Wednesday, 18 October 2023

Statements on parliamentary committee reports

Public Accounts and Estimates Committee

Report on the 2023–24 Budget Estimates

David SOUTHWICK (Caulfield) (10:07): It is a pleasure to rise to speak on committee reports. The committee report that I want to refer to today is the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee 2023–24 report. In my opening remarks I want to just make mention that in that report probably right across all the portfolios there is a common theme of waste and mismanagement. I think this is probably evident in the now Allan Labor government. We saw it from the previous Premier, and unfortunately it continues. I wanted to particularly draw attention to some of the areas in transport, in infrastructure and in the Commonwealth Games – they were all the portfolios of the now Premier, the previous transport and infrastructure and Commonwealth Games minister.

This committee report talks a lot about how things could be done better – how if we plan things properly we will not get the waste and mismanagement that we are now seeing. The problem is that when we see waste we will see blowouts. When we see particularly in major projects $30 billion worth of blowouts on every single project – no matter what you look at, whether it be tunnels, whether it be level crossings, whether it be the Suburban Rail Loop – it ends up being taxpayers that pay the price. We know that so many taxpayers in Victoria are already doing it so tough. The answer from the Allan government to these blowouts is to tax people more, when they are already hurting. We know that there is a housing affordability issue at the moment. We know that people are struggling to pay their rents, if they can get a home in the first place. In all of these issues we are seeing this, and it is all as a result of waste and mismanagement.

I refer the chamber specifically to the area of the Commonwealth Games, because it is not just about sport but about how a government actually does things or in fact does not do things. Finding 77 talks about how the government announced Victoria would no longer be hosting the 2026 Commonwealth Games after the original $2.6 billion budget for the event ended up being revised to $6 billion. We knew during the actual hearings that both ministers who were responsible, the current Premier and Harriet Shing in the other place, were steadfast in how much this was going to cost. ‘Yep, we’re right. We’ve got the $2 billion’ – and all of a sudden magically afterwards that figure blew out to $6 billion. This recommendation – recommendation 42 – says:

The Department of Jobs, Skills, Industries and Regions publicly release a detailed breakdown of the original $2.6 billion forecast cost of hosting the 2026 Commonwealth Games, as well as any cost–benefit analysis undertaken, and a detailed breakdown of the revised approximate of $6 billion forecast cost of hosting the 2026 Commonwealth Games.

We have been asking for that since the cancellation of the games, and the government are not forthcoming with those details. It is really, really important to find out how within a matter of weeks of having hearings in which we had reassurance that the government had the money, had the plan, had the budget and had it all ready to go, we had it go from $2.6 billion to $6 billion without any real detail. It is really important to have that detail so we can understand what went wrong. We cannot keep having these failures from this government, because taxpayers pay the price, and as I have said, the current Premier is responsible for $30 billion worth of taxpayer blowouts.

We now have the new major projects minister, who came into the chamber yesterday spruiking the Suburban Rail Loop again with no real details about what this is actually going to cost. They are all numbers that have been given but with no real hard figures, no rigour around what it is going to cost taxpayers, and we know things like Geelong fast rail and airport rail, which was promised as part of SRL, are now on the backburner. We know that a lot of people have been laid off from airport rail. Some people are still employed. There is no detail. There is so much waste and mismanagement by this government, and that is why Victoria is broke and Victorians are paying the price. We have got to do things better, because at the moment Victorians are struggling with an absolutely tired and useless Andrews, now Allan, government.