Thursday, 19 June 2025

Budget papers 2025–26

Second reading

Debate resumed.

Aiv PUGLIELLI (North-Eastern Metropolitan) (14:02): I rise to make a contribution on the cognate debate of the budget papers 2025–26 and the Appropriation (2025–2026) Bill 2025. This is the budget that was pitched by the Labor government as being about doing what matters most to Victorians. Not one time did the Treasurer mention our natural environment or climate change in her speech to outline this year’s budget in the other place. I do not say that as a personal reflection on the Treasurer, but as is often said, budgets are about priorities. Climate and our environment should be a top priority for every single government in this country and across the world, including this Victorian Labor government. Failing to protect our climate and our precious natural places is the greatest threat to human existence of our time, and it does not even rate a mention in the budget speech. To say that is deeply concerning is an understatement.

Things out there are pretty dire. Victoria has over 2000 threatened species and ecosystems, and most of our biodiversity indicators have been reported as poor and declining by the state of the environment report. We have already entirely lost at least 18 mammals, two birds, one snake, three freshwater fish, six invertebrates and 51 plant species since colonisation. Extinction is not something that you simply come back from. Each species that we lose has rippling impacts across our ecosystems. There is just no second chance. The current situation in Victoria means that species and ecosystems – whole ecosystems – are becoming extinct faster than the government can act. The current approach means that policies and funding are too often reactive and insufficient, and it is terrifying. What will happen when our native species and ecosystems just cannot keep up, when climate-induced impacts to our environment are so frequent that nature and our communities cannot recover? This is the existential threat of our time. We need urgent action, and too often instead we see the Labor government choosing to keep our natural environment on life support rather than stepping up to rebuild and to protect our species and our ecosystems. But there is another way if we work with communities to understand what they need to keep their natural places safe and thriving. We invest in restoration jobs and species recovery, we stop the cuts to fisheries workers and we take action to reduce our emissions and create sustainable communities. Things can turn around if we work at it.

It is also vital that First Nations people are at the centre of restoring Victoria’s lands, waters and animals to health. For too long traditional knowledge and practices have been erased and ignored, causing ecosystem breakdown, extinctions and a massive loss of biodiversity and wildlife. We must prepare our communities and our natural places to be resilient in the face of a changing climate and increased natural disasters. As part of this action, we should stop all new coal and gas projects and move swiftly to 100 per cent renewable energy. We need to make sure that our planning system is promoting cooler, greener neighbourhoods. We should be committing a consistent, fixed, substantial percentage of the state budget to protecting and restoring nature with a comprehensive plan for zero extinction, with significant increases in funding for national parks management and expanding marine national parks as well as investment to restore our urban biodiversity in cities and towns with healthy, swimmable rivers, bee and bird corridors and biodiverse urban forests and green spaces.

Budgets are an opportunity for a government to highlight its priorities, to literally put its money where its mouth is. And while there has been some funding for some important, some vital, environmental programs, in the grand scheme of things it is just far too little. I do not say that to discount the commitments that have been secured by my colleagues, and I do not say that to discount the initiatives and the outputs in this budget that are wholeheartedly supported by the Greens. What I am stating is simply a fact. To this government I say: invest. Invest in our planet, in our environment, in nature and in the world around us, which is under threat. The skies, the waters, the land and those we share it with – people and planet, all of us together – are what matter most.

Rachel PAYNE (South-Eastern Metropolitan) (14:07): I rise to make a contribution to the Appropriation (2025–2026) Bill 2025 on behalf of Legalise Cannabis Victoria. Unsurprisingly, when I look through the budget papers, the first line items that I look for are cannabis related. Last year’s budget provided $4.9 million for a medicinal cannabis driving trial, recognising the need to change our laws that currently criminalise medicinal cannabis patients regardless of whether they are impaired. The Victorian government has had almost a decade to address this issue since medicinal cannabis was legalised, and the best they could offer was a study that could tell us what other studies have already told us – patients can and do drive safely. This trial also came with no promise of change to the laws. As you can imagine, we did not jump for joy at this announcement at the time. In the meantime, we have been successful in securing amendments to the law to ensure medicinal cannabis patients that are not impaired do not automatically lose their licence. We will continue to monitor the progress of the driving trial and push for a government response prior to next year’s election.

