Wednesday, 14 August 2024

Government performance

Nicole WERNER (Warrandyte) (17:40): I rise to grieve on behalf of all Victorians who have been abandoned by a government that has forgotten them, a government who cares more about protecting union thugs than protecting hardworking families. People in my community have been shocked and dismayed when they have turned on the news to find out that their taxpayer money is not funding schools and hospitals but rather is funding the bullying and intimidation of CFMEU thugs. While I do not have enough time today to speak about every life and every business that the CFMEU has destroyed or enough time to speak about each of the more than 170 contraventions of section 500 of the Fair Work Act 2009 that the CFMEU has committed or the 50 court proceedings for their bad behaviour that the Premier has ignored, I do want to speak about just one family and specifically a mother by the name of Tammie Palmer in my electorate, who has bravely spoken out about the effect of union thuggery on her life.

Her son Ben Nash was an 18-year-old with a future full of promise, a young Gunditjmara man who was eager to make his mark on the world. Tragically, Ben’s first day on a CFMEU government worksite turned out to be his last. On the night before his 19th birthday Ben died from an overdose, a death following the bullying and intimidation of CFMEU thugs. Ben was targeted not just for his background but for his choice of attire, a shirt from a small Indigenous construction firm he had worked for previously. It was well publicised on 60 Minutes and on the stream of media that followed. It was reported that Ben was locked in a shed for 3 or 4 hours. A young man struggling with mental health issues was subjected to an environment that should have been a place of opportunity, not torment.

I grieve for the family of Ben Nash from my community. I grieve for his brave mum Tammie Palmer, who courageously spoke out against the union thuggery and who, in the face of the threat of the CFMEU, said on 60 Minutes when she was questioned if she was afraid about any backlash from speaking out:

They can’t hurt me more than I’m already hurting.

I grieve for a family that has lost their brother, their cousin and their nephew and for a community that has lost their mate. I grieve for North Ringwood footy club who have lost one of their boys, and I grieve for my friend Tammie Palmer who has lost the light of her life, her son. Hers was the realist of costs, the human cost of her 18-year-old son’s life. He did not get to live to see his 19th birthday, because on the morning of his birthday they were unable to wake him when they found him deceased in bed. That is the cost of the thuggery. That is the cost of the bullying and that is the cost of the endemic CFMEU corruption in our state.

Meanwhile the CFMEU has denied these claims, much like the Premier denies claims that she knew about the criminal and thuggish behaviour of the CFMEU. The Premier after going into hiding for three days after Ben Nash’s story came out spluttered like a broken record when she was asked why it took her more than a year to respond to a whistleblower’s warning about CFMEU intimidation tactics on Victorian construction sites:

… what – what – what – what have you got that shows that they were put to me in writing?

Because of course the Premier was sent a letter while she was the Minister for Transport Infrastructure in April 2022 – which she would only respond to a year later in April 2023 – by an Indigenous labour hire firm claiming that the union officials were threatening violence and blacklisting non-preferred firms from state and federally funded projects. To quote the letter to the Premier, this is what they wrote:

These are supposed to be government jobs for Victorians, free for tender and free of coercion where businesses are free to engage with other entities without fear of retribution …

We can’t go to clients, they don’t want IR problems; we can’t discuss it with the union, or the bodies who are supposed to keep a leash on this behaviour out of fear of business collapse or personal ramifications.

Where is the safe place? Why as an employer should we be threatened with violence, and why should this violence take place in front of employees?

These are the questions that Victorian construction workers and tradies are asking today, still, because so long as Premier Jacinta Allan is Premier of this state and her CFMEU buddies are allowed to run amok, there is no safe place for our tradies, and that is simply not good enough. It is why the Australian Financial Review wrote of the CFMEU scandal that:

Of all the senior Labor politicians around the country, Allan is the one who is most exposed by this scandal.

The Premier has tried to hoodwink the Victorian people and deflect blame for her shoddy work by saying she had referred a warning to Victoria Police; however, as reported in the AFR:

The referral pointed to an “anecdotal” suggestion of a “small number of possible” incidents and expressly stated there was no evidence it was widespread or systematic.

So I will put it simply for the people of Victoria: the Premier is so interlinked with the CFMEU that she is practically a card-carrying member. This is of course the Premier with perhaps the worst CV in history – Minister for Public Transport from 2014 and then the Minister for the Suburban Rail Loop from 2020, as well as of course the minister responsible for delivering the Commonwealth Games, and those are obviously going so well here in Victoria! In 2018, when she was the minister responsible for the SRL, she said the total cost for the entire SRL project would be $50 billion. Then later the PBO estimated the cost of constructing just the SRL East and North to be $125 billion – more than double. Now the Parliamentary Budget Office has revealed that the cost of just two-thirds, not even the entirety, of the SRL is expected to reach a massive – you hear it here – $216.7 billion. So it has gone from $50 billion to $216.7 billion of Victorian taxpayers money. That is shameful, all while Victoria racks up the highest debt in the nation – as we have heard so many times, more than New South Wales, Queensland and Tasmania combined – paying $25 million in interest per day. My goodness! And who is paying for it? The Victorian taxpayer, who I am speaking to today – through the Acting Speaker, of course.

