Tuesday, 30 May 2023

Bills

Appropriation (2023–2024) Bill 2023

Appropriation (Parliament 2023–2024) Bill 2023

Second reading

Debate resumed.

Peter WALSH (Murray Plains) (16:04): My recollection was that the Speaker had interrupted my budget response for the matter of public importance. Has someone stood up on the other side? What happened? No-one stood up for the MPI?

Danny O’Brien: No.

Peter WALSH: The member for Mordialloc took exception to my comments about the performance of the Leader of the House. Perhaps he might like to retract those comments about the Leader of the House and how well the job is being done in here.

Before we broke to do the MPI that is not happening, I was talking about how only a Labor government could put taxes up but increase debt, only a Labor government could decrease the public sector by 4000 jobs but actually increase the cost of the salaries of the public sector.

So if you go to the specifics of the budget and what particularly impacts on regional Victoria that other members will also talk about, one of the hottest issues in regional Victoria is the issue of the standard of our roads or the condition of our roads, and the fact that they are appalling. We have seen an increase in the road toll in recent years when it should be going down. Some of those accidents can be attributed to the condition of the roads. Some to other particular reasons.

A member: You’re wrong.

Peter WALSH: There is an interjection that I am wrong. With the woman on a motorbike that hit a big pothole north of Shepparton before last Christmas, that was an issue where the condition of the road actually led to that tragic situation for that particular woman.

So with the issue of road funding, if you look at it, since 2020 the road maintenance funding here in Victoria has been reduced by 45 per cent. If you look at this latest budget, it is $702 million down to $441 million. You cannot fix the roads if you do not have the money to fix the roads. The Premier in waiting has made some comments that over the next 10 years there is actually more funding there for roads. What people say to me is ‘We’ve got a pothole now’, ‘We’ve got a big part of the bitumen that is all broken up’, ‘I’ve just smashed a tyre’ or ‘I’ve just broken a rim’. ‘Oh, yeah, but we’re going to fix it in nine years’ time, so that’s all right.’ You cannot say that you have got money in nine years time to fix the road when the roads actually need to be fixed now.

If you go to the regional development budget, it is an absolute crying shame for regional Victoria. Since 2020 the regional development budget has gone down 80 per cent. This year it has gone from $211 million back to $106 million. You would remember that when the Liberals and Nationals came to government in 2010 we had a $1 billion regional development fund. That drove jobs, drove projects, drove lots of great things in regional Victoria. When the Andrews government was elected in 2014, they had the ability to spend the rest of that money for all the things that they wanted to do, but now there is effectively no money for regional development in Victoria. There is no money to actually help a business relocate out of Melbourne to the regions. There is no money for a business in the regions to actually grow and increase employment in the regions and create economic activity in the regions.

Over the last few years we all know how challenging it has been for our agriculture sector, our food and fibre sector, with exports. We have seen the bans on imports into China on our wine industry and our barley industry and the challenges that the meat industry has had getting product into China. The global and trade investment is the way that state government can actually work with industry, work with exporters to grow new markets, to diversify our markets. I think with a bit of hindsight most people realise that we had an over-reliance on the Chinese market and we needed to diversify our markets. To actually cut the trade and global investment budget by 60 per cent over the last two years is not the way you diversify and grow your markets into other countries. That I think is a huge mistake by the Andrews government. There should be more money invested into the trade and global investment area. It is not a large amount of money, but when you talk about the value to export industries, particularly to agriculture, to the food and fibre sector, it is vital that that budget actually goes up so we diversify our market base and you have the opportunity to get those new markets for our exporters.

One of the things that Victoria used to have is a department of agriculture – a standalone department of agriculture. Unfortunately now the department of agriculture, or Agriculture Victoria, as it is called, is a small department down the end of the corridor in a larger department. Over the last now nine years of the Andrews government, the agriculture budget has been cut and cut and cut, and that has continued. Under this current budget there is a 34 per cent cut to the ag budget – $687 million down to $454 million. What a lot of people do not realise is that in that agriculture budget one of the key areas is biosecurity and the work that is done to protect the state from a whole range of pests and diseases. The most recent one that comes to mind to everyone is the outbreak of varroa mite in Newcastle and New South Wales and the work that was done by the Victorian apiary industry and the department here to keep that out of this state. You cannot keep cutting the budget to the department of agriculture, you cannot keep cutting staff, and expect us to maintain our biosecurity into the future.

One thing that was in the budget or was announced the day before the budget that I think is just an absolute tragedy is the closure of the native timber industry. The native timber industry has absolutely been to hell and back under this government. Since 2014 they have been persecuted by green terrorism, by green litigation, and there has not been any protection from the Andrews government. VicForests particularly, on behalf of the native timber industry, have been tied up in the courts year after year and have spent an absolute fortune trying to defend themselves against green terrorism. The fact is that the Premier announced a number of years ago that the industry would be phased out by 2030. To bring that forward –

Danny O’Brien: Without warning.

Peter WALSH: without warning, by six years by effectively a leak to the Herald Sun and then two ministers going to Gippsland to tell the industry, ‘Shut up shop now. You’re going to be closed down by 31 December this year,’ I just think is wrong. We are going to have a government that is broke that is going to, effectively, borrow more money to put Victorians out of work to import more timber. The demand for timber is not going away. The demand for construction will continue. The demand for our good hardwood for flooring, for furniture, for doors, for window frames, for stairs – all those high-value things in a house – will continue, but that is going to come from overseas. That is not going to come from Victoria, and we are going to lose those Victorian jobs. I just think the timber industry has been so hard done by.

One of the last two things I want to finish on is that at the moment we are paying $10 million a day in interest on Labor’s record debt. By the end of the forward estimates Victorians are going to be paying $22 million a day in interest. That is just wasted money on a debt that has been created through a lot of bad decisions that have been made. $30.7 billion in major cost blowouts in this state now is just poor management. I come back to roads. That $30 billion, if it costs a million dollars to reform a kilometre of country roads, would do 30,000 kilometres of road, so how could the minister for major infrastructure projects waste so much money on cost overruns that would effectively rebuild the majority of roads in Victoria? If you took the length of VicRoads roads in Victoria, that would do a very, very high percentage of that.

I will finish with this. Victoria is broke. Life is going to get harder under Labor here in Victoria, and particularly regional Victorians are being punished for Labor’s incompetence when it comes to managing money in this state. We have got cuts to road funding, cuts to regional development, cuts to agriculture and cuts to trade and global investment. That is because regional Victoria is being punished for Labor’s incompetence. They cannot manage a budget and they cannot manage major projects, and I do not believe they should be entitled to manage Victorians’ money.

Ella GEORGE (Lara) (16:14): I am pleased to speak to the house today in relation to the Appropriation (2023–2024) Bill 2023. I would like to begin by thanking the Treasurer and his team for their hard work in delivering this state budget in what is a very challenging time. With this budget we are paying off our COVID emergency debt – the credit card we used to save lives and livelihoods, to pay for COVID testing sites, vaccines, face masks and PPE and to support the Victorian community to see it through an unprecedented pandemic. The government’s COVID debt repayment plan is one part of the budget. The other part of this budget is getting on with delivering the election commitments that the Andrews Labor government made last year. We are investing in what matters for the people of the Lara electorate across Geelong’s northern suburbs. There is some great news in the 2023–24 state budget about what will be funded as part of this bill.

As part of more than $2 billion in investment in schools across Victoria, this year’s budget includes $7.55 million to deliver a new gym at Western Heights College in Hamlyn Heights, and this is a commitment I am so proud to be delivering. As a candidate I spent a lot of time doorknocking in Hamlyn Heights and heard from so many residents just how important this gym is to the community. The Western Heights College regeneration plan commenced under a Bracks-led state Labor government to rebuild the school. Stages 1 and 2 were completed in 2014, and the school has come along in leaps and bounds since then, with enrolments increasing.

The final stage is stage 3 – a new on-site gym facility. Currently the school is using an old gym in the previous Quamby campus of Western Heights College, and the school is spending thousands of dollars each year in additional costs to hire indoor gyms and for buses to transport students from the school to other gyms. This is neither sustainable nor equitable. Despite the lack of a gym, Western Heights College has established an incredible specialist sporting program. The specialist sporting program provides aspiring AFL, basketball, netball and soccer athletes the necessary skills to achieve their goals both academically and athletically. The program is highly sought after and has attracted students from across the Geelong region and even across Melbourne’s western suburbs. The gym will be the final piece in the puzzle for the Western Heights community in bringing their school’s master plan to fruition, and I congratulate the students, teachers and wider school community for their advocacy on this issue. In particular I would like to congratulate principal Fiona Taylor and school council president Tania Briese for their leadership and commitment in seeing this project through.

In other exciting news, students and teachers of St Francis Xavier primary school in Corio are also set to benefit in this year’s budget, with the Labor government delivering $2 million towards an upgrade. This funding will support St Francis Xavier with their plans to build a new administrative building near the rear of the school, which will significantly increase the school’s ability to provide a safe environment and in particular a safer entrance for their students. The administrative building is currently in the centre of the school grounds, which means visitors have to walk through the school to access the office. The redevelopment will place the administrative building closer to the school’s perimeter. St Francis Xavier have identified this important need to establish a safer school for their students, and the funding is such a great opportunity to do that. The remainder of the current admin building will be converted into a library and digital technology space to create another dedicated learning space for students.

I had the great pleasure of welcoming grade 5 and 6 students from St Francis Xavier to Parliament House for a tour last Friday. I was so impressed with their questions about this place. There were lots of questions about all the gold that we see above us and just how much this building was worth. They are just starting to learn about government in their classroom, and they deserve great facilities to learn in. As a government, those on this side understand that every family and every student deserves a great local school. The best teachers cannot do the best job in ageing classrooms and out-of-date facilities, and the funding for these two schools and others right across the state will mean that students will continue to learn in modern classrooms and modern science labs and libraries and have better access to facilities like gyms and sports grounds.

Sport is such a big part of our community. We are helping families in Geelong’s north to get active and get engaged. The North Shore Football and Netball Club has been always a been a pillar in the North Shore and Norlane communities. They are a proud club and one of the most successful, having won 17 premierships in the Geelong and District Football League and the Geelong Football League, including six premierships in a row from 1995 to 2000. But like so many community clubs, their facilities are lacking, and there are no change rooms for their female players to use. I met with North Shore several times before the state election, and I was so pleased to make an election commitment of $2 million to build female-friendly facilities on site – another commitment that was funded in last week’s budget. This funding will ensure North Shore remain a strong community club into the future, especially for their centenary celebrations in 2027. These new women’s change rooms will give local women and girls more opportunities to participate in the sports that they love. A massive congratulations to the North Shore committee and leadership, who have been working tirelessly over the years to advocate for this project. The $2 million investment is part of a larger $6.5 million master plan to redevelop North Shore’s pavilion and other amenities. The master plan was developed with the North Shore Sports Club with support from the City of Greater Geelong, and I call on the City of Greater Geelong to come to the table and commit funding to this project.

The Lara electorate is home to some significant regional parks, including the You Yangs Regional Park and Serendip Sanctuary, and between these two sites there are over 470,000 people visiting each year to get out in nature and to enjoy outdoor recreation activities such as bushwalking, hiking, mountain bike riding, horseback riding, rock climbing and abseiling. Last week’s state budget committed $11 million in funding over the next four years to bring to life the You Yangs Regional Park and Serendip Sanctuary master plan. This commitment will fund new facilities and infrastructure. Core infrastructure upgrades will include improvements to park entrances, picnic and barbecue areas, shelters, walking paths and bike riding tracks. Importantly, the funding commitment demonstrates the importance of the You Yangs and Serendip Sanctuary to the Andrews Labor government, places that should be enhanced and protected so that generations to come can enjoy these special places. And I am pleased to report to the house that work is already underway in seeing this project come to life. Last week Parks Victoria convened a stakeholder meeting, bringing together local stakeholders and interested parties to plan for the project. There has been so much community interest and a lot of community passion, and I am so pleased to see it coming to life.

The Andrews Labor government has a track record when it comes to supporting Victoria’s multicultural and multifaith communities. Victorians come from more than 200 countries, speak 260 languages and follow 135 different faiths. Nearly half of all Victorians were born overseas or have a parent who was born overseas, and in Victoria we are so proud of our cultural diversity. For many Victorians from multicultural and multifaith backgrounds, community groups and centres offer important connections to their faith, culture and heritage. Prior to the election we promised to build, upgrade and renovate new community infrastructure for the Sikh community, and we are doing just that with $500,000 in funding towards a new Sikh community centre in Geelong. We are also supporting our local Islamic community with $50,000 for the Islamic Society of Geelong. I would like to take this opportunity to thank both the Sikh Community of Greater Geelong and the Islamic Society of Geelong for being so welcoming and inclusive. Earlier this year the Islamic Society threw open their doors to the community at the Geelong Mosque for the mosque open day, and I am looking forward to visiting the Sikh community this weekend to celebrate their success along with my colleague the member for South Barwon. The Sikh community hosted their largest ever Diwali celebrations in Geelong last year, and I am sure this year’s is going to be bigger than ever. The fireworks were spectacular, definitely the best we have ever seen in Lovely Banks.

These commitments are part of a raft of investments our government is making to build, upgrade and renovate new community infrastructure for multicultural and multifaith communities, and this government is also investing in multicultural community events. Geelong’s Pako Festa is a much-loved multicultural festival held annually on Geelong’s Pakington Street. It is in the heart of the Geelong electorate, and the member for Geelong has long been a supporter of Pako Festa. Pako Festa is all about community, and it is led by community. It draws in multicultural and multifaith communities from across the entire Geelong region. Pako Festa is Victoria’s largest free multicultural party, a huge all-day street party like no other, and if you have not been before, I encourage you to get along next year. It celebrates and highlights the extraordinary contribution of multicultural communities in Geelong and across Victoria. In this budget the state government will provide $200,000 per year over the next four years to ensure that this local institution is bigger and better than ever. As I said earlier, in Victoria we are proud of our diversity. We are proud of the achievements and contributions of our multicultural and multifaith communities, and this budget clearly demonstrates the Andrews Labor government’s commitment to Victoria’s diverse communities in honouring our election commitments.

I do wish to touch on some of the election commitments made in the Geelong region that will support the communities of Lara, Geelong, Bellarine and South Barwon. With huge demand for a skilled workforce, the state government is making sure Victorians can get the skills they need for the job that they want. A targeted investment of up to $36 million for the Gordon TAFE disability service hub will make sure that people with a disability in Geelong get the best training possible, and this builds on our landmark free TAFE policy, which I know many residents in the Lara electorate have been able to access over the past few years. We are making free TAFE more widely available to Victorians, including people returning to study or who want to complete multiple TAFE courses. We are also supporting young apprentices with the cost of living, because we know it can be tough. We know many young apprentices scrimp and save as they start out in their careers. When you rely on your vehicle to do your job every day, costs can quickly add up, so we will make car rego free, saving eligible trade apprentices up to $865 per year.

