Second Reading
Danny O’BRIEN (Gippsland South) (11:42): Twelve long years we have had of this budget mismanagement, and it has accelerated in the last three or four, particularly under the leadership of the current Premier. We have seen 12 years now, though, of broken fiscal promises. The Leader of the Opposition just highlighted exactly one of the sand beds that this budget is built on: it makes heroic assumptions about the management of expenses and says it will keep the costs to 2.5 per cent when in the last two years costs have grown by 7.5 per cent. This is the sort of spin and publicity that we are getting from this government on the budget, a budget that is all about how we deliver services and infrastructure to the people of Victoria. That is what the budget is meant to be, and it seems to be lost on those opposite that if you are spending so much on interest and on debt, you cannot spend as much as you would like on those services. You cannot pay teachers, police, nurses and PSOs, you cannot fix our roads, you cannot build new hospitals – all of those things – if you have lost control of the finances.
There are those opposite who seem to think, as the previous speaker indicated, that it is all just coming together beautifully and we are just doing so much and nobody ever has to worry about how to pay for it all. That is the problem that we have had with Labor all along, and particularly this Labor government, which has seen the share of debt rise as a percentage of gross state product from around 6 per cent in 2014 to now 24, 25 per cent. People of a certain vintage will remember the Cain–Kirner governments. People sometimes say to me, ‘Is it as bad as it was then?’ and I have to say it is worse. At the peak of the Cain–Kirner governments’ financial mismanagement debt as a percentage of gross state product got to about 16 per cent, and now we are at 24, 25 per cent. That highlights just how bad it has got under this government – $200 billion of debt.
Debt in itself is not a problem. Debt is important. We use debt all the time to help build, to help invest, but it is when you lose control of it that the problem comes. With $200 billion of debt we are now heading for more than $1 million an hour in interest repayments. Just think how many teachers, nurses, police and PSOs that could employ, for example, or the work it could do in fixing our roads, which the government seems to think are still not really an issue. With the $1 million in interest an hour, the government has allocated this year allegedly $1.04 billion to road maintenance. We could double that in six weeks of interest payments – double the spending on roads in just six weeks – at $1 million an hour. That is the waste that we see from this government and the missed opportunity that occurs because the government has lost control of the finances.
We are spending more on interest – $8.9 billion this year, rising to $11.8 billion in the out years – than on the police budget, the Ambulance Victoria budget and all kindergarten spending combined, and we still have $1 billion left over. That is the problem that we have in this state. We are heading for $11.8 billion of interest spending out of a budget of about $100 billion, so more than 10 per cent of our budget is going on interest expenses. The government and the Treasurer stand up there and have the temerity to say, ‘We’re in surplus, and we’ve delivered a fiscally responsible budget.’ That is simply not the case, and anyone with an inkling of fiscal knowledge would be able to tell the government that.
What does this mean for regional Victoria? It means a continuation of the neglect of and the avoidance of spending in regional Victoria that has come to characterise this government. We have asked the Parliamentary Budget Officer to go back to 2021–22 and to calculate the percentage of infrastructure spending in regional Victoria versus our population percentage. In the first years it was 13 per cent. In the last couple of years it has been 12 per cent of infrastructure spending going to regional Victoria against our population share of 25 per cent. That means regional Victoria is being ripped off. Regional Victoria is being dudded by this government. We are getting 12 per cent of spending on infrastructure versus our population share of 25 per cent. The Parliamentary Budget Officer is doing that work again, and I am sure based on what we have seen in this budget so far that that figure is not going to change. In fact it might even go down given the amount of spending. The only thing that might save the government is that on certain things, as the Leader of the Opposition pointed out, the government is still saying ‘to be confirmed’. When I say certain things, I mean only the biggest infrastructure spend project in the history of the country, the Suburban Rail Loop. The government are still saying, ‘We’re not actually sure how much it’s going to cost.’ That might actually make the government’s figures look a bit better if that is not factored in, but we know that regional Victoria is not getting its fair share.
I want to particularly pick up some of the spin that has been raised ahead of this budget by this government. Every single regional Victorian, when you talk to them, the first thing that they complain about is the state of the roads. We hear it time in and time out. We hear it not only in regional Victoria; we hear it in the suburbs, and we even hear it in the inner city. We have had the government come out with the latest of a series of media releases talking about a big road maintenance spending blitz and record investment, yet when you look at what the government are actually doing, they are doing less. For example, if you go to the performance measures in the budget papers, ‘road area major patched’ in outer metropolitan Melbourne two years ago was 35,000 square metres. This year it is 14,000 square metres. The ‘road area major patched’ in regional Victoria two years ago was 566,000 square metres. We are spending more. What do you think we are getting this year? 74,000 square metres of roads patched. The government are saying they are going to fill 200,000 potholes. How many potholes must there be if we are going to do less –
Jade Benham interjected.
Danny O’BRIEN: There must be too many, member for Mildura. Even the minister herself said there are too many. That is one thing. The government like to say, ‘We’re doing less road area major patch because we are focusing more on road rehabilitation.’ Let us have a look at that figure then.
