Wednesday, 16 October 2024

Government performance

Emma KEALY (Lowan) (16:32): I grieve for any Victorian who was listening to that absolute diatribe from the member for Mordialloc. Although there is one thing that he mentioned that I would like to take up, and that is that the member for Lowan cannot say this is a good environment to work in. You know what, the member for Mordialloc is exactly right, because as it stands today there are two members of the Labor Party who sit up in creep corner, who are still members of the party but who have been booted out of the Labor party room because they are too dangerous for the women within that room. They are still members of the Labor Party. This is something that we have to work with in this environment each and every day, this is something that the attendants in this place have to work with each and every day, and there has never been full disclosure over why they have been sent up to creep corner.

When we hear any of them – today we heard during question time the Premier and the Minister for Health, and we heard the member for Mordialloc just now – start to have a crack about the good track record that Labor has about women, how about they have a look in their own backyard, because it is not a positive story at all for Labor when it comes to the treatment of women. I will never, ever forget that. I will never allow Victorians to forget that, because the hypocrisy that we hear from Labor time and time again around their stance on women can only be perceived as one thing and that is, ‘We will protect the people who put women at risk and we will hush it up and keep it quiet.’ That is an absolute disgrace.

Thank you very much for letting me take up that grievance, but I would like to grieve today for all regional Victorians who are paying the price of 10 years of a city-centric Labor government who can only ever focus on what we would say is the area inside the tram tracks. But I think that has changed recently, because like an episode in a TV series that the member for Mordialloc again tried to make a funny joke about, we have our own version of Utopia here in Victoria. A television series has already been made about the Labor government. Who can forget Utopia with that nation-building authority where no dream is off the table and no infrastructure project too big. I feel like the Labor government might have just picked up a script from the Working Dog team and thought, ‘You know what, this is too good. We should pick this up. I think we can make this work in Victoria. We can make this happen.’

Now we get this version of Utopia that we heard from the Premier today, that we are going to have an amazing rail service – which only runs between Cheltenham and Box Hill, mind you. This line between Cheltenham and Box Hill is going to help every single regional Victorian in some way to travel around the state quicker. In fact I think we heard today that it will save 26 minutes for someone from Traralgon to get to Box Hill. That is incredible, because there is not even a timetable available for this service. This is a fabulous version. I feel like this is another script. We have got another whole season coming of Utopia where they can just lift some of the cabinet documents and some of the media releases from Labor and think, ‘Holy smokes, this is gold. We really, really should bring some of these people onto our writing team.’ Not only is Labor is trying to drive this spin about the Suburban Rail Loop, this massive infrastructure project – no project is too big for the Labor government; no project was too big for Utopia and the nation-building authority – they are actually trying to spin us down this imaginary pathway, where somehow it is a good thing that all of the state’s infrastructure money is being funnelled into this one single project while the rest of Victoria misses out. They are missing out, and we see that time and time again when it comes to regional infrastructure and rural infrastructure.

The member for Evelyn raised so many points about the deteriorating state of our roads. Many, many parts of Victoria are currently suffering from drought. We have some of the lowest rainfall that we have ever had on record in Victoria, and yet what we hear from Labor is that the reason the roads are bad is because we have had too much rain. I would encourage everybody on the government side of the chamber to stop listening to their own rhetoric, to stop just thinking about the spin and the lines. How about we see some evidence-based decision-making over there? This is not just us saying it, the Liberals and Nationals. We are not the only ones who are saying, ‘Hey, our roads are falling apart. Hey, there’s been very, very low rainfall.’ It is not an adequate excuse. We actually do our research. We go out there. We speak to the Bureau of Meteorology. We talk to them. We access them online. You can actually see the reports and see what the comparative rate of precipitation is across the state over time. Increased rainfall is not a fact. It is not the reason that our roads are so bad. If I hear another fanciful objection, with Labor saying that the roads are actually quite good, I would encourage any Labor member to make their way out of the city and actually travel on some of our country roads, because they are in an absolutely horrific state.

I heard earlier some of the interjections from Labor backbenchers, who perceive that, ‘No, there’s a perfect world out there. Labor are amazing; they’re delivering for the regions.’ You are just letting yourself down. In fact I was saying to the member for Berwick at the table next to me, ‘I wonder if we should actually have as a topic for this grievance debate that we should grieve for the Labor backbenchers, who are too busy swallowing the spin and sucking up to their bosses to actually get out in their communities to speak to people who are suffering with cost-of-living pressures, who can’t access health care, who can’t drive on a safe road, who can’t access a low-cost rental and who can’t save up enough of a deposit to buy a house in their communities.’ These are the people that the Labor backbenchers should be talking to. If they did their own research, then they might actually realise, ‘Wow, I’ve got to challenge my elders and say that we’ve got to do something about this,’ because otherwise they will not be there in two years time. I grieve for those backbenchers who are too busy with their fingers in their ears rather than actually listening to the evidence that is put before them in this chamber time and time again. Speak up for the people who elected you to be here. Speak up for your community, for the issues that are impacting your community. I know that all the members of the National Party are fierce community advocates. They are amazing community champions. They are tirelessly raising issues around the escalating cost of living under Labor, where we have seen power bills increase by 25 per cent in the last year.