In this year’s budget, we face a similar, albeit slightly better, promising situation. This budget includes $400,000 to commence the development of standalone industrial hemp legislation to address regulatory barriers and support the growth of the emerging Victorian industrial hemp sector. While we welcome any investment in industrial hemp, much like the driving trial, we are not optimistic of an outcome before the next election, even though the work has already been done. Legalise Cannabis’s Hemp Industry Bill 2024 that we debated last year would have created a standalone industrial hemp act to address these kinds of regulatory barriers. Yet this government continues to have a blanket ban on supporting private member’s bills, preferring progress at a snail’s pace. We appreciate that the minister and their department want to ensure that any legislation is effective in achieving this aim; however, the idea that even after a draft bill has been tabled and an inquiry completed it would still take multiple years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to draft is government bureaucracy at its finest. While this budget did not include everything we would have liked to have seen, I would like to focus now on some of the highlights.

First Step received funding that will allow them to support the mental health care of high-needs individuals who fall outside existing eligibility criteria. This mental health, addiction and legal services organisation supports over 1800 clients annually. Its multidisciplinary approach aims to bring together medical, clinical mental health, psychosocial and legal professionals to provide wraparound care and support for those experiencing complex mental health challenges, addiction and other social disadvantages. I was delighted to see the government listen to calls from me and my colleagues to fund this service.

It was great to see this budget including funding for the Victorian Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation. I raised in Parliament the shocking situation that they are in. Their main office in Dandenong is crumbling and full of asbestos and has structural failures. The building is so unsafe they are currently operating out of emergency accommodation. This funding will assist with securing appropriate accommodations and ensure the continued delivery of culturally safe, holistic wellbeing services to 13,500 local Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community members.

We were also pleased to see the announcement of free public transport for under-18s and for seniors on weekends. What a great idea. In fact it sounds a lot like our motion we debated last year calling for free buses. At the time the government did not seem interested in any sort of free public transport, so this announcement is a welcome change of tune. Accessible public transport helps connect people to community and lead better lives as a result.

Other highlights for us included a number of funding initiatives for the LGBTIQA+ community. $15 million was allocated to support mental health for trans and gender-diverse people and $1 million to enable the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission to continue its important work to eliminate the cruelty of harmful practices like conversion therapy. Off the back of the passage of anti-vilification laws earlier this year, now is the time to ensure VEOHRC are funded and resourced to continue their essential work protecting vulnerable and marginalised Victorians.

We were also pleased to see significant funding in this year’s budget for family violence and sexual violence support services. This included extra protections within specialised family violence courts to ensure victim-survivors feel safe, one-on-one case management to help victim-survivors rebuild their lives, continued funding for after-hours crisis line support and specialised family violence legal services. When one in three Australian men report using intimate partner violence, these kinds of measures are unfortunately much needed. The study from the Australian Institute of Family Studies tracked more than 16,000 boys and men over a decade. While around one in four had reported using intimate partner violence in their lifetime, this number has since increased to one in three. The most common form of violence reported in this study was emotional abuse, and for a number of reasons these people often do not end up before our court system. That is why we will always advocate for funding in preventative measures, things like strong social and relational supports, so violence can be stopped before it starts.

