Matters of Public Importance
Danny O’BRIEN (Gippsland South) (16:31): I am very pleased to rise and support the matter of public importance submitted by the member for Caulfield. I want to support the member for Sunbury because I am indebted to him for enlightening the chamber on how much the government’s Big Build program is delivering for rural and regional Victoria. In Casterton they are ecstatic about the Suburban Rail Loop (SRL). In Orbost they are just waiting for the North East Link to be finished. In Mildura they are excited about the Metro Tunnel and the blowout up there. In Shepparton they cannot wait to see the West Gate Tunnel open because that is going to make a big difference to their lives as well. We get the member for Sunbury and the Premier saying the Suburban Rail Loop will be great for all Victorians. Like I said, in Cavendish they are waiting every morning for the newspaper delivery to come. They are standing outside waiting to find out the update on the Suburban Rail Loop because it is going to make a big difference in Cavendish and in Portland and in all those areas.
They are seeing this $40 billion blowout on the Big Build, and in the meantime those of us in rural and regional Victoria are driving around on goat tracks because our roads are absolutely appalling because of the management of this government. Every time there is a blowout on a major project in Melbourne, what happens? The government finds the money for it. But when we raised concerns about our local roads in the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee last year, the department said it had not met its targets on upgrading local roads because there had been a ‘unit cost increase’ in the cost of doing the roads. Did the government put any extra money in to make sure that we actually met the targets and fixed our roads? No. There was nothing for rural and regional Victoria to fix our major roads, but if there is a $10 billion blowout on the North East Link, ‘No worries, Tim, I will just sign another cheque.’ What was it, $888 million, member for Caulfield, on the Metro Tunnel? Oh yeah, we will sign up for that because we want it open in time for the election, so we will put in an extra billion dollars – no problem at all. Rural and regional Victorians are absolutely not buying this spin from the government about the Big Build because they are not seeing any benefit.
I could go through some of the projects that are not happening. The member for Ripon would like to talk about, I am sure, the Western Highway duplication at Buangor. She might say and the government might say, quite rightly, that there are reasons for that, but perhaps they could explain why the Ararat to Stawell section is not happening. The government’s Big Build website states that the planning was completed in 2013. What year are we in now? 2024, 11 years down the track and it has not progressed. Likewise the Kilmore bypass and the Traralgon bypass, member for Morwell. I think I was about 12 when the first stage of the Traralgon bypass was planned. I am 50 now and it still has not progressed. What is happening with the Yarrawonga–Mulwala bridge, member for Ovens Valley? Built in 1939, it will probably be another hundred years before that gets done too, the way we are going. The Swan Hill bridge, likewise. The north-west rail, the Murray Basin rail project – the government likes to talk about what it does for rail and what the opposition did on rail. Well, that is again a monumental catastrophe of management. And guess who was in charge of the Murray Basin rail? The Premier today. It is another one that the Premier has touched and just messed up. And that is just on transport infrastructure.
I would like to touch on a couple of things that are of small relevance in a statewide sense but really important. The bushfires occurred over the new year period in 2019–20, yet the member for Gippsland East will tell you that for some of the rebuilding projects from the bushfires, like the Thurra River bridge and the Cape Conran cabins, it is five years that we have been waiting for the government to rebuild those facilities in East Gippsland. It is taking five years to actually deliver something. The Thurra River bridge, taking you to the Croajingolong campgrounds at Thurra River, is very important for a place like Cann River – a place that has lost much of its economic base in the last 10 years because the Labor government shut down the timber industry. So what has the government done? ‘Oh yeah, we’re going to step in and look after Thurra River and Cann River. No, no, we are going on the go-slow there. We’ll get to it when we feel like it.’ The words of the then Premier saying to the member for Gippsland East that we will walk beside you in this recovery ring pretty hollow when you hear that sort of outcome. You can go through plenty of them. Sealers Cove walk at Wilsons Prom in my electorate – damaged in 2021. It will be 2025 before they are going to fix it, if you are lucky. We are seeing time and time again throughout this state where regional Victoria misses out.
A couple of years ago I asked the Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) to look at the infrastructure investment of city versus country. It was bad enough when you include the Commonwealth government contributions, but knowing, as I do and as my colleagues do, that the federal coalition government had put a lot of money into regional projects –
Members interjecting.
Danny O’BRIEN: I am talking about regional – like the Regional Rail Revival, which the current Premier likes to talk about a lot, yet it was actually the federal coalition government that funded most of it. Notwithstanding the new federal Labor government is now having to kick up another $300 million for the Gippsland line, and we still have not got the Bunyip River bridge done. We still have got Longwarry train station with a platform but no rail. Is that the case?
Wayne Farnham: Correct.
Danny O’BRIEN: This is just the state of things. Anyway, I asked the PBO to do an assessment of infrastructure spending, and he found, when you took out the Australian government contributions – this is the 2021–22 budget, mind you; this is before we had a $10 billion blowout on the North East Link and before we had the blowouts on the Suburban Rail Loop – that there were projects in the metropolitan area of $79 billion and projects in regional areas of $11 billion. I want to put that in context. That is asset investment per person in the metropolitan region of $15,000; in regional areas it is $7000. You do not hear the member for Ripon, the member for Wendouree, the member for Eureka and the member for Macedon complaining. The member for – well, you are not really regional, Yan Yean, sorry. Maybe the member for Lara might actually speak up. Where are the government regional members? I would not include you in that, Speaker, in deference of course. Where are they speaking up?
The figure I have just given per person in metropolitan Victoria shows 114 per cent more infrastructure investment than for someone in regional Victoria. As I said, that is before the $10 billion blowout on the North East Link. Imagine what those figures would be now. It is an absolute disgrace that the government is wasting this money – $40 billion of blowouts on these projects – and yet we are still waiting for things. We are waiting in my electorate for investment in Sale College and in Foster Primary School. We are waiting for a new stadium at Mirboo North primary and secondary schools. We are wanting kamikaze corner in Leongatha to be fixed up. The Minister for Roads and Road Safety is at the table. Maybe she could listen to that one and fix that too. We are waiting for erosion at Loch Sport to be finished before it wipes away houses because the government has done nothing for seven years. Yet at the same time we have $188 billion of debt and regional Victorians who are missing out on all of this investment are getting nothing, and now we are being asked to pay for that debt. We have got the increases in land tax. We have got the increases in payroll tax. We have got the schools payroll tax if you happen to send your kids to a private school. We have got the vacant residential land tax. We have got the windfall gains tax. And as of yesterday, now we have the Airbnb tax, of which 50 per cent of those Airbnbs are in regional Victoria. So we get nothing but we have got to pay extra for it and our kids are going to be saddled with $188 billion in debt.
The SRL in particular – I mean, I have been on the record in this place before saying that this in theory is a good project, the idea of having an orbital loop. In theory it is a good project. In principle it is good. In principle it is also good that I have a private island in the South Pacific, but I cannot afford that and neither can this state. This is a project that does not stack up. The federal government is showing that it does not stack up, and if this project goes ahead under this government regional Victoria will suffer again for decades at a time as it sucks investment away from us. We have got goat tracks for roads at the moment. That is only going to continue if this government continues with this project program.