Book 8 - Parliament of Victoria

BUDGET PAPERS 2011–12
Tuesday, 31 May 2011 COUNCIL 1581
but there was nothing from Labor — not even the
smallest inkling of anything. I think it was Bob
Cameron, the former member for Bendigo West in the
Assembly, who said, just before he jumped ship, ‘We
might put it into a five-year master plan to see if we can
do something down the track’. We have that money on
the table for Castlemaine Secondary College.
Eaglehawk was hit by the bushfires of 2009. One of the
remarkable things to come from Eaglehawk is the
community drop-in centre called Our Place. The
coalition has put $100 000 on the table for Our Place.
That was done a month out from the election. The
organisers from Our Place in Eaglehawk went to
Jacinta Allan, the member for Bendigo East in the
Assembly, and said to her, ‘The coalition has $100 000
on the table to support Our Place, the community
drop-in centre, which helps people to organise their
own lives because they are having trouble getting their
forms filled out’. Jacinta Allan simply said, ‘No, we
will not help you’. In the lead-up to the last election
Labor was asked to match the coalition’s $100 000, and
the answer was, ‘No, we will not help you’.
An amount of $300 000 went to the Mount Alexander
Shire Accommodation and Respite Group — a group
that has been campaigning for years to try to get a
respite centre in the Mount Alexander shire — and
again for Castlemaine another $300 000. It is no
wonder that Stephen Oliver went within 2.5 per cent of
winning that seat for The Nationals because day after
day, week after week, he was out there meeting
community groups and taking their concerns to the
coalition treasury in opposition, saying, ‘I need money
for this, I need money to support these groups’. In
effect, we have put on the table a
$300 000 commitment for the Mount Alexander respite
group, which will be an enormous benefit. It is
interesting to see that Bendigo Bank has recently come
on board to support that group’s fundraising efforts.
Bendigo has the showgrounds and the exhibition centre,
and the coalition went out there months in advance of
the election and said it would provide funding of
$2 million for stage 2 of the exhibition centre
development. The government of the day did not want
to know about it. There was no contribution — —
Mr Tee — What about teachers?
Mr DRUM — no contribution, no effort at all,
Mr Tee. Do you want another blood nose? Just keep
going, because you have offered absolutely nothing for
Bendigo, which is one of the fastest growing regional
cities in Victoria. Labor had the opportunity to match
the coalition’s promise to provide $2 million for stage 2
of the exhibition centre. The people running the
exhibition centre and the showgrounds rushed off to the
government of the day and asked if it would match the
coalition’s promises, and all they received was a
straight-out and blanket ‘no’ — no to Bendigo with
Labor.
Then we look at the Bendigo Airport. In the lead-up to
the election the coalition said it would provide a
$5 million contribution as part of a three-way split to
cover a $15 million plan to redevelop the entire
Bendigo Airport. We were hoping to get $5 million out
of local government and $5 million out of the federal
government, because we were given an assurance that
that would be forthcoming. We came good with a
$5 million pledge in the lead-up to the election — an
election promise that we have honoured, just like we
have honoured all the other election promises we have
mentioned here tonight — and we cannot quite get the
feds over the line. Local government has put $5 million
aside in its next two budgets, so local government is in,
but we are having a little bit of trouble getting the
federal government on board with that development at
Bendigo Airport. However, our $5 million is locked in,
and Mr Rich-Phillips is very keen to see that project
progressed.
In relation to the Queen Elizabeth oval, which is right in
the heart of Bendigo and is Bendigo’s premier sporting
arena, the coalition has put $1 million on the table to
ensure the redevelopment of that oval to a statewide
standard. That will enable state league teams to come
and play at the oval. It will enable the surrounds to be
fixed for spectators, the scoreboard can be fixed — it
fell by the wayside because the previous government
did not provide the funding to fix it — and a second
netball court can be built because, unlike the Labor
Party, the coalition values the input of netball into
regional and country football arenas. The call from the
netball community in Bendigo was that it needed a
second netball court so it could be a truly elite-class
regional centre and a statewide, premium-class centre.
Again the answer coming back from Labor was, ‘No,
you are going to have to stick with what we have given,
$700 000’. We came over the top; we gave the people
of Bendigo what they needed to effectively get the job
done. There was also a commitment made to the
Eaglehawk football and netball club to improve its
social facilities.
We want to compare our funding for all those projects
with what we heard from the former Labor government,
which was that it did not care. It said it did not have any
money and that it was too bad.