I would like to now turn to some of the lowlights of this year’s budget. For the second year in a row the alcohol and other drug services funding has increased by only 1 per cent. In real terms, this funding will not allow for the proper resourcing of AOD services. Demand continues to outstrip supply, and unless something changes, this government will continue to fail to meet its performance requirements. At the same time the disability and mental health sectors are being left behind by a budget that fails to invest in its workforce. This budget will perpetuate severe underfunding and chronic understaffing. Just on Tuesday nurses and social workers and other mental health professionals walked off the job, and many of them marched and protested out on the steps of Parliament. They called for the government to face up to the fact that the workforce is at least 2300 positions shy of what it needs to be to provide safe and reliable care. It is all well and good to invest in infrastructure, but it means nothing if there is no workforce to operate within it. There is a lot of money being generated by the mental health levy – $1.1 billion – yet there remains little understanding in the sector of where the money is being spent and what accountability measures are in place. At the same time Victoria’s mental health watchdog is suffering drastic cuts to its budget, including plans to cut the number of mental health commissioners from four to one. In this context, unsurprisingly, we are pessimistic at best about the government’s ability to implement the recommendations of the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System.

We do want to note that we were pleased to see $4.9 million for outreach services in North Richmond to help address the increasing service and amenity pressure experienced by the medically supervised injecting room. Although this budget was silent on Victoria’s upcoming 10-year AOD strategy, we remain hopeful that it will provide the opportunity for sustainable renewal and progress.

We were also disappointed to see that for the second year running this government has failed to fund Southside Justice’s statewide sex worker legal program. At a time when this service is experiencing increased demand and the review of the decriminalisation of sex work will soon commence, the failure to fund this program and support its invaluable contribution to the community is a mistake. There are also many legal issues that stem from the decriminalisation of sex work – planning laws; equal opportunity laws; and employment, criminal, personal safety and privacy laws, to name a few. A specialised service can offer support across these wideranging needs without the threat of stigma. I urge the government to support Southside Justice’s important work to improve sex workers safety and wellbeing and to ensure the effectiveness of sex work decriminalisation.

Following last year’s budget we feared that the government had gotten cold feet on essential reforms to the youth justice system, instead opting for things like electronic monitoring. Our fears have further been realised within this budget, with $727 million to support drastically increased rates of incarceration following this government’s regressive bail laws. While I have been assured by the minister that at least some of this funding will be directed to therapeutic services and to addressing root causes of vulnerability, we remain concerned that incarceration is no longer considered a last resort for young people. At the end of the day we know the best way to keep people from reoffending is to not put them in prison in the first place.

We also know a quality education gives people the best start in life. That is why it is so troubling to see that the government has decided to delay raising school funding to 75 per cent of the schooling resource standard until 2031. This decision effectively cuts $2.4 billion out of the public school system. This funding is desperately needed to pay for long-awaited Gonski education reforms to address social, economic and cultural disadvantages faced by students. Victorian public schools are now the lowest funded in the country, and Victorian teachers are the lowest paid. That is the Education State for you: cracking down on bail laws, sending more young people to prison and simultaneously stripping money from the public school system.

Before I wrap up, and as a member of the Legalise Cannabis Party, I must mention the budget savings we could see from regulating the personal use of cannabis. Data from the Crime Statistics Agency shows that, on average, over the last four years almost 4000 Victorians have been arrested for possession – possession alone – of small amounts of cannabis every year. According to a report funded by the National Drug Law Enforcement Research Fund, the average cost of arrest for a cannabis offence is just over $1900 per person. That is $7.6 million we are spending every year on arresting people for possessing small amounts of cannabis. This is a disgrace and it is a waste of money. It does nothing to make our community safer, and it ruins the lives of many people, particularly young people. I put the suggestion of regulating cannabis to the Treasurer in this place and was reassured that she will always look for ways to optimise the revenue streams and target expenditure in a way that addresses the priorities of Victorians and benefits them the most – and I will hold her to that promise. On that note, I will end with a message of hope: I hope that by the time next year’s budget rolls around I will no longer be imploring the government to save money by regulating cannabis but instead will be thanking them for having done so.

Lee TARLAMIS (South-Eastern Metropolitan) (14:20): I move:

That debate on the budget papers be adjourned until later this day.

Motion agreed to and debate adjourned until later this day.