Book 8 - Parliament of Victoria

GOVERNMENT: ELECTION COMMITMENTS
1630 COUNCIL Wednesday, 1 June 2011
He should be trying to work as hard as he possibly can
for the betterment of this state.
We have brought down a responsible budget. It is a
caring budget. It looks after those who many members
on this side of the chamber have acknowledged are
vulnerable and in severe states of disadvantage. They
have been looked after in this budget. We will ensure
that we generate regional growth through the Regional
Growth Fund. We have made sure that a responsible
decision has been made for every aspect of this budget.
We just wish that the opposition had taken across to the
opposition benches the same line of promoting Victoria
that it took when in government as opposed to the line
of questioning and the line of attack that it now takes.
The Labor Party has just two members of Parliament in
the chamber today to discuss one of its own motions. I
think that is quite indicative of the way it operates. I
now see there are four Labor Party and Greens
members.
Hon. P. R. Hall — There are two Labor members
and two Greens.
Mr DRUM — That is about right; it is about even
there. Without any further ado I conclude my remarks
by wishing that the former government and now
opposition would start promoting Victoria, getting
behind some of our policies and acknowledging the
better infrastructure projects that are happening
throughout the state, and stop this whingeing, whining
and negativity.
Hon. M. P. PAKULA (Western Metropolitan) —
Mercifully I am not going to replicate Mr Drum’s rant.
I have to say there was nothing particularly surprising
about any of it because it is the same speech I have
heard for the last four years. Mr Drum appears to have
missed the fact that he is now in government.
This government promised a number of things to the
Victorian community. One of the things it promised
was that it would be a spin-free government. It
promised that spin was a thing of the past and that there
would be no more glossy brochures and no more drops
to the media, like the ones we have seen almost every
day this week. The worst spin of all is saying one thing
and doing something else, which is what this
government has shown itself to be a master of in the
last six months.
The government likes to claim that the budget delivered
on all its promises. The government likes to claim that
it is open, accountable and transparent. It made that its
mantra in the lead-up to the last election — ‘open,
transparent and accountable’ — and I will come back to
that a bit later in my contribution. The government likes
to say there have been 150 days of action. The reality is
very different.
I will not go over the ground that Mr Lenders went over
in his contribution, but I agree with him when he says
that probably the greatest broken promise is the
promise to Victoria’s teachers. That was the promise to
make them not just the highest paid in the nation on
average but the highest paid at each and every
classification level. We went through this at the Public
Accounts and Estimates Committee with the Minister
for Higher Education and Skills, who is in the chamber.
The minister’s response to pretty much every question
about this issue, both in the committee hearing and
previously in this house, has been, ‘There is an EBA
process going on, and it is a matter for negotiation. The
government is not going to pre-empt the EBA process’.
It is as if somehow the EBA (enterprise bargaining
agreement) process has come as a surprise to the new
minister. It has come as a surprise to the government. It
is as if when the commitment was made prior to the
election Mr Hall did not know he would have to engage
in an EBA process. Then all of a sudden he has made
his way to the Treasury benches and said, ‘Oh dear, I
might have a bit of a problem delivering this promise,
because I have to go through this heretofore unknown
EBA process’.
The EBA with the teachers unions and with teachers
more generally has been part of the process for a couple
of decades now, for as long as there has been enterprise
bargaining and since we ended national wage cases.
The commitment was made by the now government in
full knowledge of the fact that an EBA process would
have to be gone through, but the commitment was
made nevertheless. It is, as Mr Lenders says, not just a
commitment that the government is not going to
honour, it is a commitment that the government never
intended to honour. It is a commitment that the
government knew was beyond its budgetary restraints,
and it is a commitment that was given for the sole
purpose of electoral gain without any intention of
honouring it.
There have been a whole lot of similarly cynical
promises made by the now government. We all recall in
the lead-up to the last election the promise that there
would be 500 new prison beds without the need for a
new prison. ‘We might need to look at a new prison’,
said the coalition, ‘but that will be down the track, after
we have delivered the 500 new beds’. What do we now
find? The Minister for Corrections comes along to the
budget estimates hearings and says, ‘We can deliver
108 prison beds at Langi Kal Kal and Dhurringile, but
for the other 392 we are going to need to build a new