Second Reading
Danny O’BRIEN (Gippsland South) (15:28): I am looking forward to the opportunity to speak on the Statute Law Revision Bill 2024, which is an absolute ripsnorter of a piece of legislation. But I should actually, jokes aside, echo the comments of the member for Melton in thanking the parliamentary counsel. I did not exactly pick up what the member for Melton was saying, but I am wondering who exactly has the job of going through and finding these errant commas and double full stops and the like. One of my colleagues and I were just talking about this. I assume it is the kind of thing where you have a rolling Word document that you just add all these things to, and then parliamentary counsel emails every department and says, ‘Have you got any mistakes you need fixed up?’ I am sure one of the future government speakers might like to enlighten me on exactly how this occurs. It is very difficult to speak a lot about full stops and additional words and the like, but it does give me an opportunity to speak about some of the bills that are here.
I just want to target a couple of the issues pertinent to my electorate in particular with respect to the bills that are being amended in minor ways through this legislation. But first, on a broader picture – absolutely the housing crisis issue is one in my electorate, but it is broader. The bill amends both the Building Act 1993 and the Domestic Building Contracts Act 1995. I was interested to hear the Minister for Planning in question time trying to defend the government’s housing plan and talking about creating the ‘right environment for developers to build homes’. It is difficult in question time to be able to rebut some of the points that are made, but I wonder if the minister could explain how adding additional taxes – the windfall gains tax, the additional land tax under the debt recovery plan that the government introduced last year – is helping to create an environment where people would want to invest in property. I note, as I have done a number of times in this place, that of the 53 new or increased taxes introduced by this government since 2015 around half of those have been property taxes. For the government to now say, ‘Oh, it’s just unbelievable. We’ve got this property crisis, this housing crisis, both a rental and a housing affordability crisis,’ is fundamentally bizarre. The government does not understand that if you tax housing, if you make it more expensive and if you make it more difficult for rental providers to pay their bills because you are increasing land tax so much, that is going to be passed through to the people who are trying to pay rent and buy houses. This is one of the most fundamental problems of the government not understanding the simple economics that goes with this.
Likewise coming out of question time is the issue of the timber industry, and this is one particularly close to my heart. This legislation amends the Forests Act 1958. We have seen laid bare today the failure again of the government’s forestry policy, not simply in the loss of jobs at the Maryvale mill, where Opal announced yesterday a further 220 jobs sadly will be going from the Opal business in Australia and New Zealand, and a very large number of them, I understand, from Maryvale. But why I am raising that is because although that is obviously a decision of a private company, the Maryvale mill was central to the government’s decision-making on the forestry industry. Indeed, members will recall when the then Premier announced the end of the forestry industry in 2019 he did it at a radiata pine plantation nursery in my electorate, highlighting that his decision was all about the Maryvale mill. Indeed when he copped some criticism from a union, from the CFMEU, from Michael O’Connor, he came out the next day, the then Premier, and he said, and I quote from the Age on 10 November 2019:
The notion that this package does anything other than secure up to 1000 jobs in Australian Paper is simply wrong and I can quote you the chief operating officer … who made it very clear: these jobs are secure. Up to 1000 jobs at that Maryvale mill, up to 2050.
The Premier, I highlight, was talking about Australian Paper, and in particular the plantation sector, because he knew that the government decision was shutting down the broader hardwood industry and would result in job losses there, particularly among the harvest and haul contractors and particularly among a number of the mills. So he hung his position on the Maryvale mill and said that those thousand jobs would stay.
At the end of 2022, 200 jobs were lost when Australian Paper actually closed its white paper manufacturing line, and again today we understand at least another 45 of the 220 jobs to be lost across the Opal business will be at Maryvale. That is an absolute indictment on the government’s policy. It made this policy decision to shut down the timber industry knowing that it would hurt the native hardwood sector but tried to spin it to say that it is protecting the thousand jobs in the Latrobe Valley. It has done nothing of that. Indeed the facts are on the table now. It is looking like a quarter of those jobs that the Premier said were secure up to 2050 have already gone. If that is not a failure of government policy and a failure of the people of Gippsland and the Latrobe Valley, then I do not know what is.
Continuing on a similar theme and as the neighbouring electorate to Latrobe Valley – and indeed parts of my electorate now are in Latrobe City – this bill also amends the Gas Industry Act 2001. The Gippsland South electorate is home to the vast bulk of gas production; about 95 per cent of Victoria’s gas comes from Bass Strait and comes via the Longford plant in my electorate, just south of where I live. We are facing the wind-down of that. There is no question there is going to be probably slightly more than a decade of gas production, depending on exploration and any finds that there might be between now and then – and that is always an open question. But we are certainly winding down. But there are other opportunities to supply energy to our region, and they cross both my electorate of Gippsland South and that of the member for Morwell here as well, one of which of course is the HESC project, the hydrogen energy supply chain project. That is a project which will turn brown coal into hydrogen, and it will be blue hydrogen in the sense that the carbon from that process will be captured and pumped into my electorate out to Bass Strait into natural formations under the sea.
We have got in this place the absolute policy cretins of the Greens, who are opposed to this project, and they like to say that the Labor government is supporting another coal project. Well, I really do not understand their concern with coal if you are capturing the carbon emissions, because that is what it is all about, isn’t it? Isn’t it about burning coal being the concern because it causes global warming and therefore impacts the global climate? Well, if you are capturing the emissions and putting them back where they came from – that is, under the ground – what is the problem? Either the Greens do not seem to understand that or – and I suspect this is more likely – they deliberately avoid and ignore it. In fact I have heard it time and time again in this place when they simply say things like ‘Carbon capture and storage doesn’t work; it’s never been done.’ It has been done all over the world. There are so many projects either operating now or under development with carbon capture and storage, and it is virtually universally accepted that the Gippsland Basin has some of the best formations, the best geology, for capturing that carbon.
We should get behind the HESC project, because it will actually help Gippsland set up a hydrogen industry, one that will eventually have the opportunity to utilise the proposed offshore wind farms. When they are blowing away in the middle of the day and we have got sunlight on all our solar panels, what do we do with them? We might turn that production through electrolysis into hydrogen. And yet the Greens, who are supposed to be about supporting the environment – and I must say their fellow traveller the Minister for Energy and Resources in the government – are dead opposed to this project just because it involves coal. They ought to be hung out for that, like the Australia Institute, which put out a ridiculously misleading report a couple of years ago and were still banging on about it on ABC Gippsland a couple of weeks ago, saying that this project will create more emissions but completely ignoring the fact that if it goes ahead to commercial scale, it will have to involve carbon capture and storage. They stand condemned for this rubbish.
There is so much more I could say on this wonderful piece of legislation. Sadly, I am running out of time. Roads is just an issue that I could talk about for days in this place, given the appalling state of our roads in this state, but I commend the bill to the house.