For too long women’s health has not been a focus for investment and service delivery. Every Victorian, including women and girls, should be able to get the health care they need when they need it, close to home. A comprehensive women’s health clinic at Barwon Health will change the way women’s health issues are treated, providing care and support for conditions like endometriosis, pelvic pain, polycystic ovary syndrome, perimenopause and menopause. I have heard horror stories from friends who have suffered from endometriosis over many, many years. The pain can be unbearable, and the only treatment is major surgery. I have friends who have had to have multiple surgeries and other friends who have gone in for a surgery only to be told that their endo was much worse than their doctor thought it was. Funding and focus on women’s health is essential, and that is exactly what this budget will deliver. The comprehensive women’s health clinic at Barwon Health will be game changing for women in Geelong’s north and across the whole region, and this joins other recent investments in health in Geelong, such as the new women’s and children’s hospital and the children’s emergency department at University Hospital.

With this budget we will keep improving the V/Line services, with 23 new VLocity trains built right here in Victoria, meaning more trains more often for regional Victorians. Geelong commuters deserve a great public transport network that gets them where they need to go, and that is why we are delivering a 20-minute weekend service for Geelong. This builds on fairer fares, the Andrews Labor government’s commitment to cap V/Line tickets at the metro rate, for the first time making rail travel equitable across the state. This is something that has been so well received across my community in Lara and across the broader Geelong region.

This is a budget that looks after people and looks after our future in Victoria. We are continuing to invest in jobs and the projects that will build our state, and we are delivering the commitments that we took to the election six months ago – every single one of them. I am so proud to be delivering on commitments in Lara for Western Heights College, for St Francis Xavier School in Corio, for North Shore Sports Club, for the Sikh Community of Greater Geelong and for the Islamic Society of Geelong.

We are building the hospitals, schools, roads and rail that Victorians need now and in 10, 20 and 30 years time. We are investing to keep Victoria’s economy growing, and that is why I am so proud to be a member of this government, delivering what matters for all Victorians. I commend these bills to the house, and I wish them a speedy passage.

The SPEAKER: Order! Can I acknowledge the Honorary Consul of Ecuador in the gallery today.

Brad BATTIN (Berwick) (16:28): Thank you, Speaker. I was a bit worried you had me as ‘honourable’ then. I was going to say, ‘Hold on a bit!’

First of all, Kathy and Mick own a small business. They have two children. They worked hard to send their children to an independent school. They have invested wisely. The give back to the community. They support other local businesses and they deliver jobs for local people. We should encourage them and not punish them. These are the people that will rebuild our community. They have worked hard for 60 to 80 hours each week. They have given up weekends. They did not attend family events and went without holidays. Why? Because they knew that working hard would give their children the best start in life. It is people like Kathy and Mick who can assist with the housing crisis. We should be encouraging them to invest, to have more rental properties. But no, this Labor government have put on a rent tax to encourage these small investors to look in other states. It is time for Labor to stop punishing these Victorians for their own waste and mismanagement. Victoria is broke.

The 2023–24 state budget is a typical Labor budget. It is about increasing taxes on those that can least afford it, increasing taxes on businesses, taxes that will cost jobs in our state. The worst part is they are targeting aspirational Victorians – not rich but aspirational Victorians – who are working hard to build their future. The people who are working hard to build their future are the people the government must encourage and not punish or restrict. Every parent who works two jobs to have their child attend an independent school means one less child placing pressure on the already stretched government school system. Every emergency services worker who has invested in a property to build their future means one less family on the public housing waiting list. We need more properties for rent, not less.

This budget is so brutal in so many different ways. It is sad that I only have 15 minutes to point out the concerns and place on record the ideas to build a better Victoria – not tax a state that is broke due to the mismanagement of this incompetent Labor government. It is not just us saying this, there are many out there that are saying it. The Herald Sun says:

State debt is set to skyrocket to $171bn – almost $70,000 for every household – even though Victorians face a decade of tax pain …

Budget forecasts predict interest payments to service the staggering debt will hit $22m a day by 2026–27 while tax revenue will climb to $40bn – double what it was in 2015–16.

…

Ratings agencies said the budget did little to improve Victoria’s credit score, which remains the lowest of any state. And employer groups warned Victoria was now the worst state in the country … to do business.

UNSW economics professor Richard Holden said the government failed to make tough choices given debt would continue to grow. And he said the government was wrong to blame its debt predicament on Covid-19, saying cost blowouts on major projects and big spending had contributed.

“There was actually a lot of debt accumulation prior to Covid,” … “Framing it all as this is paying back Covid is maybe … too clever by half.”

As I said in that, our debt will go to $171.4 billion by 2026–27. Let us put that in perspective. That is $22 million per day. That is $900,000 an hour. It is $225,000 by the time I finish this speech. In a 15-minute period we are going to be paying $225,000. Imagine how many houses we could build in Victoria for social housing and actually get a return and give people a chance in life. Even with the new taxes and the cuts to jobs and projects, Victoria will increase its debt.

I am going to focus on the rent tax because there are over 800,000 people that rent here in Victoria, and this tax is going to do nothing more than place extra pressure on them. During a housing crisis this government is finding a way to make it more unaffordable. Every person that cannot live in their own house or rent a property is going to end up on the housing waiting list, and we already know the housing waiting list is out of control. It is the growth areas like mine that will be hit first and hardest. I have to ask the government why they hate investors so much – the investors that are putting properties into those areas that are giving people in my community the opportunity to have a roof over their head to give them a purpose and meaning. Instead this government want to stop investors investing here. Doing some very basic sums, on a $400,000 loan for a $650,000 property in Officer, one of our fastest growing areas, it would cost, including interest and taxes and insurance, around $690 per week to run that household. The average rent is $550. People are already losing money to keep housing affordable in our state. But what does the government want? As said in the Herald Sun:

Victorians with more than one property will pay a minimum $5000 over the next decade, with a new $500 … tax for investment properties with … land … between $50,000 and $100,000 …

and $975 on land up to $300,000. This is unfair on those renters who will end up paying that price. We need to make sure that we can keep prices down on rent, and the way to do that is to have less tax here in our state.

Businesses have also been hit with a 42 per cent hike in WorkCover premiums, making the scheme one of the most expensive in the country. That is a tax on jobs. That is a direct tax on small businesses, and the only thing that they can cut at the moment is staff. They cannot cut the cost of a bun, hamburger, lettuce or tomato. They cannot reduce the cost of electricity, which is skyrocketing, or gas, which is more pressure. The only way these businesses can save money now is to sack people, and that places more pressure on the economy. Those people will be coming back and will need more assistance.

What are other people saying about this current budget? It is not just what the Victorian Liberals are saying. S&P Global Ratings analyst Anthony Walker said the budget provided some headroom for the state’s AA rating:

We consider fiscal recovery will be a slow and long process … Despite some positive developments, Victoria’s fiscal outlook remains weak compared with other Australian states.

CPA Australia senior tax policy manager Elinor Kasapidis said Victoria was now Australia’s ‘least attractive state to run a business or buy an investment property’. Why would you be proud of a budget that makes it the least attractive to run a business or the least attractive to buy an investment property?

“Victorians are being forced to pay for decisions made by their own government during Covid,” she said. “This budget threatens to make a bad situation worse. Victoria used to be the place to be, now it’s the place not to be.”

Victorian Chamber of Commerce and Industry chief executive Paul Guerra said:

Today’s state budget takes Victoria from the most locked-down state in Australia to one of the highest taxing, as the government continues to hit business with the bill for the debt incurred throughout the pandemic and cost blowouts in the WorkCover scheme.

Victorian Council of Social Service CEO Emma King is among those concerned that the tax increases could lead to higher rents. 3AW host Tom Elliott even went on to say that to blame the Reserve Bank and the pandemic for the state’s debt was utter rubbish and said Victorians would be forced to pay for the mistakes the state government made during their management of COVID. He also slammed a lie being sold about the impact the levy would have on the rental market:

The government has said this will not impact rents – well of course it will.

These are the people that are going to get impacted. The government, each and every one of them, whether they are on the back bench, on the front bench or in between, are going to have to go back out to their communities as WorkCover increases by 42 per cent and explain to them, ‘Guess what – you’re going to have to sack staff now to recover those costs.’ Or there is an alternative. I note some shaking their heads. There is an alternative here. Let us go to the alternative. They could increase the cost of everything in their premises. Everything in their store goes up, putting pressure on the cost of living.

A member interjected.

Brad BATTIN: I note the member says, ‘Or we could let WorkCover collapse.’ The government has been in charge of WorkCover for two decades. It is only failing because Labor have failed WorkCover so badly that they now have to increase the premiums by 42 per cent. How could you sit there – how could any member of Labor sit there – and go, ‘Someone else is responsible for this other than the Victorian Labor Party, who have allowed WorkCover to get out of control.’ I will go out to my community and explain to them, ‘Labor are the reason that you are going to have to put staff off, Labor are the reason you will have to close your doors, Labor are the reason that you are putting your investment property on the market and Labor are the reason that rents are going up in your community.’

All the way through Casey and Cardinia the renters out there will feel every pinch of this every time rent goes up. Someone might say it is only $50 a month. For someone who is already paying 50 to 60 per cent of their income in rent, $50 a month is everything, and those on the other side just simply do not understand that when you implement these taxes, they end up at the bottom end there, not with the investors – or worse, people will take those properties off the market.

When it comes to the police here in Victoria – obviously this is one of my portfolios – the Andrews Labor government were very proud before the election to announce they would increase the police numbers in this term by 502. By 1 July 2024 we were going to have 502 extra police officers here in Victoria. Sadly, today as we speak there are 800 vacancies in Victoria Police, because they cannot even replace those that are leaving. They are 800 down on the numbers there were as of the election. To add to that, they still need an extra 500, so to get the 1302 extra police they need, they would need to double the size of the Victoria Police Academy. Obviously that is not going to happen. This government cannot deliver those police that they promised. There is no new money for infrastructure in Victoria Police. The only police station that will be getting renovated or updated will be Rochester. It was flooded. They deserve it; that community needs and deserves that money for that new station up there in Rochester. But not in Clyde North – that money has come out of the budget. Not in Narre Warren, where the station is no longer suitable for need – that money has come out of the budget. That is no longer there. The only thing we have seen in Clyde North since it was promised to be delivered and open by 2022 is a sign that went up in 2022 with a new date of 2025. I almost guarantee I will get to the next election and the only thing I will see change is that sticker, and it will no longer be 2025, it will be after the next election, because that money has been removed from the budget. And they are doing it because they have run out of money. We need to make sure that the police have got the support they need.

Here in Victoria our road toll has increased by 36 per cent. There are many reasons around the road toll increasing. Some will say it is due to the condition of the roads; some will say it is driver error, drink driving, drug driving. All of these play into what happens when people die on our roads, and we all know, more than ever after the last weekend, the impact of people dying on our roads in our state. That is why the government have a responsibility to deliver on the things that they have promised. What did they promise? They promised roadside drug testing targets would be up, yet they are down by 33 per cent. More people are dying on our roads from drug driving than at any time in history, and yet we have got 1 million less tests in Victoria – 1 million less roadside drug tests. There is no excuse for that, zero excuse at all. It can only be funding. The government have not given the funding to Victoria Police to deliver what they need to deliver.

When it comes to corrections and youth justice, we want to make sure that our young people have a genuine opportunity in life. We want to make sure that if they do get into the justice system, everything is put in place so we can get them work ready, return them to education or give them the support services they need. Yet this government, when they are running out of money and they are spending money on a prison that is currently not open – they are spending money in corrections, $36 million to keep one prison closed, millions to keep a youth justice centre closed – are cutting $5 million from community crime prevention, meaning there are fewer initiatives to tackle these crimes before they happen. There has been a $10 million cut from community-based order supervision management. That means more young people will not get the support they need when they enter the justice system. They will have more chance of reoffending. That is a bad outcome for Victoria. That is a bad outcome for communities.

I have said, and I will say, that the previous minister I was quite happy to work with and talk to, and we actually shared a lot of similar ideas – and I am sure that Ben Carroll, now Minister for Public Transport, who was then Minister for Youth Justice and Minister for Corrections, would agree. He would be disappointed that there are now cuts to the programs that he once supported. And now there are cuts in this budget to the programs that he said on record were making changes to the young people in our community. You cannot come in here and say you are making changes and then cut $25 million from those programs. It just simply does not work.

This is a bad budget for Victorians. It has got a rent tax, a schools tax, a job tax and services cuts. I think this bill, this legislation, will create less jobs here in our state.

Mathew HILAKARI (Point Cook) (16:43): Budgets, appropriation bills, tell the story of your community’s priorities and your government’s priorities. This budget delivers in spades for the community of Point Cook. I am going to start by talking about 10 of those key investments that this budget makes in Point Cook: Point Cook Road – $79 million to upgrade the Central Avenue and Point Cook Road intersection; the Wyndham traffic management plan, $5 million; Saltwater P–9 College, $37.32 million; a new school in Point Cook for P–9s; a new school, planning money and early works money for a Point Cook South specialist school; $10 million towards the western aquatic centre; $1.4 million to the Point Cook Football Club for their clubroom redevelopment; $1.3 million for the women’s change rooms at Laverton Magpies Football Club; $12,000 to the Point Cook Centrals Football Club to hire the field next door; and $2.2 million towards the Werribee South boat ramp. Those are 10 things that will be delivered from this budget in the community that I represent. This is something that is so great for this community, and it means that we can meet the need for those things that the community has been calling for.

Before this election I spent a lot of time doorknocking in the community. I spoke to more than 8000 people and knocked on over 8000 doors in total. They told me that their number one, two and three priorities were Point Cook Road, and for those people who live in the Point Cook community, this is a real challenge. It is a real challenge because we are beholden to the history of poor planning around this area. A single road in and out of Point Cook was the only road for a very long time. It is a community that has gone from 50 people to just under 70,000 people just in the suburb of Point Cook alone, not including Seabrook and not including Altona Meadows – communities that rely on this as a main thoroughfare to get out of the community and to get to the jobs and the education that the community so richly wants to participate in and richly deserves. $79 million to the Point Cook Road and Central Avenue intersection is part of the Big Build. It will make this intersection safe. It will improve congestion, but it will not solve congestion. It will make this area available for cyclists and pedestrians, a part of the community that cannot access this intersection safely today, and there have been serious accidents at this intersection and serious injuries caused.

