times for people trying to get into treatment. When someone decides that they need help, being told that they have to wait six months for that help is not acceptable. I cannot tell you how disappointed I am and how disappointed the really hardworking, dedicated alcohol and other drug workers are. We do not have enough rehab beds. We do not have enough treatment. We do not have enough counselling.

The killer in this is that when you cut those services, when you cut alcohol and other drug treatment, you exacerbate the problems in our emergency rooms and you exacerbate the problems in our courts and in our mental health facilities. When you cut alcohol and other drug services you send those people back into our mainstream health system. Frankly it lacks reason, and I would really urge the Treasurer to reconsider this and to look at the benefits. We know that when we spend money on harm reduction, harm minimisation, for every $1 we spend we save $27—and that is because we avoid someone needing an ambulance, that is because we avoid someone ending up in an emergency department and that is because we avoid someone ending up in our prisons. Please, Treasurer, these are short-sighted cuts to this budget, and they are things that we need to remedy.

In November I moved a motion in this chamber that called on this government to introduce a dedicated portfolio for loneliness, and that was passed with the government’s support. I am sure that many of you are conscious that loneliness has emerged as one of the most serious public health challenges being faced around the world. Loneliness is a better predictor of premature death than physical inactivity, obesity or smoking 15 cigarettes a day; loneliness is a better predictor than those conditions or activities. Lonely Australians have a significantly worse health status than Australians who do not experience loneliness. So I have to say I was really pleased to see the government quite literally put its money where its mouth is and invest directly in loneliness by way of $9 million to establish 10 new social inclusion action groups in local government areas. This will foster connection and reduce social isolation in vulnerable groups. I am really pleased that this is a win for a Reason policy.

The budget has allocated significant resources—$1.8 billion—to building new schools and upgrading existing ones. But again schools in my electorate of Northern Metropolitan have missed out. Coburg High School—this school has grown exponentially. I remember being there back in 2016 when it was just a newly opened school that was accepting maybe two or three grades. It has now got a population in excess of 1250 students. It is lacking science rooms. Students are now having to take their music lessons in a storeroom. It desperately needs funds, and the picture is no better for nearby schools like Glenroy College and John Fawkner College. If we wanted to tell some of our most disadvantaged communities that we really did not care a fig about them, we would send them to some of those schools. It is reprehensible that we have not invested in those schools but we have invested in far wealthier schools. These deserve funding, and I would urge the Minister for Education to keep this front of mind.

Not only are we seeing these schools being decimated through the lack of funding—literally falling apart around the students’ ears. But you look at the results in our primary schools in those areas that feed into those high schools and their results are well above average—these are smart kids—and then, if you look at the results at John Fawkner or Glenroy, those results drop down. Not surprisingly, parents do not want to send their children to those schools, so we are seeing overcrowding in other schools. We have these schools, we have these growing areas and we need to address this. I implore the government to invest in the north. It has been neglected.

I was in Broadmeadows on the weekend, and you only have to look at Broadmeadows station to see the neglect of the north. I was assured, at a function I was at to celebrate the work of volunteers in the north, that the government had earmarked an upgrade to Broadmeadows station by 2050—2050. Now, this is a place where you do not actually want to walk through that station’s underpasses in daylight, let alone on a winter’s evening. It is absolutely frightful, and it sends a message to my constituents in the north that we just do not care. This is a postcode with some of the most disadvantaged people. This is where we should be investing.

I continue to promote small business and innovation. We know those are the drivers to the future economy. We must be responsive to the start-up sector and emerging industries and nurture those bright new ideas capable of catapulting our economy. We have seen this in Victoria. We are actually responsible for a number of unicorns, and I think we should be proud of that. I have to say that I think the government’s approach to attracting international businesses has been well funded, particularly in the medical research area, and that is in my electorate around Parkville. We have seen some great work in that area. What I particularly endorse is the equity investment pilot fund. This is about providing equity funding to those startups. This is really welcome out there in the startup industry.

