I am pleased to rise and speak on this bill. This is an important bill that clarifies and strengthens the regulation of timber harvesting and illegal firewood collection in Victorian state forests, and it is amending a number of pieces of legislation. It responds to a number of concerns about the regulation of timber harvesting throughout Victoria. I have to say it has had an impact in the area I live in, and I will come to that in more detail as I go on.

It is the result of an independent review of timber harvesting regulation that was completed in 2018. The bill places new penalties on unauthorised timber harvesting operations. It increases penalties, which is something that is very important and something that I know the department and Parks Victoria have been calling for for quite a while, particularly in relation to the taking of firewood illegally. The bill increases the time period available to bring charges for an offence from two years up to three years. It places greater accountability on VicForests for actions of its contractors if they breach the offence of unauthorised timber harvesting operations. The bill expands the power for the Secretary of the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning to seek injunctions of various kinds, a broader power than has previously been there.

The 2018 Independent Review of Timber Harvesting Regulation report recommended new powers and protections be given to authorised officers to be able to require production of documents. This is an important aspect of the legislation too. It allows for newer mapping tools to be used and also harmonises legislative provisions relating to VicForests’s compliance with the Code of Practice for Timber Production 2014.

The illegal taking of firewood in my electorate has been a very big issue for the last 12 months or so. I have had a number of constituents come into my office who live on the edge of Reedy Swamp or Gemmill Swamp down by Loch Garry and who hear chainsaws going throughout the night. When they go and investigate in the morning they are finding huge trees that have been logged. It appears to be some sort of illegal firewood gathering activity where large amounts of firewood are being gathered, put in trucks and brought to Melbourne to sell to the public who need wood for fire. This is highly illegal. I have seen pictures of some of the trees that have been cut down. They were really huge old-growth trees in some instances. It has been very concerning to members of my community. People have taken it upon themselves to go down at other times in daylight to video this sort of behaviour and have provided that sort of evidence to the department, so I think people in my community are very keen to see some successful prosecutions out of this. I would say that this piece of legislation certainly increases the penalties for that sort of behaviour, but let us hope it also creates more ability to prove the offences. Some of these tools that are effectively being brought in through this legislation may also help with some of the investigations and capturing people, because I think very often there is a good idea of what is going on but it is hard to gather together the proof that is needed.

The Northern Victorian Firewood & Home Heating Project report was published in 2018. That was an important piece of work that identified people in our northern Victorian community who actually rely on firewood for a number of reasons. This might sound surprising, but out of all households in northern Victoria, firewood is the primary source of heat for 51 per cent of the population. Now, this report also looked at vulnerable communities in northern Victoria, and it found that 55 per cent had no other source of heating, 14 per cent rely on firewood for cooking, 7 per cent rely on firewood for heating water and 43 per cent had to collect their firewood from public land.

So the issue of firewood collection for regional communities remains very important; you see that level of dependency that there still is in our communities, particularly for those people who have no other source of heating. I have the Barmah forest and the Barmah National Park in my electorate, and I often get representations from people who live up in Nathalia and Barmah, bordering the forest, about a number of vulnerable families. I know Peter Newman has talked to me about the very aged woman who is a neighbour of his for whom he collects firewood and leaves for her because that is the only form of heating and indeed cooking that she uses.

There is still quite a need out there, and I know that Parks Victoria at times will say that they are concerned that there is not enough firewood in available spaces. Over the last few years it has been a concern to a number of people that when firewood collection areas are declared, the closest one might be way up in the Gunbower forest or somewhere like that, which really makes it very difficult for local communities to access it if they do not have their own vehicles, trailers and suitable equipment to do it.

I think it is time that some serious thought is put into how we look after those vulnerable communities. No doubt that report that has identified those groups of people will be the instigator of that. I hope that some solutions can be achieved to really assist families, because our regional communities, we know, are ageing communities, and they are unlikely to switch to new ways of doing things.

We saw the rollout of natural gas to Nathalia, probably about four years ago, and I could not help but think at the time what a great pity it was that we were spending so much money on rolling out gas when the money that that costed could probably quite easily have been translated to solar on every rooftop in a town the size of Nathalia. That would have allowed people to use all the existing appliances they had. I believe the uptake of gas has not been terrific in that town, because you need a gas oven and you need a gas heater—it really changes the way you do things—whereas solar would have been just a really nice way of enabling people to continue to use those appliances that they had, which were electric appliances. Sometimes there is a bit of short-termism in all of this. As it stands at the moment it has created a circumstance in a town like Nathalia where you have got some people on gas and some on electricity. And what will the uptake of solar be? It is a bit of a dilemma in a town like that.