I am so pleased that Jacinta Allan, the Deputy Premier, joined me the day after the budget to emphasise just how much she is committed to this project by personally being on site. I know how much the Big Build is committed to this project because they have already started the planning processes, consulting community, but I do not need to see that community consultation to know that this is desperately needed so people can get out of their community and get home safely. That is why I am so pleased to see the Minister for Roads and Road Safety at the table today with the Wyndham traffic management study: $5 million towards roads all across Wyndham, a growing area, an area that will be bigger than Bendigo and Ballarat combined in just a dozen years, with over half a million residents, over 60 per cent of whom today leave the community to take work and education. These studies now getting ahead of this planning for our community’s future, meeting those challenges that already exist, is just so important and vital for the community.

What I love about the communities of Point Cook, Altona Meadows, Seabrook and Werribee South is their love and want of great education. We have great education facilities in our community, and Saltwater P–9 College is one such community. The Saltwater estates are growing. Not every house is built there, and that school is just growing and is going to keep growing. They have a great IB program, and principal Jackie Daniali there is a great educator and leader. There are so many great educators and leaders there that I and the Minister for Education met recently, and she was able to announce the $37 million towards the expansion of that school. It is such a great school, and it is showing our government’s commitment to their commitment for great education facilities.

Point Cook South P–9, which is the interim name, is a new school to open in 2026. It is part of the 100 schools of the big build of schools that we are doing across Victoria. I am proud to be part of a government which has prioritised education and is willing to put its money where its mouth is by opening so many schools. Saltwater P–9, which I just mentioned, was one of those schools that has opened, and it has already been expanded. Point Cook South P–9 will be another school which will be well sought after, and I cannot wait to see that start. Point Cook specialist school has got money for planning and early works, another one of these schools that are desperately needed across our communities.

The western aquatic centre is a council-led project, and rightly – councils are responsible for things like pools across our communities. They will run them and they will fund them over time. But we can always as a government give them a helping hand, and there is a good reason we are giving them a helping hand: because there are 100,000 people in the communities that I represent who do not have a public pool to go to. One hundred thousand people without a public pool – some of the most diverse communities. The most multicultural suburb in the country is in Point Cook, and those communities deserve a place where they can learn to swim and thrive in the waters around Victoria, because the electorate that I represent is surrounded on three sides by waterways: Laverton Creek, Port Phillip Bay and Werribee River. Swimming is extremely important in the communities that I represent, so I am so pleased that that site will be pushed along by this funding. It will give impetus to the council to run with this project, and I am so pleased to say that they have recently assigned several million dollars to get the planning underway. It is not just multicultural communities; it is those communities with disability, those communities who are older and those communities who just want to have fun during the summer, like so many of us did, creating those memories and building community.

The Point Cook Football Club redevelopment received $1.4 million. Again, it is a council facility, but it is a different council on this occasion: Wyndham City Council. They are building so many facilities across the area because it is growing at such a high rate. This place is important, and it is special to Point Cook. It is a club which is high achieving; they are high-performance athletes. They have been in division 1 in the Western Region Football League for some time now and they need facilities that match their growth. There are more than 1000 members at the club. It is an amazing club in a growing area that is still going to keep growing. So I thank Ivo Havard, Samuel Fragapane, Dave Rouvray and Jason Ware – and Dave’s son plays for Point Cook Bulldogs and did a great job in the local community cup recently. This is about a third of the money that they need, so I look to the federal government, I look to council and I look to the league to step up and make sure that we can have this great facility that is needed, because the clubrooms really just do not fit the number of people that they want to have attending to build community. This is one of those things about those communities that are growing: it is really difficult to build community, but we have got the volunteers and we have got the people who want to build it. We are facilitating that, and that is what I love so much.

At the Laverton Magpies Football Netball Club – I do not think their clubrooms have seen much of a change in their many years at the ovals there – there is $1.3 million for Steph, who is the president there, and the team who are redeveloping that great community that we have there, investing in women’s football, investing in youth football and just growing the club. They are an amazing group of people, and I am so pleased that this government is able to support them, including with a new scoreboard and redevelopment of their clubrooms and women’s change rooms. I look forward to seeing how the council can get involved as well in that space.

The Point Cook Centrals Football Club has Todd Van Blommestein, Gavin Young, Michael Blewitt and Kelly Van Blommestein, who is president of the netball side of things. The Sharks are a great community club, and they have actually had some really great successes lately. Both their teams won premierships, their men’s and their women’s, and they both went up a division. The reason this is important is because they have just been building and building. One of the design features that is sometimes lacking in communities that are newly designed, like Point Cook, is that they have not thought through for the big growth that is going on. It is a single-oval football club, so it is hard to build a big membership and it is hard to fundamentally support what runs a club, which is the canteen, off one match at any point in time. We are lucky: we have Featherbrook school next door. So this money will fund the hiring of the oval next door during their training and during their matches, making this club sustainable.

On the Werribee South boat ramp, in 2019 we presented free parking and launch fees – we got rid of those fees that inhibited so many people in Victoria from using these boat ramps as much as they would have liked to. What we have seen is a massive increase in the usage of the boat ramp. People park all the way along the street, either side of where the boat ramp is, because it is so well used. It is a very well used area of Victoria’s boat ramps on Port Phillip Bay. The fishing is good, the barbecues are great and the playground is sensational. Werribee South beach is one of those places that if you have not been to – I have implored members here to get to Werribee South beach before – it is a really great idea to get down there, because it is beautiful. If you have got a boat, launch it from there. Soon it will be even better, with a $2.2 million upgrade for more pontoons and more parking spaces, making it more accessible for people to recreate across our community.

I want to go into a couple of other things that are being delivered in our budget, or will be delivered should the budget pass of course – and I hope it will. For protecting our waterways and the Green Links fund, which Minister Shing from the other place launched most recently, there is $10 million, with action plans with our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities in Victoria, the Aboriginal communities, making sure traditional owners have more of a say over our wonderful waterways.

Werribee Mercy and Footscray Hospital women’s health clinics – this budget delivers $58 million to deliver 20 comprehensive women’s health clinics across Victoria. We are in desperate need of those in Melbourne’s south-west, and they will be well used by the communities that I represent.

There are great things that are delivered by budgets. They describe what is a priority for a government and what is not. I know that this budget delivers on the election commitments that we as a government made. If we had not been elected as a government, none of these would have been delivered, and so that is why it is so important for the communities that I represent. I look forward to working with our government for the remainder of the term in delivering further commitments.

David SOUTHWICK (Caulfield) (16:56): Well, we often talk about those that have come from very different countries to settle here in Australia, settle in Victoria, and work really hard. Many of those were living in accommodation, renting, and working really, really hard in many, many, jobs just to survive, just to put food on the table, and many of those, if you fast-forward, are the success stories that for many, many years we have revered. We have so many from our Chinese community that have not had the opportunity of a great education but have come here, have worked so hard, have had kids and have said, ‘We want to give those kids the opportunity that we didn’t have and give them the very, very best of education.’ The same could be said of many in my community, the Jewish community, that have come here, have worked so hard and have contributed. Many people in this Parliament have spoken about the successes of those that have worked very hard, like people from the Jewish community, that have invested so much in philanthropy, in science, in education, in health and in so many different areas and that have made this great state what it now is.

Well, what really, absolutely just kills me is that the aspiration that we have set for our state is now something that is no longer revered by the Andrews Labor government but is attacked. Those people that have worked hard are not celebrated but taxed, and those people that want to contribute for others have been told by this government, ‘You know what – we’re actually going to ensure that you can no longer be celebrated. We won’t be providing the kinds of conditions that we’ve had for many, many different generations that have made Australia and Victoria the greatest place to live, but instead, what we’re going to do is we’re going to come after you, we’re going to make it harder for you and we’re actually going to disincentivise you to do anything at all.’ And that is just appalling. This is the worst budget that I think we have ever, ever seen. It is a budget that attacks aspiration. It attacks anyone that has a go. It just says, ‘You know what, you’re not worth anything. You’re better off just sitting at home and doing nothing.’ And that is largely what this budget is all about.

We have record debt in this state – record debt. We have heard on numerous occasions – the media now reports on it – that it is higher than New South Wales, Queensland and Tasmania combined. Yet with record debt, we are seeing record taxation. You would think, you would hope, that we would try to wrestle the debt down, but we are seeing increased debt – debt that will go up to $171 billion in the forward estimates. And the reason why is because this government has no idea – none whatsoever – when it comes to managing money.

They are a government that literally has no idea about managing projects. We have seen that on the Big Build with $30 billion plus of budget blowouts. We hear this government talk about how we need to be able to pay for the COVID recovery and the money that had to be spent on COVID at around about $30 billion. Well, if they managed their major projects we would not even be in this mess. Thirty billion dollars could build schools and hospitals and so many different things, but instead it is just being wasted. Now, we have heard just recently the situation with many of these major projects: the level crossings that this government celebrates, the Metro Tunnel this government celebrates. We have the Deputy Premier and the Premier going out and cutting ribbons, putting on hard hats and saying, ‘How fantastic, we’re removing level crossings.’ It is great we are removing level crossings, but do it in an affordable way, not one in which we are literally having people, as has been reported, on ghost wages, on ghost hours, where they are doing multiple shifts at a time. Surprise, surprise, they have put themselves down on three or four projects at the same time on the same day, and we the taxpayers are paying for that. That is just appalling.

Victorians are going in for a hard day of work and getting paid for that hard day’s work, and on the flip side we are hearing about people going in and being told, 20 or 30 at a time, ‘You know what, work on weekends, double time. Do a 12-hour shift but leave after 8 hours and you’ll get your 12 hours worth.’ If you add that up across each of these major projects, no wonder we are in a financial mess. And what does the Deputy Premier say? ‘Don’t care. That’s all right, that’s a matter for someone else.’ It is not a matter for someone else. The key responsibility for any government is to manage things properly, and this government has messed it up.

The taxes – Labor’s school tax, Labor’s rent tax, Labor’s job tax and Labor’s debt tax – are all new taxes. We are close to 50 new taxes under this government, a government that when they first came to power said, ‘There will be no more new taxes under a government that we lead.’ That was the promise, a promise that has been broken again and again and again. A tax on aspiration – those people that have worked so hard that I spoke about at the beginning, those people that want their kids to have an education of choice. Those people and many of those schools are subsidising that education as we speak. In my electorate we have got schools at which some of those kids are subsidised for up to 85 per cent of the fee. Again, what happens is you will have large families, some with 10, 12 kids in a family. They will go to a school and the community will get around them and say, ‘You know what, we will support them. We will do a whole range of things to ensure that those kids can get an education.’ Well, they are on the hit list. That is potentially – with the additional money – another 5 per cent on the school fees at the very least.

Certainly between the last census data and this census data in an electorate like mine, in Caulfield, in our primary schools we are seeing a 5 per cent drop from the independent and private schools to the public sector. Interviewing a number of the parents and talking to a number of the parents, they have all said conclusively, ‘We would love to be able to send our kid to one of the Jewish day schools or one of the Catholic schools, but at the end of the day we just can’t afford it.’ So what that does is it puts more pressure on the public sector, because now we have got a lot of kids in our zoned areas, but you cannot get into those schools anymore because they are full. Now we have got a situation where we have got schools in the public system that are full and you cannot get kids into them, yet the kids that were being sent to the private system and are already leaving are now going to be leaving more so because we are effectively taxing them more.

This is a government that makes no sense. It is not about fairness. They have a numberplate saying ‘The Education State’. How do you become or continue to be the Education State when you just want to tax schools, something that has never, ever been done before. We have always had a tax exemption when it comes to schools for education and humanitarian reasons. Well, this government has ripped up the paper today when it comes to those kinds of precedents that have been long standing in this Parliament. It is no longer, because this government wants to attack people – anyone that wants to work hard and wants to have a go.

It is the same thing when it comes to the payroll tax. It is a really big issue, because what we want to do is we want to encourage people to come here. People often say, ‘Well, do you know what? The government has introduced all these new taxes. They are taxing and taxing and taxing. What would you do differently? What would you do that would actually change the game and pay down debt?’ What you would do is you would restore confidence into what once was the most livable city in the world and get people that want to come here to invest here, that want to actually set up businesses here. That is what you would do.

And why would you do it when it is the highest taxing state in the nation? Why would anyone want to come here when that is happening? You have got other states that are rolling out the red carpet to businesses and saying, ‘Come and set up here.’ I will tell you what New South Wales will be doing at the moment: they will be absolutely throwing a party and they will be saying, ‘How good is this? Victoria doesn’t want business to set up. We’re just going to roll out the red carpet and welcome them here.’ States like New South Wales, Queensland, Western Australia and Tasmania are doing their utmost to actually encourage investment, because it creates jobs and it creates wealth for the state, and the more that that happens, the more opportunity that then provides. That is what this government should be doing. If there is one thing that they could do, they could restore confidence, they could encourage investment and they could get people to say, ‘You know what, we’re going to come here.’ In an article from 4 hours ago, the chief executive of Wesfarmers, one of the largest employers in this state – big brands like Bunnings and Kmart, many of those stores that we would all visit – turned around and said, ‘You know what, investment is shot here in this state because this government has done something that is very, very dangerous. We want to provide jobs, we want to grow jobs and we want to grow wages, but how can you do that when you have a payroll tax that hits up the very workers that we want to support?’

So it is not encouraging jobs, it is not encouraging investment and it is not encouraging wage growth. The only thing it is doing is growing funds into Daniel Andrews’s pocket – that is what it is doing – to be misspent and to be wasted on more projects that nobody even has any idea about, because this government clearly does not. Thirty-two major projects have been put on ice – 32 of them. We still do not have an airport rail. We have one of the largest, most active cities in the world – the world’s most livable city time and time again. Every government, past and present, has been talking about, ‘How do we get Melbourne back to where it once was as the most livable city? When do we get an airport rail?’ We all got very excited about it. In fact at the last election the government tried to repackage their Suburban Rail Loop and call it ‘SRL Airport’, because they knew the airport rail was really attractive and people would say, ‘Isn’t this great? The government is actually going to invest in an airport rail.’ What was the first thing that went in this budget? The airport rail. The thing that they tried to sell got scrapped. Now we still have no idea when we are going to get an airport rail. Geelong fast rail – gone, finished; that is forgotten. All of these projects – they start them, they get workforce onto them and they do some work. It is like building a house – they lay the foundations, they lay out the contract, they put the frame up and then they say, ‘You know what, this is all too hard. We’re just going to walk off and do something else.’ And when we come back to it, the one thing that we absolutely know is it costs more. You cannot keep stopping and starting time and time again and expect to save money; it costs money. Anyone that has built anything – anyone that has done anything when it comes to business – knows that if you do not finish what you start, you end up paying more. That is the price of this government – 32 major projects all on ice, with no idea when they are going to start again.

