Book 8 - Parliament of Victoria

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BUDGET PAPERS 2011–12 1720 COUNCIL Thursday, 2 June 2011 am suggesting that there will still be such a list in the Government Gazette, and it may even be longer. Is that not the case? Hon. R. A. DALLA-RIVA (Minister for Employment and Industrial Relations) — I understand now what Ms Pennicuik is saying. No, there will not be this convoluted and confusing list. It will be dealt with in a way that respects what the individual shires want. Clearly the Government Gazette will indicate which days or part-days will be applied for each shire or parts of that shire. If a shire council is silent, then the default public holiday will be Melbourne Cup Day. Ms PENNICUIK (Southern Metropolitan) — There will still be a list published in the Government Gazette of those places that are not having Melbourne Cup Day as their default holiday so everybody knows in which locality the public holidays are. Is that not the case? Hon. R. A. DALLA-RIVA (Minister for Employment and Industrial Relations) — I am clear on this. There is not going to be one big and confusing list as outlined here. Ministers gazette all the time, so it will depend on what is in front of them. If a council decides to write to the minister in March or April next year in anticipation of a Melbourne Cup Day substitution, then that will go in. This is about the community having a say about when it wants its holiday. It is not about whether Ms Pennicuik is interested in a long-winded list. This is about what is important for communities and businesses and about trying to make sure we do not wind down agricultural shows like the former government did. The DEPUTY PRESIDENT — Order! Ms Pennicuik, have we long to go on this same point? Ms PENNICUIK (Southern Metropolitan) — Not long to go. I ask the minister whether or not it is true that every time a new public holiday is flagged under clause 4 it will appear in the Government Gazette. Hon. R. A. DALLA-RIVA (Minister for Employment and Industrial Relations) — Yes, but it will not be the convoluted and confused list we had before. Clause agreed to; clause 5 agreed to. Reported to house without amendment. Report adopted. Motion agreed to. Read third time. Third reading BUDGET PAPERS 2011–12 Debate resumed from 31 May; motion of Hon. D. M. DAVIS (Minister for Health): That the Council take note of the budget papers 2011–12. Mr O’DONOHUE (Eastern Victoria) — I am pleased to contribute to the take-note motion on the budget papers. In doing so I would like to congratulate the government on handing down its first budget, which it did in a shorter time than is normal for a government in its first term, given the timing of the election. I would like to thank the Victorian public service because obviously with a change of government it is also a transition time for the public service with new priorities and policies to be implemented. Public servants have been professional and courteous in any dealings I have had with them, and they have done their utmost to assist the new government. I thank them for that. This debate has taken place over several days, and I have been listening with interest to the contributions of speakers from the opposition. I would like to take up a couple of points from those contributions and to talk about some of the assertions made. In his contribution, Mr Scheffer — and I am pleased to see him here this afternoon — made a number of assertions — — Mr Scheffer interjected. Mr O’DONOHUE — I will get to that, Mr Scheffer. He made some assertions about non-delivered promises. He asserted that Koo Wee Rup was being neglected because all that was in the budget was a feasibility study for natural gas for Koo Wee Rup rather than the extension. I will read part of a media release from the member for Bass in the other place, Ken Smith, dated 3 November 2010. It states: Bass MP Ken Smith said the $150 000 study was the first requirement in the process of getting gas connected to the new area. It also says: Natural gas for Koo Wee Rup is one step closer with an announcement by the Liberal-Nationals coalition that it will fund a feasibility study on bringing it to the town. It was a very clear commitment that a feasibility study would be funded. Yes, we would all like to see natural gas brought to the town. After 11 years of a Labor government there is no natural gas in Koo Wee Rup, and we would like to see natural gas there. But we promised what we could deliver, and in this budget that feasibility study is being committed to.