I had occasion over the holidays to read a book called Barkskins, an incredible book about the history of timber harvesting and logging in North America and how way back in those early days of the colonisation of North America the reliance on timber was so great, the wealth that could be derived from it was so great and the destruction of so many huge forests was so great. We have seen so much of that happen in our own country, because for so long timber was the only product that we could rely on. And I think of the historic times with the Barmah forest. All of those forests were cleared for red gum timber to build railways, to build ships and to build wharves; the wharves in Echuca are red gum.

The need for that sort of timber at that time was great, but it has left our forests often just with new growth, not like they once were and now much more in need of care. And they very often are not getting the level of care they need. It is incumbent upon governments to take something like the Barmah National Park, an iconic red gum forest—Ramsar-listed—to really preserve it and bring it back to its former glory to the extent that it can. It has management plans which are about to be released, and some of those will be met with some concern in local areas, concern about whether people will have to pay to get into them, whether they will be able to camp the way they used to camp and whether they will be more regulated. All these things are important issues, and I commend the bill to the house.

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Statement on Parliamentary Committee Report – I am pleased to rise today to make a contribution on the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee’s report that was tabled back in October 2019. In speaking on this report I want to refer to chapter 8, which deals with findings of the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning. The area that I wish to speak to relates to the water portfolios generally.

We are well aware that the Minister for Water has a number of key portfolio areas and maintains accountability in relation to the Victorian Environmental Water Holder, the Victorian catchment management authorities and a range of other Victorian water corporations.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! Could I ask the member for Shepparton to clarify which report in October?

Ms SHEED: It is the 2019–20 budget estimates.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Thank you.

Ms SHEED: There were many topics discussed during the hearings, and I draw attention particularly to the fact that the Victorian government has secured $29 million in commonwealth funding to enable the first stage of the Victorian Murray Floodplain Restoration Project to get underway. This is a really worthy project that is designed to contribute environmental outcomes to the Murray-Darling Basin plan and deliver a range of benefits right across nine sites along the Murray River and throughout northern Victoria, but there is a really serious anomaly in all of this that I wish to draw the house’s attention to. While many of these works are being undertaken jointly between the commonwealth and many Victorian water authorities, we see on our own front door in Shepparton the very significant damage that is occurring to the Goulburn River. The Murray-Darling Basin Authority has taken it on itself to override the Victorian minister’s authority and has taken steps to demand that 50 000 megalitres of water a day be provided by way of inter-valley transfer down the river. The negative impacts of this are enormous, and steps must be taken to stop it. It would seem that Victoria, which in the scheme of water policy across the whole eastern seaboard has really been the good citizen and has done the right thing by downstream communities—has been metred, has delivered water in a way that really abides by most of the rules—is becoming the victim of bad behaviour from others.

Just last week in the lower Goulburn River at Murchison it was running at 1.8 metres. Its normal, environmentally safe flow for this time of year in February would be about 50 centimetres, so it is running at four times the height it normally would—and it is cold, and it is high, and all that water is destroying the fish, the river red gums and the river banks and leaving the Goulburn Valley. The Murray-Darling Basin Authority needs to stop this. It is a breach of both federal and state environmental legislation. The Goulburn—the lower Goulburn—is one of the last strongholds anywhere in the world for trout cod, silver perch and Murray spiny crays, not to mention Murray cod. It is now being trashed and made into an irrigation ditch with cold summer flows.

There is a particular irony in all this because of the fact that the Victorian government is going to build a fish hatchery just out of Shepparton to deal with the challenge to so many of our native fish. The current operations of the Goulburn River by the Victorian government and the direction being taken by the Murray-Darling Basin Authority really will make this almost a senseless exercise if something is not done about the way the river is being used. Environmental works in the form of planting of native grasses all along our rivers are going to be—are being—damaged as we speak, and taxpayers money is effectively being thrown away while all the works that have been done to make the river more environmentally safe are being effectively washed away.

It is time the Victorian government stood up to the Murray-Darling Basin Authority and the federal government. The Victorian government has been the good guy for too long, and it is time the Victorian government takes on the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, takes legal proceedings and demands that something be done to protect our rivers here—particularly while we see northern New South Wales right now flood plain harvesting, into huge dams, irrigation water for themselves. The water has not even reached Menindee in the Darling River yet. We have seen pictures of the fish kills. There is something terribly wrong with water management in this country. It is our most precious resource and we do not know what to do about it. It is time that the Victorian government imposed some of the rules that it itself abides by on others. We are seeing massive foreign-owned almond plantations being grown down beyond the Murray choke and water forced down the choke. These developments, while harming our environment— (Time expired)

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I am pleased to have the opportunity to make a contribution on this bill. It seems like in some ways it has been a very long time coming because women’s issues have been on the agenda for so long. I think back to the suffragettes and all those people in the last century and the century before who in some cases gave up their lives to fight for the right to vote and the right to own property—the right to do so much. In my lifetime, I remember in the early 1970s joining the Women’s Electoral Lobby and being involved in women’s lib and all these things. And then things go quiet a bit, and now we are in a stage where people are seeing the need to entrench this sort of legislation in the law so that it creates a framework that we can go forward with. I think that is really what this bill does. It is an impetus to everyone to think more about gender issues, about equality, and that is really the reason I support the bill.