Also providing grants to small businesses looking at low-carbon manufacturing—this is something that we in the north used to be very good at. We used to be manufacturers in the north. But we have these opportunities, and I welcome the government’s investment there. I look at things like mineral sands and the opportunities there. I for one drive an electric vehicle. I know that the minerals that made that vehicle are rare and precious, and we have great reserves in Victoria. A shout-out to Manangatang—that is an area where we have some mineral sands. So I look forward to seeing governments invest in those areas, help us and keep that in Australia. Do not allow those big multinationals to come in, reap what they need and then leave—well, for mineral sands—a fairly shallow hole but a hole nonetheless. There is more we could say about this. I think the other missed opportunity was an investment in hemp. I spoke at length about this last sitting week, so I will not do it again, but we certainly need to invest in areas like hemp. We need to make it easier for hemp growers. We know that these are the types of new crops that will enable new and innovative and low-carbon manufacturing to occur in Australia.

Let us also not forget women’s health. We certainly saw some investment into women’s health; we did not see enough. I think something that I have been trying to highlight in this place has been the issue of endometriosis. We have heard a lot of talk but we have not seen the investment come into play. I thank the government for committing to an endometriosis centre, but we did not see any money for it, so I am hopeful that we will see some announcements and some commitments to that. I hope both sides of this chamber commit to really funding endometriosis research, endometriosis treatment and, most importantly, a cure for endometriosis. It is debilitating. It affects one in nine women, yet we spend more money on snoring than we do on endometriosis. We spend more money on sleep apnoea than we do on endometriosis, by a considerable amount. So again it is a call-out that the government commit to significant funding to the various really innovative organisations operating here, whether they are operating out of the Epworth, whether they are operating under Hudson, Monash, the women’s hospital. There are really great, dedicated researchers that just need a little bit of love from the government.

Removing the current land transfer duty exemption applying to the transfer of dutiable properties to an institution with a religious purpose—this is another great way of bringing in some much-needed funds. We understand, and this is through the Parliamentary Budget Office and through other research, this would bring in another $13 million over the next couple of years. We pay transfer duty when we buy and sell our homes, so why shouldn’t religious organisations? It was just a few years ago now that Fairfax revealed that the Catholic Church holds assets in Victoria valued at more than $9 billion, including banks, a superannuation fund, an insurance company, a news service and a telecommunications provider. Properties reportedly include offices, residences, car parks, conference centres, tennis courts, mobile phone towers and a restaurant. They are the largest non-government landholder in the state, so why should that wealth be duty free?

Of course I cannot contribute to a budget debate without mentioning the regulation of cannabis. We spend billions of dollars in prohibiting cannabis.

Mr Finn interjected.

Ms PATTEN: Welcome, Mr Finn. Glad you came in at just the right moment.

Mr Finn: Beautifully timed, wasn’t it?

Ms PATTEN: Perfect timing. We know we could actually earn about $200 million if we regulated cannabis, let alone the savings we could make if we regulated cannabis. You never know, even Mr Finn might investigate that proposition.

Mr Finn: I doubt that very much.

Ms PATTEN: It is not a radical policy, Mr Finn; it is happening all over the world. We are seeing it in Canada, France, Germany, Mexico and, more recently, Malta. We are up to nearly 50 per cent of the states in the United States now regulating the sale of cannabis rather than prohibiting it. The outcomes, shock horror, have been positive.

The other thing I want to quickly touch on is around the money that we spend on justice issues. We are not spending enough around the causes of crime. Again, we are spending on the ambulance, not on the fence. Let me give you some examples. Take the capital works: we are spending in this budget $111 million on new justice projects but only $80 million on housing projects. We are spending $27 million on refuge and crisis accommodation. In fact, that is slightly less than what we are spending on the Fawkner cemetery. Now, I am pleased that the Fawkner cemetery got some expansion money; it is needed. However—

Mr Finn interjected.

Ms PATTEN: It is needed. It is still the last tram stop on the line, but really, to be spending more on a cemetery than on refuge and crisis accommodation means that we really do need to have a rethink about that.

