I rise today to speak on the Appropriation (2026–2027) Bill 2026 or the Victorian budget, and if you listened to the contributions by Labor members today, then you would think that all Victorians are satisfied and very happy with what is allocated within the pages of the budget. If you had a look at any social media page which links to any announcement by Labor, you would see a different story. If you read the comments on any media article, you would see a different story. If you got out of the bubble of what happens here in the Parliament, you would actually hear from people how white-hot angry they are with a Labor government that has completely forgotten about the people who elected them to govern for them.
When you hear their rhetoric about cost-of-living pressures, it is just not matching with what we are hearing in the community. There are families who are struggling more and more each and every week when it comes to the weekly grocery shop. It is becoming the most stressful thing that families have to deal with week on week. They are doing away with meals for themselves. We know that parents are doing it so hard at the moment to keep up appearances so that their kids can have food in their lunch box and can go to the school camps and so that they can make sure that they can support them in their tuition where they can. Yet the Labor budget does not deliver for these families.
You might say there is a little sugar hit here or there. But at the end of the day we are seeing little sugar hits but a massive spend outside of how much money is available. When that occurs, all it does is drive up inflation. It drives up the cost of living. It drives up the cost of your groceries every week. Labor is driving up the cost of our fuel every week. It is driving up the cost of our energy bills. Every single time we hear from the Labor government that they know about these issues, we do not see a response that makes any difference, and all we see in this budget is more spending, more debt, more Victorian taxpayer money spent on interest repayments rather than on the frontline services that we desperately need to see in Victoria.
Our people are white-hot angry. They are so angry because they are sick to death of Labor not listening and just supporting their own. They are frustrated when they look at the budget and they see that funding has been cut for the Western Highway duplication, a project that should have been completed back in 2016, but 10 years later we have still got trees growing up through culvert pipes. We have got a donga there, a workstation there, that has had the same white ute parked out the front for about the last five – before COVID anyway. I think it has recently changed to a silver ute. We have still got the fences and the security guards at the birthing tree, yet we
have got no plan going forward and no money from the Victorian government when it comes to making this road safe. It is unfair for the people who have to turn up to the accidents. It is unfair for the local community, who know that this has got to be fixed, yet Labor will not put the money there.
For those that say we need to make all these electorates marginal to make sure we get anything, there is no seat more marginal than the Ripon electorate, and they still do not prioritise that region. It is a Labor government that is out of touch and simply does not care. The Nationals will always stand up for regional Victoria. We live it, we know it and we will fight for our community’s fair share every single day. That is why we know, when we speak to people in our communities, that people are frustrated. They know that their highways are falling apart. They are so angry because they have got transmission lines being planned to go through their properties and they have not even had the opportunity to have their say.
Labor talks a lot about consultation, but what it should really be is notification. Farmers are just being told what Labor plans to do on their land without listening to their concerns. They have never, ever bothered to turn out and listen to farmers. They are frustrated because they just want their local member to turn up and listen to them and take their views back to this place, back to Parliament. Yet they do not hear from the member for Ripon, and they are very, very angry about that. They simply do not believe what they say when what they do is a completely different story.
It is exactly the same when it comes to renewables. We are getting this industrialisation of agricultural land where there is no explanation of what we get back in return or even how on earth it will deliver affordable and reliable energy – the affordable and reliable energy that every Victorian needs.
Whether you are a householder or whether you are a business, the cost of energy is going through the roof, and more and more often we are hearing from people, ‘How on earth can we ensure that we are going to have the lights on in even a year’s time?’ There are people within the energy sector who think it is astonishing we have not had blackouts yet. There simply is not enough energy planned for the state of Victoria for Victoria to get ahead. This is a government that has been completely asleep at the wheel when it comes to securing Victoria’s energy future, and it will be generations that have to deal with that, because you cannot bring new energy on board quickly and easily.
When we hear a government that condemns gas as ‘fossil gas’ and turns away all investment to unlock new gas reserves in Victoria, we know it is a government that has got its priorities all wrong. When they are simply looking at all of regional Victoria as a massive block of undeveloped land and an opportunity to roll out wind farms and solar farms and not considering what the impact will be on our agricultural productivity – the agricultural sector that now delivers more than $200 billion in economic value to our state – you have to wonder how on earth we have got to this point, and that is because we have had Labor for three terms now.
We have had a Labor government for 12 years; in fact we have had a Labor government for all but four years since 1999. That is a long time for one government to be at the wheel, and it is no wonder that backbenchers and Labor stalwarts right across the state are saying they need a break. It has been too long and we have gone too far, and this budget just proves that, because what we see are the same old lines coming out. We see more and more coming into the state coffers through taxes, and people are getting less and less. This is the story of the Allan Labor government: you pay more and you get less.
In fact we are spending now over a million dollars each and every hour on interest repayments – interest to the big banks. That is a million dollars every hour that could be spent on fixing our roads, on fixing our health services, on upgrading our schools and on expanding our public transport network so people actually can catch a bus in our region. What I would love is to have a train returning to our region and for them to actually treat Horsham and Hamilton like the regional cities that they are.