We see that gas bills have gone up by almost 10 per cent in the last year. We have seen the covering up and the trying to pay for the Suburban Rail Loop, a Melbourne project, with 55 new or increased taxes. Thirty target property, and we know what happens when there are increased property taxes – it pushes up the cost of buying a house and it pushes up the cost of rent. It makes it much, much harder for someone to save up a deposit for a home, because all of their money is going out paying for Labor’s taxes to fill this massive black hole dug by their nation-building project, the Suburban Rail Loop, which will not benefit anyone in my electorate of Lowan, because we are so far away from Cheltenham to Box Hill in philosophy, in our business focus and in the way that we treat life and respect one another but also in our access to public transport services, because what we get in regional Victoria is next to nothing, with all of the focus by Labor on what happens in the city.

We know that Labor’s decision-making is having catastrophic impacts on our local healthcare services. Are Labor going to amalgamate hospitals or are they going to merge hospitals or are we going to call it a consolidation? We have a look at the health services plan released only a couple of months ago, and secretly at the back of that we see that we are still going to have regional boards to manage hospitals as a consolidated group. To me that sounds like large-scale amalgamations across the state, and this has now been confirmed. Over the weekend we heard the Minister for Mental Health confirm that there will no longer be standalone mental health regional boards even though the royal commission specifically said that we need mental health boards to be separate to hospital boards otherwise these reforms will get lost. But no, Labor have changed their mind after just three years. All of the regional boards are going to be thrown together and Labor will go ahead with consolidation, amalgamation or merging – whatever you want to call it – of our hospitals, and we are living that experience with Grampians Health.

Last week I spoke to a staff member who I know very well and who was one of the health promotion and disease prevention team at Grampians Health. Their entire team was sacked last Thursday. They are all women. One of them is on maternity leave and actually lives in the member for Mildura’s electorate, and she was sacked by the Labor government, who say they are all about women.

Juliana Addison interjected.

Emma KEALY: I would like to take up the interjection from the member for Wendouree, because this is exactly my point. This is the evidence. When you speak to the people who got sacked last week, that is what happened in the community. Health prevention was taken across from primary care partnerships when Labor cut them and scrapped them and took away their funding. They were moved to Grampians Health, who have now sacked them. There is no health promotion anymore, and what is the impact of that? We are going to have more people who are sicker, more people who put demand on our health system and more people who need an ambulance. It will just cost more money and have worse health outcomes for our local people.

This does not even touch other aspects about health care and the cuts to health care, the appalling outcomes and worsening outcomes for my people and people right across regional Victoria who cannot access care when they need it. Mental health locals – the only mental health service that we would have had as part of the mental health reform – are being scrapped. That would have been what delivered front-of-house services to the Hamilton community, to the Horsham community and to many communities right across the state. They have been scrapped by Labor. The first thing that Labor did when they saw the recommendations of the royal commission was to implement the mental health tax, and that will bring $1 billion into the coffers of the state government this year alone. Why aren’t they supporting the royal commission’s recommendations after making a promise to all those Victorians who gathered in the Royal Exhibition Building, many in tears because they had shared their stories, they had shared their experiences, they had lost loved ones to mental illness and mental ill health?

The promise was that Labor would fix that. They have broken that promise, and that is disgraceful. As a result we will only see worsening mental health outcomes in all of the data that we will see in years to come. It is already getting harder to see a mental health professional. We are already seeing record numbers of Victorians taking their own lives. We are already seeing record numbers of people on the alcohol and other drug residential rehab treatment waitlists. It is simply a terrible story when it comes to Victorians who need help and support, the people who are most vulnerable in Victoria, because Labor have made big promises to them and time and time again they have let them down.

Labor are increasing cost-of-living expenses. Labor are increasing the cost of doing business and putting pressure on our small businesses, which recruit so many people in our rural and regional communities. Labor have absolutely decimated the healthcare sector and people cannot get health support when and where they need it. And because of all the additional taxes and all the additional charges, which are going to pay for a great big project to service a very, very small number of people in Melbourne, Victorians are paying the price. It is pushing up the cost of living. It means they have got less chance of being able to save up a deposit to buy their own home. There are families that are wondering how they are going to keep a roof over their heads, pay the school fees, keep food on the table and make sure that they give the opportunity to their family to have positive outcomes. I grieve for all Victorians, but I particularly grieve for regional Victorians, who are paying the ultimate price for Labor’s mismanagement of the state for the past 10 years.