We have got $70 billion in contingency funds – no idea what that is for. One would suggest it is to help the Deputy Premier advance to the premiership and take over from Daniel Andrews when he has had enough. Who knows what it is for. But ultimately what we need to do is have some certainty. There is no certainty here. We have got the Commonwealth Games, which are meant to create legacy projects in regional Victoria. That was the reason why we were doing this, to create legacy projects. There is no legacy here. The only legacy the Andrews Labor government is leaving is a bankrupt state, a state that will be broke thanks to this government and their mismanagement.

This is not a good budget; this is a dud budget. I think nobody has seen a budget so poor before in what this budget does not provide. You look at the very, very basics of Labor’s rent tax. We hear time and time again about the housing crisis and affordability. Again, people cannot afford a home to buy, let alone a house or an apartment to rent. You have got waiting lists. You have a house that is open for rent, and there are queues around the block trying to get in. And what does this government do – they say, ‘No worries at all. We’ve got a solution here. We’re going to provide another tax on any kind of investment properties to get people into the market to build more stock. We don’t want to do any of that; we want to stop more homes being built and more apartments being built and reduce supply to make it even harder for people to get into a home – or better still, if they do get in, they’re going to be paying more.’

This does not do anything in terms of creating housing affordability – absolutely not. It does the opposite. Renters are already doing it really tough. The last thing they need is more tax. The last thing they need is more price hikes on anything that they might want to get into. It is so tough in terms of cost of living already. There are so many hits when it comes to what each and every Victorian is facing: when it comes to our energy bills, when it comes to groceries, when it comes to anything – building costs – the whole lot is absolutely next-level bad here in Victoria.

So you would hope, and you would have hoped, that the government would have actually taken this budget as an opportunity – not an opportunity to tax people more but an opportunity to provide confidence to grow an economy. This does none of that. It does none of that for any hardworking Victorian that wants to do better for themselves, for their family. We do not put those people on a pedestal anymore. We do not turn around and say, ‘Isn’t that great? I want to work like that.’ Any one of those university students that are going out there to get themselves a degree, to get themselves a job, to do better – we do not want any of that under an Andrews Labor government. Instead we want to tax them. We want to actually hurt them and we want to say to them, ‘Bad luck, Charlie, there’s nothing in it for you.’ At the end of the day, everyone is going to pay more taxes, everyone is going to have to bear the burden. At the end of the day, it would be okay if we were reducing debt; we are increasing debt, and who pays? Our kids, our grandkids and further generations. It is a terrible budget – a budget that hurts all Victorians.

Iwan WALTERS (Greenvale) (17:11): It is a pleasure to rise to contribute to this debate and to follow the last but one speaker, my colleague and friend the member for Point Cook, who I think gave a beautiful exposition about what this budget is and what a budget represents in terms of a government’s priorities and its commitments to the people of this state. He talked compellingly about what this budget means for his community in Point Cook. I intend to do likewise in terms of this budget’s impact and contribution to development in my community in Greenvale, which shares some similarities with that of the member for Point Cook in being a rapidly growing part of Melbourne with a real need for government support for infrastructure like roads, like new schools, like the amenity that communities in growing areas need and want and deserve.

Before I get to that, I want to talk about just some of the measures on the revenue side of the ledger. Before I do that, I will just acknowledge that some of the revenue measures related to the budget are contained within the State Taxation Acts Amendment Bill 2023, but one cannot consider the appropriation bills and the investment decisions of this government without reference to how Victorian taxpayers, who I respect deeply and who this government respects deeply, are supporting the investment decisions contained within the budget.

A cornerstone of the budget on the revenue side of the ledger, as the Treasurer alluded to in his ministerial statement earlier, is a landmark reform to abolish stamp duty for commercial and industrial properties, boosting business growth and expansion across our state. This is effective, efficient, productivity-enhancing tax reform that will deliver for Victorians. Indeed the cumulative increase in the size of the Victorian economy as a result of this reform is up to $50 billion in net present value terms. As a result of these changes, the lump sum stamp duty system for commercial industrial properties will transition to a much more efficient annual property tax from 1 July 2024 to help businesses expand and create new jobs.

It has been interesting to note some of the more fevered commentary from our friends in the fourth estate over the weekend and indeed from the contributions from some of those opposite today about this government’s relationship with business, especially when one contrasts it with the facts. I will just quote that noted socialist and opponent of business the Victorian Chamber of Commerce and Industry CEO Paul Guerra:

The Victorian Chamber has been working with the State Government on this landmark and generational productivity reform which businesses across Victoria will welcome.

This is exactly the type of progressive tax reform that is required to free up stamp duty charges which will accelerate building upgrades, stimulate investment in commercial property and free up more capital.

What he means when he says ‘free up more capital’ is free up more capital for investment in those productivity-enhancing things that Victorians depend upon. And it will – it is a reform that will remove barriers to larger investments, accelerate business growth and help our economy grow stronger by enabling businesses to move or start up closer to where their customers are or their suppliers are based, cutting costs, making supply chains more efficient and increasing the value of economic activity in our state: the thing that ultimately job creation, business investment and the revenues of this government depend upon. That is the type of economic activity which supports this budget’s investment in the future, and nothing is more significant for the future of Victorians than education and training.

This is a budget, as the member for Point Cook mentioned in terms of his electorate, that invests in schools and school infrastructure. The reason it does that is because it is building the Education State. The previous speaker, the member for Caulfield, questioned what the Education State looks like. I do not question it. I do not think any member on our side of the house questions that, because we know what it looks like. I know what it looks like, having been a teacher in our schools under the previous Liberal government, an era where school investment atrophied, where quality declined, where there was a lack of focus on education and its enabling role in the success of Victorians in the future. This government is not about that. We are about investing in the future via education, because that is what is going to equip Victorians now and into the future for the jobs of a growing, globalising and technology-integrated economy.

I want to talk about a couple of the incredibly positive announcements in this budget that my community is incredibly excited about. Greenvale Secondary College, which I was privileged to be at the opening of just last year, is already catering to several hundred students in my community. It is a school that has been talked about for decades, but those opposite when they had their chance in government did not get on and build it. This Andrews Labor government has built the Greenvale Secondary College. It is a beautiful building. It has a great culture led by principal Mark Natoli, and I salute him and I salute the teachers of that school for the culture they have built with the first generation of students coming through, and the school council presidents past and present who have advocated to me and to this government so strongly to secure the next stage of funding – $22.38 million that is going to transform education locally, making sure that students from year 7 to year 12 in Greenvale have outstanding, world-class facilities in which to learn, to thrive and to grow. I contrast that with the kinds of facilities that I taught in, and I know there are teachers around this house who can possibly attest to this as well, which were decrepit by comparison. That is what the Education State looks like: quality educational infrastructure that enables students to have an outstanding education regardless of where they are in this state.

Indeed another investment in that vein is $10.5 million to upgrade Bethal Primary School in Meadow Heights. I salute principal Dave Warren and his team at Bethal Primary. They do an outstanding job educating children who have some high needs in many instances, some real need for educational support and the opportunities that education can provide. This government takes that seriously, and I have been really overwhelmed by the commitment that teachers at that school have towards their students – their investment in students – because of their recognition of what their work and what a good education can mean for the life opportunities of students at that school.

But it does not stop there. No, there is more: $5 million for the next stage of the Mary Queen of Heaven campus development in Greenvale, a fantastic school led by principal Renae and a wonderful, dedicated team of caring teachers. I was deeply privileged to represent the Minister for Education at the opening of Mary Queen of Heaven just last month, and it is extraordinary to think that there will be another phase of that campus being developed very soon because of the investment by this government, making sure that wherever parents choose to educate their children they are supported in that choice – we recognise the value of faith schools like Mary Queen of Heaven to provide an outstanding education in the tradition that their parents seek for them.

It does not stop with school education, though. TAFE and training are essential ingredients in the future prosperity of Victoria and the opportunities that individual Victorians enjoy. We have put more than 70 courses on the free TAFE list, helping more Victorians get the skills that they need for the jobs that they want and the new jobs that are being created in our dynamic economy. It used to be very hard for Victorians with higher qualifications to access a subsidised TAFE course. That is the sort of barrier to training that stymies productivity, restrains growth and means that people are not able to access the jobs that fit their needs, their interests and their talents and skills best. We got rid of that, and it is really important for improving the flexibility and the productivity of our labour force. We are addressing skill shortages and giving Victorians the first chance to get new jobs in emerging areas of our economy.

In this budget in particular we will invest $186 million to expand the eligibility criteria for subsidised training courses, $90 million to meet the expected demand for training while providing additional literacy, numeracy and digital skills for free TAFE students – isn’t that fantastic – and $90 million for TAFEs to continue to provide the priority skills and job placement support, to improve wellbeing and to maintain high-quality workforces. All of these investments contained within the appropriation bills we are currently debating build on previous investments that are having a massive impact in the training sector in my community, like the $60 million Health and Community Centre of Excellence at Kangan Institute in Broadmeadows, which I acknowledge to the member for Broadmeadows is technically located just outside my electorate, in hers, but serves an awful lot of people from the Greenvale electorate who really rely on that kind of facility. It is a new facility which will feature flexible learning spaces, laboratories and outdoor recreation spaces and house students in those really essential areas of our economy which are growing and where we have severe skills shortages, like aged care, mental health, disability, nursing, pathology, allied health and healthcare education services.

Training, skills, upskilling and ensuring that governments are working to equip Victorians to respond to economic change matter. My community remembers the recession of the 1990s, which was like an economic explosion for those in Melbourne’s north. I do note that those opposite were then occupying the Treasury benches, and the difference in the experience between what followed the 1990–91 recession and what followed the collapse of the automotive manufacturing industry in the north is instructive. In the early 1990s and through the 90s there were record levels of youth unemployment as firms cut back on training and apprenticeships, and the Kennett government was missing in action. Unemployment soared, and that resulted in permanent scarring – a generation, particularly of men, who were never able to find work again. That is why training and upskilling matters. It provides flexibility. It provides local people in my electorate with the tools and the skills they need to access those newer areas of the economy which are adding jobs so that those who are subject to the vagaries of economic change and technological transition are not thrown on the scrap heap. That is not good enough. That is not acceptable to a Labor government, it is not acceptable to me and I do not think it is acceptable to Victorians, which is why we were returned at the last election to deliver this budget, which has such a profound and acute focus on skills and training. I thank the Minister for Training and Skills in the other place for her continued support for training and investment in my electorate.

It does not stop there, though. Health is a cornerstone of this budget in the appropriation bills we are discussing, which include $320 million to support the construction of new emergency departments at the Northern Hospital and the Austin Hospital. The Northern has the busiest ED in Victoria and the Austin the fourth biggest. There are 109,000 ED presentations at the Northern every year, and given population growth in my part of Melbourne – and I can see other members who are based in the north; the member for Sunbury knows it very well – it is a growing area with a real need for world-class health services which cater to that growth. That is why we are investing in those quality ED facilities. These upgrades matter to my community. It is all part of our $1 billion hospital plan for the north, which is about securing great care closer to home for residents in Greenvale. We have invested more than $12 billion in health infrastructure since we came to office in building the health facilities Victorians need, and we are doing more of that now.

I do note that this is also a budget that places the health care of women at its centre, with $58 million to help deliver a women’s health clinic at the Northern Hospital, part of an overall budget appropriation of $153.9 million, which will change the way that women’s health issues are treated, providing care and support for conditions like endometriosis, pelvic pain, polycystic ovary syndrome, perimenopause and menopause. As someone who is very privileged to live with a female clinician who works in our public hospital system looking after some pretty sick people with cancer and other blood conditions at the Royal Children’s and Peter Mac, I am incredibly proud of this government’s continued investment in health and that bounce back from COVID, ensuring that Victorians, wherever they live, are able to access those quality healthcare services that a civilised society depends upon and that Victorians rightfully expect.

I also just want to note in the time that is remaining to me that the bills we are discussing today also include an appropriation for the Parliament. As the chair of the Scrutiny of Acts and Regulations Committee I want to acknowledge that the funding in these appropriations supports the work of our parliamentary staff and to thank them for the work that they do to uphold the capacity of every parliamentarian to serve their constituents and to uphold Victorian democracy. That is particularly the case through a body like SARC, which is charged with scrutinising bills, scrutinising ministerial regulations and holding government to account in a bipartisan and independent manner. That is impossible without the professional, diligent, dedicated and expert support that the secretariat, led by Helen Mason, provide, so I take this opportunity to thank them and note that the appropriation today will support that work into the future.

In closing, I also note that the budget bill we are discussing today includes $400,000 as part of a $13.2 million commitment to support dog parks across Victoria. I was privileged to be at the Broadmeadows Valley dog park in Meadow Heights with the Minister for Environment just last Friday, and the rather put-upon 11-month-old labrador that occupies my house came with us to announce this $400,000 funding. This is the sort of thing that makes a difference to a growing community – $400,000 does support, as the member for Point Cook said before, the kind of amenity that councils often roll out, but it is the sort of thing where state government, with a relatively small amount of money, can really make a difference with the kind of amenity that a growing community wants and deserves. With that I thank the house for its time and commend these bills to the house.

Michael O’BRIEN (Malvern) (17:26): It is one thing for the Andrews Labor government to send Victoria woke, but it is another thing when they send us broke. And that is what this budget is doing: this budget is sending Victoria broke. This budget will make the lives of so many Victorians harder in a time when the cost of living is already pushing many families to the brink, and what is so desperately unfair is that it is ordinary Victorian households that will have to pay the price for this government’s economic incompetence. Parents and students will be smashed by a new schools tax. Renters will be punished with a new renters tax. Small business, the engine room of our economy, our jobs engine room, will be smashed by a 42 per cent hike in WorkCover premiums, and a generation of young Victorians will be punished with the dead weight of Labor government debt that they are going to have to carry throughout their lives. This generation are going to miss out on opportunities that should be theirs, because this government has conscripted them to pay for Labor’s reckless spending and Labor’s reckless waste.

George Orwell’s famous dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was written as a warning, but I wonder if this Labor government has not regarded it as a manual. Apart from the ugly, authoritarian manner in which this government treats individual rights, the misuse of language in this budget is straight out of newspeak. This is a budget that Labor says will tackle debt but sees debt increase, a budget Labor says will grow the economy but which sees unemployment rise, a budget Labor says will trim the public service but which sees the state wages bill blow out. This is all against a backdrop where on 25 May the Essential Services Commission under this government announced a 25 per cent hike in power bills for the forthcoming year from 1 July. More taxes, more charges, more debt, more pain – that is the message from this budget.

Let us have a look at some of the metrics. I flag now I am not going to be discussing my own electorate a lot in this contribution; I will do that at another opportunity. But to be honest, it will not take me long to discuss the impact of this budget on my electorate, because none of my schools get a cracker – not one. None of my infrastructure funding bids get looked after – no level crossing removals in my electorate, no sporting grounds supported in my electorate. It will not take very long at all.