Our spend on acute mental health beds is about half of what we spend on prison beds. As some of the people in this chamber know, we did a homelessness report. We understand that preventing homelessness prevents crime. In the homelessness inquiry we saw this; in the justice inquiry we saw this. I would again point out that we are locking people up via refusing bail because they do not have a home. We are effectively locking up people because they are homeless, not because of a crime that would have accounted for a jail term. Look at the awful, awful circumstances of Veronica Nelson. She stole an ice cream; she died in our prison.

The hydromorphone trial for clients of the supervised injecting room—I was very sad to see that that did not get up. Again, we know that by providing hydromorphone to clients at the supervised injecting room we would have reduced crime. We would have engaged those people to come back from where they had been, engaged them back into services, engaged them back into treatment and, more importantly, stopped them having to traffic on the streets or purchase on the streets. We would have reduced the crime enormously, and I will keep on at the government about a hydromorphone trial. We have seen it in other areas.

I would like to also give a shout-out to the Legislative Council. I know that those in the other chamber do not seem to know what we do here, and I have heard them say that more than once—and the budget shows that. We get a tiny amount of the budget, yet this is where law is actually passed. This is where law is reviewed. This is where law is, effectively, made. Our Legislative Council committees, our standing committees, do an enormous body of work in policy. This is about connecting with our community. This is about our transparency and our accountability to our community. This is so important, and yet the Legislative Council gets a tiny proportion—$2 million. So again I would implore the Treasurer and the government to start spending and start valuing the work that this house does.

Finally, measures like the GDP—they are relevant but they are not the whole picture. Other jurisdictions are working into a wellbeing budget, and I think we need to do that. Our constitution says that we are for and on behalf of the people of Victoria now and into the future. We have to be measuring that. The former chair of the United States Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, noted that:

The ultimate purpose of economics … is to understand and promote the enhancement of well-being.

Now, again, I know that the government has shown some interest in this area. I would hope that the next budget that we see here will have some wellbeing indexes. Let us measure that. That is what I would love to see in the next budget: more measurements of our wellbeing. As a fun fact, the GDP went up when we had the Black Saturday bushfires. GDP went up, so as far as the budget was concerned, that was a great result. But we know we need to measure the wellbeing of our community. That is what they expect us to do, that is what we need to do. It is not my position to oppose a budget bill or a financial bill, so I will leave it there.

Ms BURNETT-WAKE (Eastern Victoria) (19:00): I rise to speak on the Appropriation (2022–‍2023) Bill 2022, regarding the state budget that was handed down on 3 May. At the outset I will say that this budget completely misses the mark. This is a budget that completely misjudges the needs of our state and the economic environment Victorians are currently living in. It completely misunderstands the impact of lockdowns on business, on the economy and on mental health at a time when Victorians desperately wanted to see a budget that invests in fixing that damage.

Instead we get more debt. Victoria already had a monstrous level of debt, and what we see with this budget is that debt continue to climb. The debt level of our state alone will soon be equal to that of New South Wales, Queensland and South Australia combined, with debt projected to reach $162 billion by 2025. We are talking about billions of dollars in interest alone that could have been invested into our communities, into our health system, into roads and into mental health, but instead Victorians will be plagued by this enormous debt for many, many years—generational debt.

What do we get for all this debt? The government’s public relations made use of a big headline in the budget that read, ‘Putting patients first’. The Andrews Labor government boasted about a $12 billion investment in health care to address the dismal state they have gotten our healthcare system into. When we break that $12 billion down, it becomes clear: it is just more deceit. Of that $12 billion, $1.3 billion has already been spent on PPE and the COVID pathways program, which was jointly funded with the Liberal Morrison commonwealth government. More than $1 billion has already been spent on RATs, which was also jointly funded by the Morrison government. A further $466.5 million has already been spent on a COVID-19 transitional operating model, also jointly funded. And let us not forget the $257.9 million already spent on COVID-19 vaccinations, which was again jointly funded.