Bring back the train services. It is unfathomable that we have got one of the key things that Labor are trying to wave the flag on, that they are going to halve the cost of public transport across Victoria. That is of no help whatsoever if you have no access to public transport. It is inequitable investment, and it is not fair on those rural and regional people who rely on others to be able to get them to health appointments, to get them to school, to get them to work.
We rely on our roads, and our roads are falling apart, and you can see in the budget papers that less will be done by Labor – there will be less repair and maintenance of our roads. People are paying more in taxes, and fewer roads are being fixed. This is Labor, and that is the one thing that I will agree with the Treasurer on. She has said quite explicitly it is a Labor budget. Well, I agree wholeheartedly. It is a budget paper that outlines more and more taxes and increasing revenue from taxes and is leaning on people – Victorians and Victorian businesses – who are doing it so hard at the moment to spend more, to put their hands in their pockets and give more money to Labor, and yet they see that their opportunities are diminishing under a Labor government that simply do not know how to balance the books.
CFA volunteers are equally frustrated. The emergency services tax revenue line is twice as much as the previous fire services property levy revenue line was, so every Victorian is paying twice as much in emergency services tax as they were before, and yet we are seeing a lower investment in our fire trucks, in our stations and in our SES sheds. The volunteers are not getting the supports that they need and that they deserve and that they are paying for – and not just a little bit; they are paying a huge amount for it.
We have got simple things that would be easy for the government to fix, like unlocking the gas monopoly to western Victoria so we could actually get a pay-on-time deduction on our energy bills, get a reduction on our energy bills for being able to actually shop around and get some competition, but for 12 years Labor have refused to deal with that.
We have got issues around policing shortages right across the electorate. In far western Victoria there were only seven police on duty for a number of weeks over Easter between Dimboola and the border. There should be a dozen cops covering that roster, but there simply has not been the investment in police that ensures that we get people in rural and regional areas. It is no wonder that farm crime is surging at the moment. It is little wonder that we have got an increase in theft of cars in our townships, that people are now locking their houses for the first time ever. This might sound astonishing to those from Melbourne, but people generally have not been locking their back doors in country Victoria. Everybody does now. Everybody locks their door. They have got security systems. They are making sure that they are the frontline defence when it comes to somebody coming into their home, because everybody knows somebody who has been violated through crime. That is not the Victoria we used to have, but this is Victoria under Labor.
We know that the Nationals will always fight for a fair deal. We fight tooth and nail for it, and we do manage to get some funding for our communities. We stand by them. I am proud to have stood by the Stawell Primary School and Dunkeld Consolidated School in securing funding in this budget. We have fought so hard for the Dadswells Bridge upgrade in Dadswells Bridge and also an extra turning lane, which we will be getting in this year’s budget. We have also been fighting along the Murtoa, Glenorchy and Horsham-Lubeck roads intersection, which has been the subject of a number of horrific fatalities. It is so pleasing that after so many years of fighting, with that community – with Darren Schultz and the other CFA volunteers who turn up to the accidents at that intersection – that we have been able to secure funding for that.
But there is much, much more to be had, and we can only deliver that from government. That is why the Victorian Nationals and Liberals have already released our 10-year plan to secure Victoria’s economic future. It is a plan which is fair. It is not about cuts, as Labor would say – they are all about spin and are forgetting, I think, what they are actually elected to do, which is to make sure that they deliver for all Victorians. It actually will make sure that our children and our children’s children will have access to the same opportunities that my generation had access to. That is what is fair, that is what is equitable and that is what everybody should be fighting for.
I am enormously proud to be part of the Nationals team that will always fight for our fair share in rural and regional Victoria. We are out there in our communities – we live it and we know it. We stand with our volunteers. We stand with our workers. We stand with our businesses. We stand with the people who cannot get the support they need or the help they need. We stand by the people who cannot access health services. We stand by the people who cannot access small amounts of funding – like a CFA volunteer I spoke to last week who cannot get funding for chocks to hold their wheels up so they can safely fill up their truck in a dam. We stand up for people who have got broken rims and broken wheels and cannot afford to get them repaired, because they have damaged their rims on their roads. We know exactly what the issues are, and we will fight for that. But there is only one way we can deliver, and that is to be in government.
I have now stood in this place for three terms. This is the 12th budget that I have responded to. Each and every year we get the budget papers and we look excitedly for something. This is the thinnest budget I have ever seen. It is the thinnest budget when it comes to deliverables, but it is the fattest budget when it comes to taxes. It is the fattest budget when it comes to debt and deficit and interest repayments. It is a disappointment for every single Victorian. So I urge those on the Labor side of this chamber to have a look at the comments, to speak to the community and understand that they are unhappy – in fact they are very, very, very angry. I have never seen Victorians as angry and frustrated with government as during the COVID lockdowns.
We have got exactly the same situation going on, where Victorians feel like they have got a government which is making decisions about them, for them, without them, and it is having a massive impact on their lives – on how they run their business, on how they raise their children and on how they go about their day to-day opportunities in life. They are worried about what happens in the future. That is why the Nationals will always stand up for our fair share for regional Victoria. While we can deliver well in opposition, I look forward to the day we can deliver our own budget – (Time expired)