Let us look at debt, and the starting point is when this government was elected, which was 2014–15, and I was the outgoing Treasurer. I bequeathed to this government a set of books that had net state debt at $21.8 billion. The budget now says that next year it is going to be $135.4 billion, and by the end of the budget cycle, at the end of the forward estimates, 2026–27, it will be $171.4 billion. So from the time this government was elected to the end of this budget period the government will have increased Victoria’s debt by $150 billion – ‘billion’ with a B.

No wonder we have got worse debt than Queensland, New South Wales and Tasmania combined. And you cannot just wish that away. You cannot say, ‘We’ve had our fun; we’ve had our party. We’ve spent all our money. We’ve had our cost blowouts. Someone else will clean up the mess.’ No, young Victorians are going to be left to clean up this government’s mess, and it is going to take generations to pay it back. I think one of the more interesting newspaper headlines I saw a little while ago had a picture of the Premier on it, and the headline was ‘Forever in his debt’. That pretty much sums it up, because this state and younger generations of this state will be forever in the debt caused by Daniel Andrews – by the Premier – and his government and MPs.

The debt is in a horrific position, and it is not as though we have any assets that could be sold off to pay it down. This government has tried. They sold off the Port of Melbourne – they spent all that. They sold off Victoria’s share of Snowy Hydro – they have spent all that. The sold off the land titles office – they spent all that. Now they have sold off the registration and licensing functions of VicRoads. It is great that the great socialist comrades on the other side have been the biggest privatisers since Kennett and Stockdale. They love a good sale. Apparently when they do it, it is okay, but when any other government did it, it was really bad. The sale of VicRoads’s registration and licensing functions we will be debating later on, so I will not foreshadow that, but we will be debating the creation of a future fund. Can I just say that when Peter Costello and the federal coalition government created the national future fund it was because they had paid off the Australian government’s entire net debt. Every single dollar of net debt had been paid off. This government has put this state in a position of indebtedness that we have never seen before. Treasurer Pallas is making Joan Kirner look like Scrooge McDuck – absolutely unbelievable. Actually it is probably the other way round – it is probably Scrooge rather than Scrooge McDuck. You get the point.

A member: There’s no duck about it.

Michael O’BRIEN: There is no duck, no ducking way. The debt is in a horrific position, and this has of course led to our credit rating being shot down. When I handed over the books to Mr Pallas we had a stable AAA credit rating from both ratings agencies. We have now been downgraded not once but twice. We have now gone from AAA stable to AA. What does that mean? It means we have to pay higher interest rates. It means we are not as safe a government to buy a bond from, so accordingly you have to charge higher interest rates to attract those people to buy your bonds. So we are paying higher interest rates because this government has blown the AAA credit rating, and the Premier and the Treasurer have just as much admitted we are not going to get it back anytime soon.

This government talks about jobs – great Labor government. ‘We love talking about jobs,’ they say. In that case, why is this budget forecasting unemployment to rise? If this is such a good budget for jobs, why is unemployment going from 4.25 per cent next year, which is an increase, to 4.75 per cent at the end of the forward estimates in 2026–27?

Michaela Settle: It’s still lower than when you were in.

Michael O’BRIEN: Victoria created more jobs than any state in the country under the last coalition government, member for Eureka – more jobs than any state in the country – and unlike Labor’s budget papers, the ABS does not lie. So debt is going up, unemployment is going up – what is happening to wages? This is a government that believes in good wage increases. Actually the wage price index for 2023–24 is 3.5 per cent. By the end of the forward estimates, in 2026–27, it is down to 3.25 per cent, so in fact your increase in wages is actually falling. So we have got more debt, more unemployment and wage growth is falling. That is sounding pretty good so far, isn’t it, Shadow Treasurer? What is business saying about that? I refer to an article in the Herald Sun online under the heading ‘Daniel Andrews’ $1billion Victorian payroll tax hike “will hit wage rises”’, which says:

Nearly $1bn a year in new Victorian payroll taxes will make it harder to put up workers’ pay across the state, with the funds instead set to go propping up the Andrews government budget, Wesfarmers chief executive Rob Scott has warned.

…

Wesfarmers has more than 30,000 employees in the state across retail brands Bunnings, Kmart, Target and Officeworks and Priceline.

The article goes on to say:

What’s happened as a result of increasing payroll tax is that it’s just made it harder for Victorian businesses to pull wages up, because Victorian businesses are now having to allocate a billion dollars extra to the Victorian government.

So this government is taking wage rises out of the pockets of workers to fill its own coffers, because it cannot manage the budget. What is happening to our interest bill on all that debt? Well, money does not come free. It might come as a surprise to some of those members opposite, but you cannot just print money. You have actually got to start paying it back, and you have to pay interest until you do pay it back. When Labor inherited the best set of financial books in the country of any state in 2014–15, the interest bill was $2.1 billion. What is it going to be next year? $5.6 billion, rising to $8 billion in 2026–27. That is $22 million a day every single day. Go to any member here and ask them what $22 million could do for their community – what it could do for their local schools, what it could do for their local community groups, what it could do for their neighbourhood house, what it could do for their SES or their Fire Rescue Victoria or their CFA and what it could do for sporting facilities and local sporting clubs. Just one single day of Labor government interest on debt could transform so many communities. But no, it is going down the drain to pay the interest bill on the outrageous debt of a profligate Labor government. So that is where we are: debt is up.

Michaela Settle interjected.

Michael O’BRIEN: This is a point, member for Eureka: read your own budget papers. Your debt is going up, not down. Taxes are up, debt is up, credit ratings down, unemployment up, wage increases are falling and interest bills are up. On taxation, if we go from when they inherited the books, $17.9 billion was state taxation, rising to $34.9 billion next year and then $40.4 billion. They will have gone from inheriting a situation where the state tax burden was $17.9 billion – let us just call it $18 billion; we will be generous and round it up – so $18 billion when I handed them over. It is going to be $40 billion in 2026–27.

Roma Britnell: Double.

Michael O’BRIEN: More than double. And what does that mean? They might say, ‘Look, we’ve grown the economy, so maybe the tax burden has actually fallen as a proportion of the economy.’ That would not be the case, Shadow Treasurer, because in 2014–15 at the election the tax to gross state product ratio was 4.8 per cent. It is now 5.8 per cent. It has gone from 4.8 per cent to 5.8 per cent – the worst in the country. It is the worst debt of any state in the country, the worst tax burden of any state in the country, with rising unemployment and rising interest payments, but the government says, ‘No, we’ve been very responsible in this budget. We’re going to trim the public service. We’re going to cut 4000 public service jobs.’

A member interjected.

Michael O’BRIEN: Well, you would think there would be a big reduction in public sector wages to reflect this big trimming that the government seems to be so proud of. In fact the public sector wages bill is going up by $3 billion across the forward estimates. So only a Labor government could manage to actually sack 4000 public servants but wind up paying the rest of them $3 billion more. That is an extraordinary outcome. Again, just as a point of comparison, the public sector wages bill in 2014–15 was $18.5 billion. By 2026–27 it will be $38.3 billion. So they will have more than doubled it – $20 billion extra. But look, all those spin doctors and all those new agencies and authorities and putting all those former political staffers into public service roles does not come cheap, member for South-West Coast. They have got to do it. So you have got a situation where you have got more debt, more taxes, higher unemployment, higher interest payments and a blowout of the public sector wages bill. And what is the message for young people? The Premier gave an interview to the Guardian newspaper a little while back, and he was asked about young people and their interest in owning a home. This is what he said:

… ownership is not such a big thing. They are happy to rent …

So I challenge members of the government who are in the chamber today to go back to their own electorates on Thursday and go and speak to young people. You go and ask them: are you happy to rent all your life? Do you really want to give up on the great Australian dream of home ownership? Because the trouble is this Labor government wants citizens to be clients. They do not want people to actually be able to own a home or have a small business. They want them to be constantly clients and dependent on government. That is why they believe that they are entitled to more of their taxes, because ‘We will look after them’. Well, they do not look after them – they do not look after them at all. They are taking more, they are getting less, they are going slower and they are deeper in debt. This is a budget where this government’s chickens have come home to roost. Nine years of appalling economic management, of waste, is now being accounted for. The saddest thing is it is not the members sitting here who will be paying the bills, it is going to be the kids who will not get the chance to go to an independent school that reflects their family’s values – they will not be able to do it. It will be the small businesses closed down because of the extra taxes and charges. It will be the renters paying higher rents. They are the real victims of this budget, and those opposite are responsible for every one of them.

Kat THEOPHANOUS (Northcote) (17:41): I rise to speak in support of Labor’s state budget, a budget that looks after people, looks after our future and does what we said we would do. Outlined in these appropriation bills is our plan to grow jobs, to strengthen our economy and to deliver the services, supports and projects that matter to Victorians. It is a plan that we took to the Victorian people last year: a plan for better hospitals, world-class schools, the road and rail our growing state needs and a bright, sustainable state now and into the future. We have not wasted a moment getting cracking on all of this. Our budget funds every election commitment we made. It continues to address the challenges that Victorians across our communities are facing, and it puts in place the responsible targeted measures we need to stabilise our budget following the pandemic.

Speaking to residents in my own community of Northcote, many with small businesses, many in insecure work and housing, many working on the front lines of our health system, the overwhelming sentiment has been that our government acted decisively to save businesses, save jobs and save lives – actions which did not come without cost but which were necessary. I have heard those opposite continually take digs at these measures, and we all witnessed and saw their tactics during the very depths of the pandemic. How did that work out for them?

A member: Very badly.

Kat THEOPHANOUS: Thank you. I mean, seriously, God help us if they are the ones left to make the decisions, those difficult decisions that need to be made to protect Victorians in our time of need. The truth is that the Victorian economy has recovered following the pandemic and jobs growth has been strong. But we are now facing the pressure of high inflation and rising interest rates. That is why addressing cost of living forms a critical component of our budget, exemplified perhaps most dramatically through our investment in the State Electricity Commission. Many Victorians remember with fondness the SEC. It meant a fair deal on your power prices and good, stable jobs for workers. That is why Labor is bringing it back – to drive down power bills and create thousands of jobs in renewable government-owned energy. An initial $1 billion investment in the SEC will deliver 4.5 gigawatts of power – the equivalent replacement capacity of Loy Yang A – through renewable energy projects. But bringing back the SEC will not just mean more renewable energy, lower bills and reduced carbon emissions, it will also create 59,000 jobs – jobs that are secure and meaningful, jobs that mean being able to support a family. I cannot overstate the amount of enthusiasm and excitement for the SEC there is in my community and how many conversations I have had with constituents about the possibilities that this opens up for Victoria, and now with this budget we are delivering the funding to make it a reality.

From our very youngest Victorians, who have just been born, to those now in retirement, this is a budget that is carefully designed for Victorians at all stages of life. In my electorate I am incredibly proud that we are investing $15 million to deliver a new Northcote early parenting centre, where local parents – and their children – will be able to access the crucial support they need in those first years of becoming a parent. Because parenting can be tough – really tough. At Northcote’s future early parenting centre, families will be able to come and stay in their own private rooms and get the care they need for free. Over several days and nights highly skilled practitioners will work with them on strategies to support them and their child, tailored to their unique needs. Whether it is sleep and settling, feeding, bonding, mental health or positive parenting, the multidisciplinary team will be there to support them and build skills and confidence. It is an extraordinarily successful model – one that I have seen up close at Footscray’s Tweddle and one that as the member for Northcote I have fought to be made available to families in the inner north. We know that the first thousand days are critical to the development and wellbeing of babies and toddlers and to the bond and connection they have with their families. To all the local parents and organisations who have been passionate partners on that journey with me, thank you.

This is just one aspect of how our budget supports families and children. Our budget also funds landmark reforms like free kinder and 50 new government-owned childcare centres – reforms that not only give kinder kids the best start in life but give parents and especially mums the choice to go back to work or study without facing the prohibitive cost of care. Whether it is kinder, primary school, secondary school or TAFE, our government believes deeply and fundamentally in the value and opportunity of a great education. In my first term here in Parliament I made it my mission to ensure that local schools in my community saw the investment they needed. I am so proud to say that since 2018 we have seen over $100 million invested across schools and kinders in the inner north and that we are continuing this momentum with funding in this budget to kickstart planning on a major modernisation of Thornbury Primary. It is an exciting time for this unique little school in the heart of our suburbs as they have also just completed their inclusive playground and finalised designs for a major bathroom refurb. I cannot wait to see the heights that they get to with this new investment.

As students grow I believe the most important thing we can provide them with is genuine pathways. It gives me great heart to know that the students of Northcote High, Thornbury High and other schools in the inner north will have access to new clean energy VET pathways, clean energy worker training centres and an SEC centre of training excellence to develop the skills and secure jobs our workforce needs as we become a renewable energy powerhouse. And to grow the workforce of the future for essential sectors such as health care, we are expanding free TAFE and incentivising priority courses like nursing and midwifery. Indeed through this budget we will be able to provide free university and specialist training for over 17,000 nurses and midwives. We do all this for two key reasons: (1) because we said we would and (2) because our government knows that calling ourselves the Education State is a commitment that never stops. We know that investing in education builds a better future for all Victorians.

As Victoria’s first Parliamentary Secretary for Women’s Health, I am honoured to be working with our fantastic Minister for Health on the critical reforms in women’s health that are coming, and I want to touch on them for a moment. Women and girls make up more than half of our population, yet for too long our health has been under-researched, under-diagnosed and left untreated. Whether it is debilitating period pain, endometriosis, PCOS, rheumatoid arthritis or the symptoms of menopause, not being understood, not being taken seriously or not being believed is trauma in itself. No woman should have to go through that kind of trauma simply for seeking care.

This week we took a major step forward in our work to transform the way we treat women’s health in Victoria with our Labor budget committing $154 million to dramatically expand and improve services. This builds on the important investments we have already made, including funding Victoria’s first clinic focused on women’s heart health and our state’s first ever sexual and reproductive health phone line. I am thrilled to share that this budget includes funding to establish 20 comprehensive women’s health clinics across our state. They will provide free, comprehensive care to support Victorians experiencing conditions like endometriosis, pelvic pain, PCOS, perimenopause and menopause.

These clinics will give women access to specialists, including gynaecologists and urologists, alongside specialist nursing and allied health support all in one spot, making it easier and faster to access the world-class care that women deserve. Just last weekend I joined the Premier and the Minister for Health at the Royal Women’s Hospital, where their women’s clinic will increase from one day a week to five days a week. We heard from Endo Warriors’ Kat Stanley and Northcote local Fi Macrae, who shared their long and difficult journeys towards diagnosis and treatment and how much these reforms will mean to generations of Victorian women and girls.