So here we have the Andrews Labor government boasting about a $12 billion investment in health care, but what they failed to tell Victorians was that most of this funding had already been spent and it was jointly met by the previous Morrison Liberal government. They have deceitfully included more than $3.5 billion in health funding that has already been spent, last year. In fact the Andrews Labor government have cut health funding by $2 billion. While hospitals are overrun and ambulances are ramped, this government has cut $2 billion from health funding. That is right. This could not have happened at a worse time. Twenty-one Victorians have died waiting for an ambulance in the past six months. It is an absolute disgrace that the government has still failed to address the issues with 000 and the healthcare system. These cuts have failed every Victorian.

There was, however, one win for the Eastern Victoria Region when it comes to health, with a commitment made for a new mental health, alcohol and other drugs emergency department hub at Latrobe Regional Hospital. This aims to free up space in the emergency department and shows that the government recognises that mental health, drugs and alcohol are a huge problem in the Latrobe Valley.

It was, however, disappointing to see that the Latrobe Valley Magistrates Court was not prioritised to receive a dedicated drug court. I have previously spoken in this chamber about the importance of drug courts and the need in Latrobe Valley, given the positive outcomes these courts have achieved in Melbourne and Dandenong. Drug courts are now available in other regional communities, such as Ballarat and Shepparton. I am perplexed as to why the Latrobe Valley is still not high on the government’s priority list, given that they clearly recognise the higher incidences of drug and alcohol use and offending in my region.

There is also further mention of the Frankston Hospital upgrades, which I understand were first announced in September 2018, and completion is still not expected until 2026. This project was initially set to cost $562 million, but this year’s budget revealed a total estimated expenditure of over $1 billion. The project has blown out to a disastrous $556 million. How does the government get it so wrong? I know from speaking to my constituents that there is a real and urgent need for upgrades at Rosebud Hospital. The peninsula has the second-oldest population in Victoria, with over 44 per cent of residents over the age of 50. The main buildings of Rosebud Hospital have not been comprehensively redeveloped or expanded in the last 25 years, and the two operating theatres cannot be used because they no longer meet Australian standards. My constituents on the southern peninsula are having to drive over 30 minutes to Frankston Hospital for basic care, which is simply not good enough. The hospital is there, but due to underfunding, parts of it are just going to waste. These are services and rooms that could be used to save lives and complete life-changing procedures. If the government knew how to manage money, we could have had the Rosebud and Frankston hospitals upgraded and within budget; instead it has blown out by almost double, and the residents in Frankston and Rosebud continue to suffer.

While we are on the topic of the peninsula, I have been vocal inside and outside the Parliament on the need to save Flinders Pier at a time when the community was seeing and hearing nothing from their Labor member. It was therefore a pleasant surprise to see funding allocated for critical works on Flinders Pier as part of this year’s budget. I will not speak to this at length, because I already did so in a recent members statement a few weeks ago; however, I would urge the government to get on with that project as soon as possible for the wider peninsula community.

That brings me to roads. The government have cut a further $24 million from the road asset management program. That is after already slashing the program by $191 million in the previous year’s state budget. As I travel across my electorate it becomes clear that roads are simply not as good as they used to be. It is just absolutely disgraceful, the state of our roads. Our country roads are riddled with potholes. Many are notorious for accidents that have taken lives, and this government’s solution is to just lower the speed limit from 100 kilometres an hour to 80 kilometres an hour. They lower the speed limits instead of investing in overpasses, traffic lights or whatever is going to make those individual regional roads safer. The perfect example is in Tynong North, out the front of Gumbuya World. This is a notorious intersection that has taken many lives. Despite these tragedies, the government still fails to invest in that stretch of the road. They reduced the speed limit and gave themselves a pat on the back, while my constituents are left navigating this dangerous stretch of road each and every day.