BUDGET PAPERS 2011–12 Thursday, 2 June 2011 COUNCIL 1721 Mr Scheffer also referred to the Somerville police station. It was a commitment of the government to deliver that in its first term. I can tell Mr Scheffer that there is funding to commence that process, and that a Somerville police station will be built and open before the next election in line with the commitment of the then opposition and now government. Working through the contributions of some of the other speakers, Mr Pakula basically just recited some questions he had put at the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee and the responses he got from the ministers at the time. There was nothing more and nothing less; it was a very limited contribution. Mr Tee gave some generalities about various issues, but he also contradicted himself. On the one hand he criticised the government for referring to externalities beyond its control, such as GST funding being slashed by the federal Labor government, and on the other hand he spoke about externalities himself, such as the high Australian dollar and the two-speed economy. He contradicted himself in what was a very weak contribution. But perhaps the best contribution, or the one I would like to highlight the most, was from the former Treasurer and now Leader of the Opposition, Mr Lenders, because in his quite bizarre budget response he spoke about Juan Peron and made other bizarre comparisons with the Baillieu coalition government. It made me think about the contribution made by Mr Rich-Phillips on behalf of the then opposition as the lead speaker this time last year when he spoke about the growth in spending on an annual basis. He compared the number of employees required before payroll tax was levied, on average, at the time the Kennett government left office in 1999 with the numbers under the former regime. We saw none of that from Mr Lenders. There was no analysis of the facts or of the numbers. It is interesting that whilst he was the Treasurer, Mr Lenders used to personalise his attacks against Mr Wells, allege that Mr Wells had caused a run on banks and that Mr Wells had done all sorts of things. The reality was that Mr Wells, on behalf of the coalition, costed the promises made by the coalition before the election. Treasury ticked off those promises, ticked off that the promises made by the coalition were accurate — and that was with the meagre resources of the opposition. But interestingly if we look at Mr Lenders’s performance since he has had the apparatus of government removed, we see that his performance has diminished significantly. I will take the house to a story in the Age of 22 November written by Peter Ker, and I will quote parts of the article. The title of the article is ‘Lenders feels the heat as pressure forces a fumble’, and it states: He was picked as Treasurer because he’s got a ‘safe pair of hands’, but John Lenders had fumble fingers in several media performances at the weekend. The pain began on Friday when — in an attack on Ted Baillieu over water policy — Lenders got his dates wrong by three years. The article goes on: While anyone can misspeak under pressure, few can make a hash of things like Lenders went on to do at the stamp duty launch. Asked a simple question about how many people Labor expected to benefit from the policy, Lenders turned a friendly half-volley into 9 minutes of media hell. Unable to offer an estimate, the Treasurer opted for a very ‘macro’ view of the policy’s merits, declaring that ‘every Victorian will benefit’. When the media pack made it clear they would not be fudged, Lenders offered a broad collection of historical numbers, leaving it to Age journalist David Rood to offer some quick calculations. A stumbling Lenders immediately accepted Rood’s calculations, but when asked to restate the number Rood had come up with, Lenders was unable to repeat it. The feisty conference ended with Lenders telling the media in a shrill voice that he would no longer ‘play your games’, and that Liberal Treasury spokesman Kim Wells needed to be put through the same sort of scrutiny. We have seen the former Treasurer since that disastrous media performance fail to deliver as Leader of the Opposition and we have seen the opposition fail to deliver in general its alternative for the people of Victoria. They have failed to budget to this point for any concrete plans as to how they would do things differently. All we have seen are generalised attacks about issues without any substance, without any particularity and without any vision for the future. However, back to the budget that has been delivered. I am very proud to be part of the coalition government that has delivered this budget which delivers to the people of Victoria the commitments the coalition made in very challenging fiscal circumstances, with an economy that has had external shocks as a result of natural disasters and that has had the commonwealth government axe funding to Victoria. That has presented significant fiscal challenges. Despite those fiscal challenges the coalition government is delivering on its commitments. Looking at my electorate of Eastern Victoria Region, I am particularly pleased that a range of significant commitments that we made and that we took to the election — and that Labor failed to match, I might add,
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