The budget not only invests in these 20 women’s health clinics but includes an Aboriginal-led clinic and a mobile clinic for remote communities. There will be an expansion of our sexual and reproductive health hubs from 11 to 20. We are supporting the creation of a women’s health research institute to bridge the knowledge gap on women’s health and an inquiry into women’s pain management to hear directly from Victorian women about improving patient care. There will be over 10,000 additional laparoscopies to treat debilitating endometriosis, more support for women to access public fertility care and free pads and tampons in public places. This is a budget for women.

These are just some of the enormous reforms that will make a real difference to Victorian lives, yet they do not happen without our hardworking health workforce. That is why our budget also invests another $150 million to increase support for nurses and midwives, a female-dominated workforce heavily affected by stress, fatigue and burnout. It is just one part of our $4.9 billion investment into our health system more broadly, including upgrades at the Northern and Austin hospitals as part of our hospital plan for the north.

I want to speak about mental health for a moment. Since the royal commission we have been getting on with the job of building a modern, accessible mental health system for every Victorian. Now I can say that Northcote will be a key part of that story, with a commitment for a Northcote mental health and wellbeing local service as part of this budget. This will be a front door to public mental health services. It will mean free, easy-to-access care and support without necessarily needing a referral from a GP, which can be difficult at the best of times. I am so proud to have fought for this for the inner north consistently over the last four years, and to see it now funded and becoming a reality is a little bit surreal. I know how much this will mean to people living in my community who are struggling or to families trying to support their loved ones. We all know someone who has dealt with mental health issues. This is something that pervades our community, and now Northcote locals will have a service that they can rely on. There is nothing more important than getting the care you need when you need it.

There are so many wonderful things in the budget for the inner north, and perhaps I cannot get to them all, but there is funding in the budget for sports infrastructure, for clubs like Northcote City Football Club, for their facilities at John Cain Memorial Park. The Premier came down to John Cain Memorial Park during the election campaign and spoke with the club and made a commitment that we would fund their club for $500,000 for female-friendly facilities that they desperately need. They are a growing and popular club in the inner north. We have delivered in full through this budget on that commitment. I am very proud of that one, and I know how much it will mean to that community there. It was great to celebrate with them recently, actually last week, joining their women’s clinic, and I had a kick of the ball. I cannot say that my soccer skills are up there with Sam Kerr’s, but I had a crack, and it felt really good to be out there with other women having a go and getting involved, and this funding will absolutely make a difference to other women making that choice to get involved in this club.

We are also boosting our hardworking neighbourhood houses. We all know how much our neighbourhood houses do. They run on the smell of an oily rag, and yet they make it stretch and they pull in volunteers. We have got several in the inner north who are receiving funding through this budget to expand on their service offering to make sure they are reaching the most vulnerable people in our communities. Those things make a real difference, and while it might not be millions of dollars, it is funding that these community organisations are using for the betterment of the people that need it right there in our suburbs. I want to thank Jika Jika Community Centre, Bridge Darebin and the Alphington Community Centre. I also want to acknowledge that we have got funding in the budget for people experiencing family violence. We have got funding for our multicultural and multifaith communities.

We have got funding for open spaces like the Merri Common, which is a piece of land next to Merri station. This piece of land needs an uplift, and we have funded a $1.5 million uplift to this piece of land next to Merri station so that the community can use it better. We will be consulting very closely with our neighbours around that patch to get the very best outcome for that one.

We are also funding more protections for our beautiful, precious waterways, the Darebin Creek and the Merri Creek, through a $10 million fund. That will be important funding to ensure that they thrive, that we can regenerate them and that we can ensure that the friendship groups that support those creeks have the resources they need to continue doing the job that they do. We have got funding for a neighbourhood battery in Darebin, which I am very excited about, and we will have more to say on that very soon.

These investments into our state and into our future are critically important. They are the things that matter. They are the things that we promised to Victorians. They mean we can continue the momentum, delivering a brighter future for the inner north not with words but with real action. I commend these bills to the house.

Tim BULL (Gippsland East) (17:56): It is a pleasure to rise and make my contribution on the budget bills. I want to get straight into the biggest issue in my electorate, and that is the closure of the timber industry by the end of this year and the devastating impact that that will have on a large number of communities in my electorate. It is a decision that this government must reverse. Having had a quick Hansard search, over the last four years I have spoken around 20 times in support of the timber industry and lodged more than 60 questions on behalf of workers and the sector. Many of these have been the result of a lack of support for this sector. The reality is that this government has been making life very, very hard for this industry for quite some time – for its workers, for its families. Pretty much ever since this government came to office it has declared war on the timber industry. Now it has made the decision that it wants to kill it, and regional Victorians are punished yet again by this government.

But the worst part of this decision is that it was made on budget morning. There was no forewarning; there was no heads-up to these timber workers, no heads-up to these families. In fact what they were led to believe pre budget and pre election was that this industry would be supported by this government until 2030, and then with a snap of the fingers, ‘You’re out of work in six months’. The previous speaker, the member for Northcote, just got up and spoke about the importance of mental health. How do you look after the mental health of timber workers when you tell them they are going to be out of a job in six months? It is an absolute disgrace. It was a heartless ambush of these timber families and these timber communities – no forewarning, no detail, just a simple whack. With a distinct lack of information or any detail even followed up in the days since, this has left timber workers and their families in disarray. They are very angry. It is not just my electorate of Gippsland East. The member for Gippsland South here, the member for Morwell, the member for Narracan – they are all going to be deeply impacted by this, the families in all of those electorates.

But looking beyond the jobs just for a moment and looking beyond the impact on our timber communities, there is an issue here about responsibility. There is a reality that the government and the Greens will not want to hear, and I want to put it down in two points. The first one is just on 95 per cent of our current imported hardwood timber comes from countries with less oversight and less safeguards than our Victorian industry; 95 per cent of our hardwood imports now come from countries with less oversight. The second point I want to make is that consumer demand for hardwood is going through the roof. It is going through the roof because it is the building product that is recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It is the building product that is recommended by Planet Ark, who are telling us to ‘Do the world some good, build it with wood’. Consumers listen to that message. Those agencies that are telling us what we have got to do to combat climate change tell us to build with wood. So our consumers go out and they purchase their hardwood flooring. They purchase furniture made out of hardwood. They have their doors, they get their stairwells – they choose hardwood timber because the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Planet Ark tell them it is the right thing to do. In relation to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, not only do they say to use hardwood, but they actually specifically recommend using plantation timber and they recommend sustainable harvesting of our forests. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says we should sustainably harvest our forests – no ifs, no buts. That is it, that is there. It is mentioned multiple times.

So I pose this question to the government members: with community demand for hardwood increasing because we are told to use it and 95 per cent of our hardwood imports coming from countries that have less oversights, where are we going to get our hardwood from when we close our Victorian native hardwood timber industry? Where is the environmental responsibility from a global perspective that we are therefore doing the right thing? Where is the common sense? As consumers we are going to keep buying these hardwood products because we are told to buy hardwood products – ‘it is the right thing to do’ – but it will be sourced from countries with less oversight. So in fact what we have done here in Victoria is this government has made a decision that goes against the IPCC, and it goes against all rational thinking about doing the right thing. A number of times not only myself but fellow members in this chamber have asked this government, ‘Where is our hardwood going to come from? Is it going to come from Malaysia? Is it going to come from Papua New Guinea? How is that a better outcome when they have less oversights in those countries?’ It is absolutely nonsensical.

We know it is not going to come from plantation, and I will tell you why. The smoke and mirrors that this government put forward when it was negotiating with the timber industry was that we would transition to hardwood plantation by 2030. But when we asked the minister repeatedly to show us where these plantations are, because if we going to transition by 2030 those plantations should be 15- to 20-years-old now, do you know what the answer was? They could not tell us where they were. The minister finally conceded that those plantations of hardwood did not exist. It was all smoke and mirrors. There was no intention to transition to hardwood because it simply was not there.

But even so and taking that into account, last week’s announcement and the way it was done was cruel and it was heartless. And how did the government try and sell it? Well, we had Ms Shing in the other place coming out and saying, ‘We’re doing this because we care about timber workers and we want to give you certainty.’ That was what she said. I mean, is she absolutely serious? The first thing that Ms Shing could do if she cared about the mental health of timber workers is not spring this on unsuspecting families with absolutely no notice. That would be the first thing you might like to try and do. Do not spring this on people and then say you care, like Ms Shing did. It is an oxymoron. It is a complete contradiction.

If she is genuinely concerned about the welfare of these timber workers, I would hope that she would organise meetings in each of the timber towns – start at Orbost, Swifts Creek, Yarram, Heyfield, Morwell and even the mills in Bairnsdale. But I tell you what, she will not do it. She went down and made the announcement that the timber industry was closing with the minister behind the shelter at a TAFE college. She will not front up and talk to these communities that she is meant to represent in her own electorate. She will just issue fluffy media statements saying she cares when her actions do not back it up. It is a disgrace. Her actions from here on in will determine how much she cares about these families, and I can tell you at the moment they see through her spin and her claptrap. Their immediate future is very, very concerning. These workers need answers. The government some time ago – I think it was about two years ago – made funds available through the forestry transition fund to employ project managers to manage the transition and the phase-out of the timber industry. They were to look at the real opportunities. They were to look at the new industries we were to transition to, the new jobs and what was going to drive the economies in these communities when the timber industry left.

Danny O’Brien: What are they?

Tim BULL: Well, the time has now come to show us. I saw a lot of information about workshops, and I saw some information about forums. Now is the time to show us where these replacement industries and jobs are going to come from. No more fluff – tell us how you are going to employ the more than 2000 timber industry workers with real jobs. Let us not have a repeat of what we had with the Hazelwood closure. We got promised an electric vehicle factory down there. That was duck eggs.

Danny O’Brien: 500 jobs.

Tim BULL: 500 jobs. That ended up in duck eggs. Then we were promised in Nowa Nowa, when the mill closed, a nursery, and Harriet was down there again patting herself on the back about how great she was that this nursery was being opened – all turned to dust. It is not happening. They have pulled the pin on that.

I want to take Orbost as one example of how a community is impacted. These are not our figures in the opposition. This is the Orbost chamber of commerce and industry that did some work a few years ago. Orbost has got 4000 people, and 40 per cent of that town’s employment was dependent on the timber industry. Forty per cent in a community of 4000 is dependent on the timber industry, and this government go down – when they have been promising ‘We’ll keep it going till 2030’ – and close it overnight. We have had calls from timber workers saying, ‘If my life insurance covered my mortgage, my wife and my family, I wouldn’t be here,’ because of the callousness of this government’s action. It is an absolute disgrace. It is a decision that needs to be reversed.

We also have a mental health crisis in this state. Time and time again I come into this chamber and I hear government members talking about mental health, and it is a critical issue. Absolutely it is a critical issue. Decisions like this, with no forewarning to those communities and those families, are not the actions of a government that is seriously keen on addressing that issue. That is going to create so many more mental health problems right across that sector. We talk about the mental health supports going in. People in Orbost are struggling to get mental health supports now in Swifts Creek and Heyfield. They have to travel. They are remote. They are not in the towns, and we get this line out in a press release. Where are people now in Orbost dealing with the mental health of those workers that they have just told that they are going by the wayside? It is not there, and these people are facing this incredible level of stress and hardship not knowing what their future holds. I have been talking to contractors that have borrowed $2 million for machinery, based on the commitment that their industry was going to be going till 2030, because you guys promised them it would, and then budget morning you tell them the rug is gone in six months, with a pathetic package that is not going to get them out of financial stress and hardship. It is a disgrace, and you need to have a look at this, you need to revisit this and you need to sort it out if you are serious about people’s mental health and you are serious about rural communities.

In my remaining little bit of time I just want to talk very briefly about the challenges we have got in our roads system, and we have got the Shadow Minister for Roads and Road Safety here. The crisis on our roads is getting worse and worse. Politics aside, our roads have never been worse. I had an RACV worker of 35 years experience write me a letter the other day saying the condition of our roads is going to start costing lives. He has never seen them so bad. So we pick up the budget papers, and we have a 25 per cent cut to the roads maintenance funding budget at a time when it needed a massive boost. This 25 per cent cut means we now have a $380 million reduction in roads maintenance funding since 2020. In a percentage figure that is 45 per cent of our roads maintenance funding cut, and our roads are absolutely appalling. When we have a government going into this level of debt that it is going into, we expect to see some outcomes for going into debt.

We would expect to see our roads improving, our health system solid and our mental health system solid, but we are incurring this debt without seeing any benefits for it. Not only that, but when the federal government announced its budget a short time ago, there was a $1.3 billion funding cut from the federal government to the state for roads. Not a word, not a peep – silence from the other side. If it had been a coalition federal government that had done that, you would have heard the bleating in Mallacoota. But no, not a word. This government goes to great lengths to make all of our cars roadworthy, but the reality of it is our roads are not car worthy at the present time.

From a local aspect, very briefly, there is nothing for the electorate – no Bairnsdale hospital, no Orbost or Maffra police station, no fire stations at Lakes Entrance and Metung, where they badly need them. We hope we get them soon, but there is just nothing there. We did not expect to get them all, but we would have liked to knock one or two off the list. But there is absolutely nothing. On the whole, headlined by the disgraceful decision on the timber industry, this has been an absolutely disastrous and hopeless budget for my electorate and regional Victoria.

Steve McGHIE (Melton) (18:11): I am proud to stand and talk about the Appropriation (2023–2024) Bill 2023 and Appropriation (Parliament 2023–2024) Bill 2023, and I would like to acknowledge the Treasurer, the Assistant Treasurer and their teams for their tireless work on yet another excellent Labor budget. Of course this is our first post-COVID era budget, and it is a budget for education, for transport and for health – and we are making jobs for Victorians along the way. We are providing what Victorians need now, and we are planning for the future. The Andrews Labor government is delivering for Victoria, and this budget is a fine demonstration of that. I am very proud to remind the house that we are funding every election commitment that we made leading up to the ‘Danslide’ last year. As I say, and I remind you again, that is every single election commitment, and I think it is an amazing effort to be able to do that in such circumstances as where things are with the economy.

This budget recognises that my electorate of Melton is one of the fastest growing electorates in the state, and through this budget we are supporting our future generations. Of course there are initiatives like free kinder, which is something I have always been passionate about – every child deserves the best start, no matter what and where they live or their family circumstances. Our government, the Andrews Labor government, is dedicated to the move to pre-prep, providing 30 hours of play-based learning by 2032. I was at Aspire early learning centre only about two weeks ago to participate in their reconciliation action plan day. It was fantastic. I commend and thank Stephanie, the person that runs Aspire there, and all of her committed staff for the work that they do with regard to that early learning centre and also for their commitment to the reconciliation action plan.

