Tuesday, 27 May 2025

Budget 2025–26

Richard WELCH (North-Eastern Metropolitan) (19:32): (1650) My adjournment matter is for the Treasurer, and the action I seek is from the Treasurer. The 2025–26 state budget is a budget of debt and decline. While Labor was busy spinning fantasy forecasts behind closed doors, thousands of hardworking Victorians rallied outside the Parliament. CFA volunteers, farmers and regional families united in opposition to Labor’s cruel new emergency services tax. These are people who are already battling drought, rising costs and collapsing services. Now they are being punished with a tax grab dressed up as a reform. At the same time, the budget is completely devoid of productivity measures – not a single meaningful initiative to make government services more efficient, to reduce waste or to improve outcomes within our business sector. Despite Labor delivering a $1 billion worse result than forecast, even after a $3.7 billion GST windfall, there is no plan to deliver more with less. Victoria’s debt is on track to be $194 billion. That is $28.9 million in interest every single day and over $10 billion a year.

Victorians are paying more and more, but roads are falling apart, hospitals are at breaking point and public school funding has been slashed by $2.4 billion. There is no sense in that we should be directing working capital back to businesses so that they may innovate, they may adopt new technologies, they may drive the state’s productivity. Debt is growing faster than the state. That is why debt is going up. The only growth area we have is where government is borrowing and taxing more to spend more. It is not our industries doing it.

Nowhere is Labor’s lack of productivity thinking clearer than in regard to AUKUS. While South Australia and Western Australia are moving aggressively to secure AUKUS-linked defence contracts, Victoria’s government offers nothing but negative words about it. There is no plan, no engagement, no attempt to ensure that Victorian firms can win, work up, scale and compete on this once-in-a-generation industrial opportunity. This is not just about defence, it is about productivity. AUKUS offers us the chance to lift local industrial capability, modernise supply chains, foster advanced manufacturing and create skilled jobs. But without leadership Victorian business will miss out while other states surge ahead. Labor promised discipline. What Victorians got was waste, debt and inaction. Productivity reform is not about cutting services, it is about delivering them better and empowering businesses to succeed. The action I seek from the Treasurer is to deliver targeted productivity initiatives, the kind missing from this budget, to ensure Victorian businesses are fully equipped to seize AUKUS opportunities and do not lose out to better prepared states.