Another example of inaction on roads is Jetty Road down on the peninsula. The federal government provided $75 million in funding in 2019 for the Victorian government to use to complete much-needed upgrades at the intersection of the Mornington Peninsula Freeway and Jetty Road. That money has sat there for three years, and all the state government has done is use $3.5 million of that for a business case. Meanwhile my constituents on the peninsula sit in congested traffic and have to navigate the dangerous intersection daily. The money is sitting there, and the Andrews Labor government continue to fail to act. They say they are acting. They say they are working on a business case. My constituents do not want a business case that wastes another year; they want action. This funding has sat there for over three years. I really feel for my constituents who have to navigate these dangerous roads while the state government take their time acting.

Since the government first announced the expansion of the Angliss Hospital in Upper Ferntree Gully in the 2019–20 state budget the total estimated investment has blown out to $8.58 million. This is explained by a small line in this year’s budget that puts it down as ‘market conditions’ and ‘COVID-19 impacts’. That is a huge blowout, and it is only made worse by the fact that so many of my constituents cannot even use this hospital. I am talking about the maternity ward, which has been closed since March due to a broken lift, which I have mentioned many times in this chamber and also spoken about in the media. It is appalling that the government knew about this faulty lift for so long but failed to act. Now my constituents are paying the price by having to travel to Box Hill to give birth in an unknown environment, and this government cannot even give me an answer on when this lift will be repaired.

While my constituents navigate roads and hospital ward closures, they hear about how the government blows billions on its major projects. The state budget revealed a huge $4.7 billion blowout to the West Gate Tunnel Project. It is quite sad that the tunnel was originally scheduled for completion in September this year and has now been pushed back years due to Labor’s inability to manage money and its projects on time. Victorians are the ones meeting the cost through the never-ending list of taxes that this government continue to impose. I think we are up to 42 new taxes from a Premier who once promised every single Victorian that he would not introduce any.

Victorians deserve so much more than what this budget has delivered in Eastern Victoria Region. Alone we have seen a $69 million blowout to the Seaford stabling project, an $11.8 million blowout to the Frankston station upgrade and $5 million added to the bill for the Latrobe Valley government hub, and that is just to name a few. I have already mentioned many of the areas that have been forgotten, but business owners across the state have also been neglected. We know that local shopping strips have been left devastated by the extended lockdowns imposed by the Andrews government. These business owners need practical support to recover and rebuild, but sadly that too was overlooked in this budget.

Instead the Andrews Labor government are going to spend $14.8 million on trade growth programs, including the establishment of a trade and investment office in Paris. Is that really what Victorians want their money spent on? I do not think so. From the conversations I have had, this is definitely not what my constituents would have liked to have seen prioritised by the state. Overall it is disappointing that the government have not prioritised Victoria’s long-term economic recovery. Victorians deserved a budget that fixed the health system crisis, invested in mental health, created a strong economy and kept the cost of living down and a budget that helped businesses get back on their feet. That is exactly what a Matthew Guy Liberal-Nationals government will do if elected in November. Underneath the Andrews spin it becomes clear the government have missed the mark in so many areas impacting the lives of those in Eastern Victoria and Victoria more broadly. I will continue to advocate for my constituents to get their needs heard.

Mr QUILTY (Northern Victoria) (19:12): I will be brief. Budget bills are a little bit difficult for the Liberal Democrats because we do not have a list of things we would like the government to spend money on, we would like it to cut spending. We look miserable rather than generous, but it is the people’s money, not the government’s. With this Appropriation (2022–23) Bill 2022 the government is asking the taxpayers for $85 billion to cover its spending addiction over the coming year. This is a 31 per cent increase from prepandemic levels. Imagine an already heavily overweight person who weighed 100 kilograms before lockdowns putting on an extra 31 kilograms over the two years—the COVID gut. That is the growth we are seeing in this government. It is not sustainable.