Looking towards our schools in Melton, Melton South Primary School, Toolern Vale and District Primary School and Kurunjang Secondary College are all receiving funding towards their planned upgrades. We made commitments prior to the election to upgrade all three of those schools, and I should say that they desperately need it. The planning will commence as soon as possible to start that process. Of course I am delighted to tell you about the big school of Melton, Melton Secondary College – and an excellent local school it is, with vastly growing enrolments. They deserve, like all of our schools, world-class facilities, and that is why we are providing $8.87 million to rebuild their block T and to provide them with a rugby pitch. I will come back to the importance of that rugby pitch later in regard to what it delivers for the students that have taken up rugby through the rugby academy at Melton Secondary College and what it has meant to them. It has changed their lives just in the last 18 months to two years since that has been going.

Our senior secondary education is about developing and realising every student’s potential. Not all pathways to VCE completion are the same. Education is complex, and in a lot of cases it needs to be tailored to the student, which is why we can be very proud that Melton Secondary College and their students are taking different pathways, and the reforms to that allow them to do so. That has all come about out of the Firth review in 2020. I commend the Minister for Education and indeed the Department of Education and Training for the incredible work they have done, and in such a short time, and for their oversight. It represents some of the biggest changes seen in this area in over 30 years since the inception of the VCE system.

I will come back to that rugby academy which I briefly touched on before. Through the partnership with the Melbourne Rebels, Tim Condon, who is one of the teachers there, and his team at Melton Secondary College have developed a rugby academy. I think previously it was developed out at Fountain Gate Secondary College. This has been an amazing concept to engage with Pacific Islander kids – and not just Pacific Islander kids, but about 80 per cent of them are from the Pacific Islands, or their parents are – to strengthen their engagement with academia through the sport of rugby. It has been an amazing outcome for those students, and the results, their academic achievements, have just gone through the roof. It is incredible, their engagement through rugby and their competitiveness, and some of them have gone on to the Melbourne Rebels – boys and girls, not just the boys – so it is a great achievement. I know that the Melbourne Rebels were in here a couple of weeks ago talking about the rugby academy and trying to expand it to other schools, and if any other members are interested in that program I encourage them to get involved, because it has been fantastic for those kids and those families and for the schools.

A member: It has changed lives.

Steve McGHIE: It has changed lives, that is right.

Melton Secondary College is a school that we can be very proud of, and the previous principal Mr David Reynolds had a lot to do with the growth of the school – and I should say I commend him; he retired at the end of the last school year. David was there for many, many years, and he was a fantastic principal. Now the new principal Kathryn Sobey has also noted a higher percentage of year 12 completions because of the rugby academy. These are wonderful outcomes that benefit all of the school, the kids and Victoria in the longer term, and it is fantastic for us. As I said, it allows for boys and girls to participate, and again – he was here a couple of weeks ago – I want to thank Jimmy Orange for setting up this program and for the hard work that he has done through the Melbourne Rebels. It is a great initiative. It is transformative for our community and many other communities that will take this on, and I just say, ‘Game on, Rebels’ and congratulations to them.

Of course in the budget there are many other things about additional schools. The Andrews Labor government is funding $169 million to help cover the cost of school excursions, camps and sporting activities for students in need, and we know how important it is for a school year to have these events. There is $105 million to continue school breakfast programs, affordable school uniforms and glasses for kids. Again, they are essential items, and if feeding a child is not important before they start a day’s schoolwork, then I do not know what is. We are ensuring that no child misses out. We are making sure that kids can go on camps and excursions, that they do not need to miss out on important educational pieces because of difficult financial situations at home.

Continuing to talk about schools, we can talk about independent and Catholic schools, and we have some in Melton. In the budget we have set aside $450 million towards building and upgrading low-fee independent and Catholic schools, and this budget will see $5 million go towards the delivery of another part of the campus at St Lawrence of Brindisi primary school in Weir Views. It is a fantastic Catholic school. I was down there last year prior to the election. It is a beautiful school, and this will add another part of the campus down there. Of course Al Iman College is one of our Islamic schools in Melton – another great school. I think it has about 1200 students. I have been to the last two VCE award presentations – amazing. As I said, they have about 1200 students, a big future in Melton and a big growing community. What the government has done is allocated $400,000 for the necessary work on their school crossing to be funded by the Department of Transport and Planning.

I thank the Minister for Public Transport, who is at the table, for his assistance in this. The community down there organised a petition. We went down and visited the site. Clearly there is a requirement for a school crossing. It is a really busy road, Rees Road. There is definitely a requirement for a school crossing of some form, and obviously the department of transport will have a look at that with the view of planning to install a crossing at a later date. The community are so excited about that, because at school times it is almost kamikaze to try and get people across the road. It has probably been a bit astounding that there have not been some pedestrians hit prior to this. Let us keep our fingers crossed that that does not happen.

TAFE is another thing that I am passionate about. In my earlier days in education, I went on to year 12 at a TAFE college, which I never thought I would do. After spending five years at a tech school thinking I was going to end up being a plumber, I got talked into going on to do, in those days, the equivalent of year 12 at Footscray TAFE. It was probably one of the greatest years I ever had at school. We had a bit of fun on the way through, let me tell you – it was not just about education. But I have got to say, the budget has allocated $55 million to work on our new TAFE campus in Melton and support around 600 students. Initially those students will be for the construction industry, which is clearly what we need with what is going on around this state with all the construction. It gives students an opportunity to learn skills that can be utilised within the construction industry – and hopefully around the Melton area. There is massive construction going on. As you know, we have the new hospital coming and, as I said, the TAFE college, some schools that are being built and level crossing removals. So there is plenty of construction happening in Melton outside of residential construction.

We are supporting our trade apprentices by providing free motor vehicle registration and allowing them this essential means of transporting themselves and their gear to their jobs. We know how important that is for young tradies in their utes, because I do not think a tradie has anything but a ute to carry their tools and things like that. This is going to save the tradies that are apprentices about $865 a year, and that is massive to a young apprentice, saving that much. I am sure they will put the $865 to good use. They will probably put wider tyres or wider wheels on the ute or whatever. Anyway, it is their money to spend.

The other thing in regard to schools is that we are really excited about establishing three beacon schools across the state to teach Punjabi and Hindi VCE language programs. According to the 2021 census, Melton has over 5000 Punjabi speakers and almost 1200 Hindi speakers throughout our electorate. I am sure there are probably more than that now obviously since 2021 because of the growth in the area. I know my local Indian communities have requested the teaching of their languages at school levels. One of our kindergartens in Melton is teaching Punjabi to kindergarten students, which is amazing. They are picking it up at the youngest age – at three and four years of age. It is just incredible. It is really important that the kids learn the language of their culture and they continue to pass it on.

As we grow so rapidly in my area, and I am sure in other areas of the west with all the multicultural communities, it is really important to have your kids learn their language. I think it is important that us Anglo-Saxons should start to learn some of that language. I know in a few years time in Melton we are going to be the minority. If we do not learn and understand other languages, in particular Indian languages in my community, we are going to be left behind. We are not going to know what they are talking about or what they are doing. Yes, we will get to know their culture, but we certainly will not understand some of the things that they are talking about. In a way it is nice, that reversal. They have come into our country and not understood us a lot, so it is fantastic that the shoe is on the other foot now. It is about time we had to pick up our game, I think.

I have been on my feet a number of times in regard to the multicultural events and community groups that we have in my electorate. I am so proud to have such a broad, diverse multicultural community in Melton. As a boy growing up in Braybrook 55 years ago, if you ever dreamed that Melton was going to be such a multicultural community, you would be absolutely kidding yourself. It is so diverse. As I say, where I was born and bred it was all Anglo-Saxon back in the 1950s, 60s, 70s and even into the 80s. The Vietnamese started to come in in the 70s and things like that, and then we had the other ethnic groups coming through. No doubt there were Italians and Greeks and things like that previously, but not so much in the western suburbs. Melton was an outlying country town back in those days, and it was all Anglo-Saxon. We are supporting South Sudanese, Somali and Afghan young people and their families by continuing to have community support groups to tackle disengagement not just in my electorate but in the inner west. And we have all encountered those problems. So these appropriation bills are very important. It is great delivery for items in Melton, and I commend the bills to the house.

Roma BRITNELL (South-West Coast) (18:26): Well, this is a brutal budget that leaves the Victorian community in a position where life will be harder. Life is certainly getting harder under Labor. Victorians, particularly regional Victorians, are being punished by Labor’s fiscal incompetence. So let us recall the words of the Premier just before the 2014 election: ‘There will be no new taxes in a government I lead.’ Well, it is almost 50 new taxes later. And if we look at what happened before the 2022 election five or six months ago, we heard the Treasurer saying, ‘We will deliver on our election commitments with no new or increased taxes.’

Now, before you say, ‘Well, you know, we have had a pandemic,’ this ‘COVID credit card’ comment is nothing more than a misnomer because if you look at the budget before the COVID pandemic, you will see that the debt was blowing out under Labor significantly. We know, and we have known every time we have seen them in government, that Labor cannot manage money. We have got a Premier who cannot recall and a Treasurer who cannot budget. There is no expert saying that this is a good financial position that we find ourselves in as a state. Victoria is broke. Unbelievably, our debt is $165 billion, increasing as demonstrated in this budget to $171 billion and going further to reach $200 billion. Despite the increase in taxes that you would think would then reduce the debt, there is no debt reduction. By the forecasts in this budget, debt increases – despite taxes on jobs, taxes on schools, taxes on renters and tax on debt.

What you will see here in Victoria is that the debt interest repayment will go from $10 million to $22 million per day that this state has to find just to pay the interest – not to reduce debt, to pay the interest. Let me say that one more time: increased debt, increased taxes, so that means increased revenue, but no debt reduction. What could that $22 million per day buy in South-West Coast? It could fix roads. It could put infrastructure that desperately needs to be fixed up, refurbished and developed on the agenda. It could buy so much. You would think with those alarming figures Labor would be reining in their spending. But no, this is a government who will not recognise the truth about how they have wasted $31 billion in cost blowouts on the projects they call the Big Build – all of those projects in Melbourne that have cost way more, and I am talking billions, than they were supposed to. The costings that they have done for projects have not worked. They have not done their due diligence, and the evidence is clear for all to see. So what are we getting for those blowouts that we see? What did we get for those Big Build projects in the regions? We are not getting anything in the regions. They are all in Melbourne.

Even in the budget this government are saying they are cutting 3000 to 4000 public servants. When we were in government in 2014 there was $18 billion paid in wages. That is now $35 billion. So even though they are going to cut 3000 to 4000 public servants, they are going to take the wages bill up from that $35 billion to $38 billion, so cutting jobs but spending more on the wages of those who are left.

So what is it that we get in South-West Coast? What did we expect to see in this budget? Well, the state of our roads has been in crisis since Labor first came into government and started cutting the maintenance budget. You would have expected – anyone would have been reasonably expecting – to see a very big investment into the roads in regional Victoria, because it is clear if you drive on them, as we all do daily, that they are failing. Whether it is broken rims, potholes or crumbling shoulders, our roads are in a mess, and Victorians – regional Victorians, South-West Coast residents – are suffering due to Labor’s financial incompetence. What would $22 million a day in interest do for our roads? Under Labor, Victoria is broke, and our roads are going backwards as a result. Our debt is more than that of Queensland, Tasmania and New South Wales put together, but we are not seeing what New South Wales sees with their roads, for example – or Queensland’s roads. I have recently just taken a drive to have a look because I hear from so many that ours are so much worse, and they are.

Here we have a government sending us backwards. Labor is punishing Victorians, punishing south-west Victorians, with a $380 million reduction in annual spending on road maintenance since 2020 – a massive 45 per cent cut. That is just unbelievable, given the state of the roads. But we would not expect that a very city-centric government even understands. They are not coming out to have a look, although we did see the minister come out recently. The Minister for Roads and Road Safety came and had a look and said she stands ready. Well, the budget came out a week later, and she is not ready, because she has cut the budget by a massive 45 per cent since 2020. This year alone, in budget paper 3, page 310 – so you can look it up – the roads maintenance budget is cut by a further 25 per cent to just $441 million. This is actually less than the last budget of the former coalition government in 2014. That is a decade ago. Think about that: this government is spending less on maintenance than the coalition government did a decade ago. Look how much money has changed, what it bought you a decade ago compared to what it buys you today, and yet we are seeing our road toll climb, tragically. The road toll is 35 per cent more today than it was this time last year. Yet at the same time Labor is ripping $3 billion from the TAC to prop up its budget. Under Labor, Victoria is broke and road safety is paying the consequences. We should have seen a massive injection. What we saw was a cut.

The increase in taxes does not help the housing crisis we have in South-West Coast. We have a government who have wasted money here too. Despite the billions they say they spend on building houses across Victoria, there have been only 75 new homes added to the number of homes in the pool of social housing that this government has been overseeing. I met recently with the CEO of the Women’s Housing association. It is not a government department. They are building 31 houses in Portland alone. They are getting on with building houses. They are actually only building eight in Warrnambool. Why? They want to build a lot more and they can build a lot more; it is the red tape and the land unavailability. This government are making sure it is too hard. We had as an election promise sending flying squads into councils so we could free up land and get roofs over people’s heads.

The windfall gains tax, one of the 50 that this government have implemented, starts on 1 July. I will tell you now, the farmers who have got the land available to subdivide will not be selling that land whilst this windfall gains tax is in place. Giving 50 to 60 per cent of their farm that they have farmed all their lives – and that is their superannuation – to the government is just not something they will do. They will keep their beefers on it and there will not be that subdivision available, and we will not have roofs over people’s heads. This government’s actions will stifle the ability to build and put roofs over people’s heads – and homelessness is what we see as a result of that. I have seen it incredibly over the last 10 years, from when I worked in Aboriginal health, when we saw a lot of people couch surfing but not homeless. Now what do I see? People homeless, on the streets, in doorways, down at the Surfside area.

What I have is I have women coming into my office, women with children saying, ‘We’ve listened to the government say if we’re in a domestic violence situation we will be looked after. I have now left, I have finally got the empowerment within me to do that, and I’m sleeping in my car with my children.’ That is what I hear, and we go to the government time and time again and say where are your solutions. There are houses sitting idle. St Vincent de Paul come to me from Warrnambool saying, ‘There are houses sitting idle.’ It is so disappointing that this government are delivering nothing on the promises that they made in South-West Coast.