This is a project that the Premier was responsible for when she was the Minister for Transport and Infrastructure, this is a project that she was responsible for when she was the Minister for the Suburban Rail Loop and it is a project that she is responsible for now that she is the Premier. While it is in part the CFMEU’s fault that these costs have exploded, it is also the Premier’s weak attitude. You cannot blame them for asking for near infinite money to build this project, but you can blame the Premier for her blasé, weak attitude that this project will ‘cost whatever it costs’ and will go ahead come what may, all while future generations are plummeted into a record level of debt. We are talking about our children and our children’s children, who are going to inherit this historic level of state debt. Where is the fiscal responsibility in our state? Labor cannot manage money and cannot manage projects, and it is up to every future Victorian to pay the price.

But of course Premier Jacinta Allan was not only the Minister for the Suburban Rail Loop, as I have been talking about, she was also the Minister for Commonwealth Games Delivery, and what a pathetic failure of government policy that was. Need I remind Victorians that they spent more than $589 million to not host – let me make that clear, to not host – the Commonwealth Games. Victorians, that is over $1.6 million a day for a calendar year of your money that has been wasted on a fake election promise. Our amazing results at this year’s Olympics have renewed a sense of national unity I have not seen since the Matildas tore up the field. I commend all our amazing Victorian and Australian athletes, but I know that Victorians are disheartened that our athletes will not be able to show off their amazing skills on their own home soil because this government does not believe in its ability to run an event and clearly does not believe in our athletes either. I grieve for our local athletes. I grieve for our state that was made the laughing-stock of the world, and I remember when they cancelled the Commonwealth Games wondering why they did not just run it on a smaller scale in Victoria. Then I realised that the only reason why those opposite ever wanted to hold the games in the first place was to mislead and deceive voters at the 2022 election, to promise them the world – new housing, new stadiums, new investment in rural Victoria – which many Victorians understandably supported, only for them to turn around once they were elected and cancel the games, not deliver the houses and continue to fail the Victorian people.

I also grieve for the Victorians suffering under a government that is weak on crime. Recently I had the privilege of hosting a community safety and crime prevention forum in the suburb of Doncaster East, driven by the escalating concerns of our constituents. The decision to convene the forum was not taken lightly. It was a direct response to a troubling trend we have seen in our electorate: a staggering 48 per cent increase in burglaries with an alarming 78 per cent rise in incidents reported in Doncaster East alone. These statistics, while alarming, are more than just numbers; they represent real people in my community. My office has been inundated with calls and emails from local residents deeply concerned about the surge in violent crime and home invasions – stories like that of Alice Skordakis, who bravely spoke to the Herald Sun recently and spoke out about a terrifying situation where three armed invaders broke into her home whilst her 14-year-old was home alone. Imagine this: you have just left your 14-year-old daughter home alone, and as soon as you have left three armed intruders break in. In a frantic attempt to protect herself your daughter runs upstairs to her bedroom, struggles to lock the door, her heart racing with fear as the intruders force their way in and then follow her up the stairs, trying to break down her bedroom door. It is every parent’s worst nightmare, and thankfully Alice’s daughter is safe and okay, although traumatised after having to lock herself in her bedroom to stay safe while these invaders tried to break down her bedroom door and then further traumatised when their family home was broken into again just four weeks later.

Another victim of this government’s soft-on-crime attitude is Dr Ash Gordon. As has been reported and as the member for Berwick spoke about, one of the accused perpetrators was out on bail at the time of Dr Gordon’s death. The member for Morwell would know this all too well, because the family is from his electorate. Dr Ash Gordon was 33 years old – that is my age – with all of his life before him before he was allegedly callously murdered by this thug. There were warning signs, and this tragedy could have been prevented. The perpetrator was out on bail when he committed this offence. I have actually spoken to the affected family, who were subject to a machete attack and who reached out to me when they realised that the same 16-year-old that attacked their family member and attacked them with a machete was out on bail thanks to the Allan government and their weak bail laws. It was this family that reached out to me, and as been reported in the Herald Sun, these victims have called out the Allan Labor government. I remember the day that I got that phone call from this family who said that it was a Facebook Marketplace incident that went wrong where they were chased down by a thug wielding a machete. It was the same 16-year-old that allegedly went on to commit this murder. The victims have called out Allan Labor government, and they have said this:

The Allan government and the justice system have blood on their hands …

That is what the family said. This 16-year-old violent offender should not have been out on bail when he then went on to allegedly murder Dr Ash Gordon. So I grieve for the families who no longer feel safe, I grieve for the families who now have an empty seat at Christmas dinner because of CFMEU thuggery, I grieve for the victims of crime killed by those who the government has let out on bail and I grieve for Victorians, who are sick and tired of this failing, ailing and corrupt Allan Labor government. Victorians deserve better than this.