Road rehabilitation and resurfacing in outer suburban Melbourne fell from 802,000 square metres to 496,000 square metres. And the road area resurfaced or rehabilitated in regional Victoria – the government says, ‘We are spending 70 per cent of the road maintenance money in regional Victoria.’ Actually, 76 per cent of the roads are in regional Victoria, but let us leave that aside for a moment. In 2022–23 the government was resurfacing 12 million square metres of road; this year, less than 3 million – a 75 per cent reduction. In that year the government’s budget said $441 million on road maintenance. This year they are supposedly spending over a billion, and we are getting less.
Martin Cameron interjected.
Danny O’BRIEN: That is a good question, member for Morwell: where is the money going? We have got a government that is allegedly spending more, and yet we are actually getting less when it comes to roads. That is the concern that we have on this side. I know when I talk to road builders they are not sure where the money is going, because it is simply not coming to them. Every single Victorian knows the truth: when you look at the roads, they are in an appalling state.
When I look at another area of my responsibility, the emergency services portfolio, this year’s budget shows that Victorians will be slugged $6.8 billion over the forward estimates on the emergency services tax. If you continue the line of what was being levied under the former fire services property levy, that is double what Victorians previously were paying on the fire services levy. And as the Leader of the Opposition said, scrapping that tax on average will save Victorians $84 per year. We know that our fire services in particular and our emergency services need more investment. Are they getting it, though, under this $6.8 billion – no, they are not. We had the minister come out before the budget and say, ‘We are spending $100 million on new fire trucks for the CFA.’ One little thing they forgot to mention, member for Ovens Valley – they forgot to mention that is over 10 years. So we are seeing the spin. We are seeing double the amount levied on Victorians, but that money is not going to our emergency services workers and volunteers on the front line. That is why we will scrap the tax, go back to the fire services property levy, save Victorians money and ensure that the CFA, and Fire Rescue Victoria in particular, get the resources and the equipment that they need.
I want to turn briefly to my electorate of Gippsland South and express my disappointment again at the lack of funding for particularly Sale College. It is the number one issue in my electorate. To my great surprise, back in 2021 the then member for Monbulk, the Minister for Education, actually provided funding for a master plan, and that master plan has been completed. Land has been purchased for a new single-site Sale College campus, but now four years in a row since that was finalised we have got no money for it. It is not completed. That is the dividend of the bad economic management. We could fund that in a couple of days with the interest repayments that this government has signed us up to. So we missed out on that. We missed out on Foster fire station, which we have been campaigning for for years, and on Korumburra fire station. We did have some wins: at long last Mirboo North fire station, which I have been campaigning for since 2017, which the Premier visited in 2024 and which the Treasurer visited at the time, has finally been funded, although we still do not have an actual site for it, so when it will happen is anyone’s guess. We did finally get a new boat for the Port Welshpool coastguard, and kamikaze corner in Leongatha has got some funding four years after the Nationals actually committed funding for design and planning for that corner, which is the intersection of the Bass Highway and Strzelecki Highway – everyone’s worst intersection in South Gippsland. Finally we have got some money just for design and planning, and, like Sale College, we are still waiting on actual funding to get it fixed.
I also want to talk about broken promises. We have seen a number either in or impacting my electorate. The 2022–23 budget, the budget before the last election, provided $7 million for Yinnar Primary School, which at the time was in the electorate of Morwell but came into Gippsland South at that election. Four years later there has still been nothing spent; nothing has actually happened. Likewise, $11 million was committed to upgrades at the Leongatha Secondary College; four years later still nothing has been spent. Last election the then Premier promised to build a new West Gippsland Hospital and promised to redevelop Bass Coast hospital. In this budget, four years down the track, after no funding from previous budgets, we still have no funding. West Gippsland Hospital particularly impacts the south-west of my electorate. It is part of that catchment area. Instead we have got the government spending money on upgrading the existing hospital, throwing good money after bad when we know that we need to rebuild West Gippsland Hospital on a new site. It is all ready to go. The land is there. There are cows grazing on it at the moment, because once again in this year’s budget it has been left alone by this government.
I turn, as I come to the end, to what the alternative is, and we have just heard in great detail the alternative from the Leader of the Opposition and the Shadow Treasurer. We have a plan to get the budget back in control, to get it back in the black, and to also send a signal to the business community that Victoria is ready to invest again when it comes to a Liberals and Nationals government. We have announced that we will progressively reincrease the thresholds for land tax. It is currently at $50,000. We will go up to $100,000 in our first budget. People raise this with me all the time. We will increase the payroll tax thresholds so that more small businesses are not penalised for trying to put staff on, for actually trying to employ Victorians. To pay for this and many others we will institute a hiring freeze, which the Parliamentary Budget Office estimates will save us $22 billion over 10 years. It is a hiring freeze. Anyone who has a job in the public service now will continue to have a job under us, unlike under Labor, who have sacked not hundreds but thousands of public servants. It is all right when they do it, but when we say there will be a freeze, they have something against that. There is so much waste. There is so much mismanagement. The Nationals and Liberals will get it back under control and make sure regional Victoria gets our fair share.