Wednesday, 1 November 2023

Growth Areas Infrastructure Contribution Fund

Evan MULHOLLAND (Northern Metropolitan) (18:18): (566) My adjournment tonight is directed toward the Treasurer, and the action I seek is for the Treasurer to rule out an expansion of the Growth Areas Infrastructure Contribution Fund. It is a leaky ship on that side of the chamber under this tired, old almost decade-long Labor government. Today it was leaked in the Age that cabinet is considering an expansion of the growth area tax to all properties.

The housing statement was really a flashy document. There were lots of pages that literally said ‘Page intentionally left blank’, with all the taxes left out. All the taxes were left out of it and came afterwards. This tax would make housing less affordable. We already have here in this state the highest property taxes in the nation, and it is already a failure of a tax, the growth areas infrastructure contribution, that is collected then sent into Spring Street, where it has sat for over two years and has half a billion dollars sitting in it remaining unspent. This Treasurer and this government are using the GAIC as an accounting trick to prop up the state government, to make the budget look that little bit better than the mess that it is in. Premier Daniel Andrews, when I accused him of this previously – the former Premier ‍– on the GAIC, said:

We don’t rush to … funding … projects, we think about the best projects for a local community and … do that properly.

Well, I am told that the government is scrambling and only just informing local councils, asking, ‘What projects do you want from the GAIC?’ We know that later in the year they will be going out and they will be cutting ribbons, saying, ‘Look what Labor’s funding,’ when it is actually developers and home owners that have funded the infrastructure. What I hear in my community – what I hear in Kalkallo, what I hear in Donnybrook, what I hear in Greenvale – is that people expect their infrastructure to be delivered before they move in or as they move in, not years after. This is how you end up with, in growth areas like Kalkallo, people having to wait an hour to get out of their own housing estate. This is how you end up with Donnybrook and Wallan on V/Line. This is how you end up with Melton and Wyndham Vale on V/Line trains. The government boasted that V/Line is the fastest growing rail service in Australia. That is only because they are putting tens of thousands of houses in these growth areas and people are all having to go on a V/Line train. I seek the action of the Treasurer to rule out taxing every single Victorian with a GAIC tax.