Wednesday, 18 June 2025

Department of Treasury and Finance

Budget papers 2025–26

Melina BATH (Eastern Victoria) (17:29): I will actually speak on the budget in my contribution today. It will be on budget paper 3, and it is in relation to fire and emergency management output. Just to note, the government in the previous three financial years spent an average of $604 million on fire and emergency management – $600 million. This year in the budget the same line item has $400 million, and it is actually down considerably from the previous year.

When the Minister for Environment was asked about this at the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee inquiry, his comment was ‘The figures are lumpy’. They are lumpy figures. There are a lot of things that can be lumpy: it can be my cooking from time to time, it can be a bed from time to time, but I would not have thought it would be the budget figures for a known service. We have a known landmass. We have a known area of forest. We have been doing fuel reduction burns. Victoria has been doing bushfire firebreaks for a long, long time. In the previous three years it was $600 million annually. This year it is $400 million, and the minister says, ‘Look, it’s lumpy.’ Then he said, ‘Why don’t you go and have a conversation with Forest Fire Management Victoria officer Chris Hardman, and he will explain.’ Well, Chris Hardman is a very knowledgeable person and does an amazing job – all hands to him. But the government should not be having a budget that is ‘lumpy’ in respect to keeping Victorians safe – a lumpy budget.

The minister also said, ‘It’s okay, we’ll use the Treasurer’s advance. It’s okay. We can go into the Treasurer’s advance, and we’ll tap into that.’ They can borrow some of that money and not pay it back to the Victorian taxpayer, because it is not allocated in the budget already. But they will go in and use the Treasurer’s advance. The Treasurer’s advance, as we all know, is a limited pool, supposedly, and it is for unforeseen circumstances or emergencies – natural disasters and the like. We saw it used during COVID. We saw it last year for the Suburban Rail Loop. They have dipped into the pocket of the Treasurer’s advance for the SRL. I do not think that is a natural emergency – it might be an emergency down the track when somebody has got to pay for it. They dipped into the Treasurer’s advance for the Commonwealth Games bailout. That is not an emergency. Natural disasters, fire and storm – okay. That is what they are doing. And yet we have the very level of government that is keeping Victorians safe, protecting regional and rural communities and looking after the bush saying, ‘It’s a bit lumpy,’ and ‘We’ll add it on later by going to the Treasurer.’ And not only that, but he said that they were going to get FFMV, Forest Fire Management Victoria, to go cap in hand to the Treasurer to ask for some money.

What has happened in recent times has been the government’s flawed policy around Safer Together. It trashed the bushfire royal commission’s 5 per cent rolling target of treatable land. It threw it out and said, ‘No, no. We’ll come up with a really much better policy.’ Virtually no sane person, even some of the people that wrote it, agree with it now, the Safer Together policy. The government has not met its benchmarks. It has not met its Safer Together residual risk in many places. It has not met it in the metropolitan district. You people in Melbourne – you have not met it. It has not met it in the Yarra district, in Gippsland. It has not met it in Latrobe Valley, and it certainly had not met it in the Grampians up until the fires. But now what does the government do? The government then puts that whole mass area of fires that have occurred in the Grampians over the summer in. It will consider that a reduction, a bushfire mitigation. It actually incorporates it into its own Safer Together. So we have to have out-of-control bushfires in order for this government to say it is meeting its own flawed target. Minister, you inherited this policy. I ask you, I implore you, to ditch Safer Together and do some proper residual burns.