Public sector education used to cost us $14.8 billion and now costs $17.1 billion, while our schools are being amalgamated to cut costs and classes cannot be run because there are no teachers. The Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning went from $2.3 billion to $3.1 billion, and we are just talking about the costs of what the government spends. Most of the costs that DELWP impose on the economy come from additional expenses the private sector must incur to meet regulatory burdens. The Department of Health and Human Services grew so costly that it had to be split in two. The $15.8 billion health portfolio is now $20 billion across the health and welfare portfolios. Where is all this money going? We are certainly not seeing 31 per cent better government services. We do not have 31 per cent more hospitals. Inflation in hospital wait times and ambulance ramping does not account for it. I certainly did not see anything for the new Wodonga-Albury hospital in the budget. This is not 31 kilograms of new muscle, it is 31 kilograms of double chins and sagging bellies.

One of the biggest increases has been payments from the Treasury department. It used to cost us $8 billion; it now costs $18 billion. These are government grants to prop up the economy after knocking it flat during COVID. The government want to build their re-election credibility based on infrastructure spending in Melbourne—a couple of hundred billion in debt for Melbourne rail and road projects. But you cannot use grand capital projects to cover up the massive blowouts in current spending with nothing to show for them, services going backwards and hospital waiting times blowing out. To any taxpayer watching this, I want you to try and imagine how this extra 31 per cent of money is being spent and how much value you are getting for it. Better yet, spend some time trying to figure out for yourself how the extra money is going to be spent. Comb through the budget, read the news—research it however you like—and look for anything more informative than a headline. The answers, if you find any, will not be satisfying.

There was $17.4 billion more government this year than in the year before COVID, and that is set to rise to $20 billion in the coming financial year. For reference, that is about $7800 per household extra—and that is solely for the state government; that does not cover the federal government deficits, it does not cover Medicare or unemployment benefits or pensions. With that additional $7800 the total per household spend for just the state government is $33 000 a year. You pay another $54 500 on top of that for the federal government. Is there anyone out there who can genuinely say that they would be willing to pay $87 500 a year, plus local government rates, for the services they get from the government? There are millions of Australians who spend year after year of their life trying to pull together $40 000 for the down payment on a house while at the same time they are paying $87 000 a year for their subscription to the government. It is not a quality service. For a lot of households $87 000 is more than their entire after-tax income. They spend more on government than on everything else combined, and they have little or no say in it at all. All I am saying is that it might be a good idea to cut back on the cost of government. Instead of stacking on bulk like they are training to become a sumo wrestler, the government should aim to be leaner and fitter. Wouldn’t it be better to let people decide for themselves how they are going to spend some of the $87 000?

So far I have talked about costs, but I want to quickly look at the other side. Let us talk about production. At the same time as spending all this extra money the government has banned huge sections of the population from working. Some of these bans are still in force today. At a time when our ability to produce is being pulled out from under us, mostly by the government, the government is ramping up its costs. You will be cutting back to home brand labels and the cans at the back of the cupboard while the government is using Uber Eats to order in from the expensive end of the menu.

Every sitting week this government passes new regulations, new rules and more red tape to weigh down small business—more sea anchors on the economy, dragging behind the ship of state and slowing it down. We are loading more weight on top of an increasingly small number of people, and eventually they will not be able to bear it. Again, this is not sustainable. We need to reverse course. For all those the-economy-does-not-matter advocates from the last two years, we are all going to find out, moving forward, why the economy really does matter. We need to remove all the COVID restrictions and many of the pre-COVID ones too. We need to cut taxes and let people spend more of their own earnings. We cannot just chuck the entire economy on the credit card and print money until we are in the clear—because we will never be in the clear. If our state keeps spending at this level, the hungry taxpayer is going to starve and our obese government is going to have a heart attack. The state has put on too much fat during COVID. The emperor will be unable to fit into their new clothes. I can only hope the sight of our recklessly bloated government leads to a new diet plan this November. The Liberal Democrats oppose reckless government spending and we oppose the budget.

Ms TAYLOR (Southern Metropolitan) (19:19): I move:

That debate be adjourned until next day of meeting.

Motion agreed to and debate adjourned until next day of meeting.