The Lookout drug and alcohol rehabilitation centre was something we all expected to see – that hardworking community, the committee who have for seven years worked very closely with this government and tried their hardest to meet every criterion that they could and have done so. Every other part of Victoria has a drug and alcohol rehabilitation centre. What would you expect to see? Such a normal service is required in every area, and we are the only ones without one. It is the COVID debt, they say. Ha! We have the least funding per capita of any state for health in this nation, and that is why we are not getting the drug and alcohol rehabilitation centre. Victoria is broke, because you should have – and any reasonable government would have – funded this. The only reason they are not doing it is they cannot. They know they need to do it.

The mental health services that do so much work in our region, the Let’sTalk program, the Standing Tall program, Big Life – another one, I could list a lot – organically grown services which take pressure off the CAMHS, the child and adolescent mental health team and the psych services team, have been left with nothing, and yet they would help this situation, not make it worse. Victoria is clearly broke.

Health and education have also not avoided the axe. Health is in crisis, and I am so concerned about South West Healthcare missing out on being one of the health services that gets pushed forward. In the budget it has been identified it will be another year later than was originally decided. There are 10 health services that were funded in the 2018 budget. South West Healthcare was announced in 2020. As a community, South-West Coast, we need to be alert to and alarmed by this government’s false promises and do what we can to support our hardworking nurses and doctors and the admin team who are working to get that hospital built, but we need to watch closely and keep the pressure on. We are a long way from Melbourne, and that is why our health services are so important and do such a good job – the accident and emergency team, the theatre teams working in extraordinarily cramped conditions.

The rail line – no announcement. Again, in 2017 we were promised new carriages and new train sets; the government will not identify any for Warrnambool. They just keep stringing us along, and our train services do not improve. Labor has run out of money, and our surf lifesaving club, the basketball stadium in Portland, the hockey facilities in Warrnambool and the breakwater that is so iconic need an injection of funds. Warrnambool College have nowhere for the whole school to meet under shelter. Port Fairy Football Netball Club and South Warrnambool Football Netball Club need an injection of funds. But under this government, this tired, disinterested, disorganised and now chaotic government, they are not going to see those projects this year. It is incredibly disappointing, but we would expect that from a government who have told us one thing and then done another.

It is a corrupt government who mismanage money – and when they run out of money, they come after yours. We are seeing that in this budget with a tax on jobs, a tax on renters, a tax on schools and a tax on debt. We have a bigger debt than New South Wales, Queensland and Tasmania put together, but we are not seeing the services that they see. We are seeing debt that is going to continue to grow and interest rates that will cost us $22 million a day.

John MULLAHY (Glen Waverley) (18:41): I rise to speak on the Appropriation (2023–2024) Bill 2023 and the Appropriation (Parliament 2023–2024) Bill 2023 and in support of this government’s budget. Last Tuesday we received the details of the state budget, and I am proud to speak in this chamber to outline some of the wins that we had for my electorate of Glen Waverley. Firstly, I would like to thank the Treasurer and the Assistant Treasurer and their teams for all their hard work on this budget. They have managed to strike a balance between managing the debt we acquired from the pandemic and making sure that we fulfil our election commitments and promises, making sure our communities still receive the funding they deserve to keep Victorian running.

Last November I was fortunate to get a promise from the Andrews Labor government, and that promise was to deliver $10.9 million to upgrade Forest Hill College – and now we are doing just that. Forest Hill College is one of our many excellent public schools in my electorate, with over 600 students. Forest Hill provides quality education in all areas of the curriculum, including sport. They have got excellent academies in football, basketball and tennis, and they run wonderful programs there. I have been fortunate to be down at the school many times over the last year, including when I was invited down as a candidate, to see the great work of principal David Rogers and his assistant principal Nicola Buckingham, and I also was able to go down and visit the parents and teachers council, which is run by Robert Nash. I was also fortunate to get down there with the Minister for Education last year to deliver that promise, and I thank the minister and all her team for the work in upgrading schools across the state, including those in my electorate.

The $10.9 million we are contributing to the Forest Hill College will go to upgrading three buildings in the school, blocks A, D and M, and I must say that is very much needed. I was down there earlier this year when they had a few issues with some skylights. That is all being sorted as we speak, but I am looking forward to those buildings being replaced so there will not be any issues in the future. These upgrades will provide much-needed quality learning spaces for the students. On Tuesday last week I called principal Rogers and the school council president and informed them that our election commitment will be fulfilled in this budget and the next. I can assure the house that David and Robert and the leadership team of teachers at Forest Hill College are very excited about the outcome of this budget and are looking forward to works at the school beginning. I was also invited down last Thursday for an assembly for National Reconciliation Week. They ran a wonderful assembly recognising what we need to do in our state for reconciliation.

I know that the parents and students at Forest Hill College welcome this budget allocation. Last November my volunteer team and I doorknocked and letterboxed the areas around Forest Hill College to inform the residents of the funding we would be providing if an Andrews Labor government was re-elected. My team and I spoke to hundreds of people, and we noticed that this announcement was well received. I remember speaking to several voters at pre-poll actually, down at Mahoneys Road, where we spent 12 days speaking to every elector that was coming through that booth. Many of them walked up to me thanking the Andrews Labor government for the promise that we made, and now we are going to deliver that with this budget. We know how important education is to all of us, especially our future generations. I welcome this budget commitment and look forward to working with the minister and the college community to deliver these upgrades.

While I am on education, the continuation of our early childhood and pre-prep policies and agenda is astounding. My daughter was born in 2018, and we were fortunate to get three-year-old kinder rolled out through our area. She turned up to three-year-old kinder – the education outcomes that she has received from that. And then that has been backed up this year with free four-year-old kinder, which is just helpful to all of us. We talk about cost-of-living pressures at the moment, and the free kinder policy is something that will just make a massive difference to the community.

The other commitment that I was fortunate to get in this budget was $50,000 for the Waverley Woodworkers. This is a great organisation. I got to know them over the last five years working for the previous member for Mount Waverley. They just do some wonderful work. It is set up as a men’s shed, but there is a sense of community that you get around there. Men get to go down there, share experiences, share skills and also just support each other. It is very good for their mental health and so on. I called the president Ray French last Tuesday to let him know the good news, and all those involved in the organisation welcome the announcement. I was also lucky to visit the Waverley Woodworkers last year with the member for Ashwood to see the space. I should say I have been down there quite a few times. It is a wonderful space. They moved recently from an old, very small workshop to Central Reserve, underneath the footy stadium there, into a nice modern location, and this $50,000 is going to go towards helping them create some more storage space so that they can have timber stored properly. I am proud to be part of a government that values and invests in our local community groups. It is these kinds of organisations that keep our communities strong and healthy.

I am also proud to announce another important budget allocation for my electorate. Under this budget we are delivering $750,000 to fund Vermont Reserve. Vermont Reserve is home to the Vermont Cricket Club, the Vermont Football Club – it is the Vermont footy and netball club – and the Vermont Sports Club, all of which are excellent community sporting clubs. Early last year, around August, I met with local councillor Prue Cutts, who is now the deputy mayor, and all the presidents of those three organisations as well as some of the directors from Whitehorse council. It was good to see that we are all on the same page for what we want as outcomes for the Vermont Reserve. The toilets and showers are in a very bad state. We have got so much more female participation at all of these clubs, but females do not want to use these rooms – there is no privacy, and there is only one toilet in each of the rooms and two urinals. It is infrastructure that was built in the 1970s for the captive audience of mostly male participants then. We need to make sure that we are delivering for our sports clubs so that the higher uptake of female participation can be catered for.

It was great to speak to Danny Ross, the president of the Vermont Football Club; Trent Touhy, the president of the Vermont Cricket Club; and also Don Parsons, the president of the Vermont Sports Club. They are all excited about this announcement. It will go towards the change rooms, but also there will be an upgrade to the light system there. Because of the extra participation that we have there, we need to have the lights upgraded so that the oval can be used more regularly. It was excellent: I spoke to all of them; they are all very happy. We popped down there on Friday afternoon to catch up with them and make an announcement that it has been delivered in this budget. There was a lot of excitement in the room. The weather was not that great, but we were able to do that inside. I am glad that such discussions are happening around gender equality in sport, and I look forward to working with the local clubs to achieve gender equity in this space. Thank you to the Minister for Community Sport and her team for their work in ensuring our local sports facilities are maintained and those in my electorate regardless of age or gender can participate in community sport, and I look forward to working with the minister and her team to deliver this outcome.

This budget is investing in our healthcare system to make sure Victorians are getting the healthcare services that they deserve and need. The Andrews Labor government is investing $320 million into the Hospital Infrastructure Delivery Fund, and this fund will go towards planning, developing and the early works at the Monash Medical Centre and the Maroondah Hospital, two hospitals that are outside my electorate but that service my community in every facet of their health care. Additionally, we are investing in the women’s health clinics, because we know that we need specialist health clinics so women can attend and receive treatment or advice on areas from contraception to those struggling with conditions such as endometriosis and PCOS.

The Andrews Labor government is also funding to plan a new mental health and wellbeing local service in Glen Waverley, something that we will be very excited about. This service will be available for people aged 26 and over who are struggling with their mental health, including those experiencing physiological distress and addiction. The local service will be a welcome space for those in my community who are struggling. We do have a Headspace in the Glen Waverley area. Actually it is just on the outside of my district, but it services our community. This local service will be something that will be very useful for people over the age of 26. I see this local service as something sort of similar to the Orange Door program but specifically for mental health. It will be staffed by qualified mental health professionals, including carers. During the cost-of-living crisis I am sure there are many of my constituents who will be glad to hear that this service will be free of charge. Additionally, patients will not have to go to their doctor for a referral or reach mental health eligibility criteria.

We know that from a federal point of view people are wanting more mental health services, and this delivers on that. I believe that in removing these hurdles those in our community will be able to access the services when they need them, and therefore it will help remove the stigma around mental health. The Glen Waverley service will be one of 50 local mental health services that the Andrews Labor government will be establishing, and I am proud to stand with a government that takes mental health seriously and one that invests in the mental health services.

We are investing a lot in the healthcare sector in this budget because we know that we cannot live without health care. We are investing $46 million to train our future paramedics. We will also be training up specialist paramedic practitioners so Victorians can get the help they need before they arrive at the hospital. These are potentially life-saving measures that we are implementing. It feeds back into the priority primary care centres that we are currently running, trying to take the burden off some of the emergency rooms in our hospitals so people can get the health care that they need quicker and faster at these PPCCs. Additionally, we are investing $167 million to support our nurses and midwives. We are striving to strengthen the nurse-to-patient ratios so that we can make sure Victorians, including those in my electorate, get the best quality health care and medical attention. I would like to thank the Minister for Health and her team for all the hard work.

One of our major election commitments was to bring back the State Electricity Commission. This policy was very popular through the campaign, and we have not wasted a day in doing so. This budget commits $1 billion to bringing back the SEC so we can bring back government-owned energy and bring it back in the form of renewable energy. This budget is investing $12 million to establish the SEC centre for training and excellence so we can train a new generation of SEC workers, providing jobs for thousands of Victorians. This $5 million includes establishing clean energy courses so we can transition to safe, clean jobs. The centre will be hosting career nights at high schools and government schools so we can inspire the next generation to embark on a career in renewable energy.

In this budget we will also be investing $16 million to establish two new worker training centres for renewable energy, one in hydrogen and one in wind, and I am proud to see that this year’s budget is investing in renewable energy jobs and training for Victorians. This will be excellent down at the Holmesglen TAFE in the Glen Waverley district. I am hoping that we can get some courses down there. I would also like to thank the Minister for the State Electricity Commission and the department for all the work that has been done so far in helping to bring back the SEC. I and many in my electorate are looking forward to seeing the SEC up and running.

I have got $186 million to expand eligibility for VET subsidies and $170 million for the Building Better TAFE Fund, providing TAFE projects for the clean energy fund. The other – and I am running out of time; too many things – is the investment we are making in our multicultural communities across the east with regard to money being invested in the Whitehorse Lunar New Year festival and also money for our multicultural traders associations. The Tamil Festival Australia has been given another $400,000 over the four years, which will be excellent for my local Tamil community. I was just with the Bharathi Tamil language school on Sunday. They were also using the facilities at Forest Hill College; they train their students there at Forest Hill College. So it is not only a public school that we have in my area that gets to use the facilities but also the other community groups around that do use those facilities on the weekends and after hours.

The other thing I would like to touch on is the Suburban Rail Loop. I only have 20 seconds, but the ongoing works on this project will be important. We have currently got works underway in the Glen Waverley area. We are currently moving the services around to where the train station box will be, and the people in my area are excited about that. With that, I commend the bills to the house.

Sam HIBBINS (Prahran) (18:56): Given the hour I suspect I will have to make some more substantive remarks when the take-note motion comes around, but in the time I do have I will say that this is a budget that was handed down at an incredibly difficult time for so many Victorians struggling with the skyrocketing cost of living, struggling with paying the rent and affording their own home, struggling to access affordable health care – so many people being pushed to the margins of homelessness and into poverty, and this was a budget that needed to go to the heart of those issues to address the massive social challenges that are affecting so many Victorians, particularly young Victorians. But the reality is with this budget everyday Victorians who are struggling are going to be worse off. This is a budget that needed to go to the heart of those issues, but instead people are going to be worse off under this budget. Instead of helping, workers and people in need are going to be hurt.

People cannot wait more years until this is addressed. I mean, let us just look at renters facing another year of massive rent increases, but as usual – as typical – there is stuff-all for renters in this year’s budget. You have got people who are just one rent rise away from homelessness. You have got 30,000 people experiencing homelessness every single night, but you have got four times as much money going into the racing industry as is going into people experiencing homelessness. You have got people waiting years to access public housing – 120,000 people on the public housing waiting list and growing, but no new money for public or affordable housing. These things will only continue to get worse with this budget. People cannot afford for things to get worse before there is any prospect of them getting better. Without significant government interventions more people are going to be pushed into poverty, pushed into crisis, seeking help at already stretched homelessness services, food relief and emergency wards – more people on the margins, more into poverty, more suffering housing stress, more people experiencing homelessness.

The reality is we can have the sort of society that we want to live in. We can put an end to poverty. We can put an end to homelessness. We can make sure everyone has got a safe, secure place – and I should say affordable place – to call home; make sure that people can get access to the health care that they need, affordable health care; and make sure that people have well paid, secure jobs. This is a budget that cuts thousands of public sector workers, just after we spent so long saying thank you to our essential workers. This budget is now sacking them at a time of low wage growth, and they are still persisting with the wage cap at a time when we have got workers suffering one of the biggest real wage cuts in history. And we can ensure that there is a planet for everyone to live on in the future. That is what the Greens are fighting for, and I will have more to say on the take-note motion.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! The time set down for consideration of items on the government business program has arrived, and I am required to interrupt business.

Motions agreed to.

Read second time.

Third reading

Motions agreed to.

Read third time.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: The bills will now be sent to the Legislative Council and their agreement requested.

Business interrupted under sessional orders.