It enshrines in legislation that ‘defined entities’, being the public sector, councils and universities, take positive action towards achieving gender equality, and it requires them to promote gender equality in their policies, their programs and their services. The bill also establishes the public sector gender equality commissioner. I agree with the member for Geelong that that is an important issue. Somebody needs to be overlooking what is going on, providing the sorts of information and frameworks that organisations will need to comply with through the legislation.

On other aspects of the bill, it requires all of those organisations I just mentioned to undertake gender impact assessments. They need to address workplace gender inequality by preparing gender equality action plans every four years, with a requirement for organisations subject to the bill to report every two years and to make reasonable and material progress in the workplace. They are required to report on the progress of the actions that they identify in those impact assessment statements.

Sometimes these things might seem like it is all over-regulation and all too hard and difficult to manage, but I think we only need to look back over a range of legislation that has come in over many years, whether it be the Victorian WorkCover Authority, WorkSafe Victoria—people used to die on worksites on a regular basis. We addressed that. We have road rules to address the issues around road safety. We have organisations that monitor and deal with that and do a lot of educational work to bring people along with the sort of legislation that gets passed, and I really see this is just an extension of that. The bill will allow the Governor in Council to make regulations for or with respect to any manner or thing associated with the bill.

Then we come to prescribed entities, which really can take it, I believe, outside the scope of those organisations that I named before. Organisations with 50 employees or more can come within the scope of the bill. I assume that those smaller organisations have been left out because of the regulatory workload that might impose for some businesses and in rural and regional areas, but I would hope that the general tenor of it throughout all organisations is adopted. Certainly I know, as a lawyer in private practice who had two children during that time and had bassinets under desks while I was seeing clients and doing all sorts of things, you can manage all sorts of things, and I certainly employed quite a few women over my years in practice during those times. You can have flexibility; you can have flexible working hours; you can work at night instead of during the day if you need to. So there are many ways of achieving it, and it is really just about having the flexibility. But in this case the legislation is actually creating an onus, and I think that is a good thing because so many people will always try and slide away from these sorts of issues.

I support the bill and what it stands for. Women comprise two-thirds of Victoria’s public sector and apparently have an 11 per cent pay gap—same work, same job—and that seems to me to be quite extraordinary in this day and age. So I am proud to be a woman in this political field here in the Victorian Parliament. I notice that the Parliamentary Elections (Women Candidates) Act 1923 received royal assent in 1924, and that act saw Lady Millie Peacock become the first female member of the Victorian Parliament. When you look around the Victorian Parliament now, it is really amazing to see the difference. Just seeing the member for Lowan before, very pregnant, talking about her experience, about the fact that she will be having a baby here in Parliament—you know, coming with her at times—and that she now feels that that is something she is supported to do; that is a terrific thing. We have seen many other women, even just in the five years I have been here, pregnant and bringing babies along with them and managing this really important role of representing our communities.

I cannot help but reflect on rural issues when I think about this bill. I was just recently at the International Dairy Week in Tatura and spoke to a group of women in the evening. In my lifetime farmers wives were called farmers wives, when really all they were were farmers. That has really changed. I think it is just a great thing that farmers are now farmers, whether they are men or women. It is that social change that comes along. If someone now says, ‘Well, she’s a farmer’s wife’, we glare at them; everyone would glare at them, because that is simply not acceptable. They are out there doing everything that the men do and have a really significant role in the management of farms. It is a really significant reflection, and just walking around in that huge arena with all these magnificent cows were so many women leading the cows, grooming the cows and taking a really active part in that whole dairying industry. It is very much an industry where women take a very significant role. To all the women who have gone before us, in so many fields, I think we really have a debt of gratitude to them, because they have made every step of the way that bit easier for us, and here we are now passing legislation that really recognises a lot of the hard work that has previously been done.

The bill seeks to remove the systemic causes of gender inequality in policies, programs and services in our workplaces, and I think without some form of target, then that notion of gender equality becomes quite hard to really take up, keep at front of mind and pursue. I recall being on other boards when we had to talk about carbon emissions. You had to actually have evidence that you were doing something to achieve a certain amount of carbon emissions reduction at one time in history. A lot of these things come and go, but that was no less a burden. This is even more significant, in that it is about relations between the genders, and it is about women having an opportunity to go forward.

The bill, I think, sort of proceeds in some ways a lot of the work that has been done. When I think about the district of Shepparton I can refer to steps that have already been taken. In 2018 the Greater Shepparton City Council developed the Gender Equity Strategy and Action Plan 2018–2020, really as an internal document and a tool to sort of encourage workplace equality and foster cultural change. Moira shire, in my electorate, appointed an officer specifically for that task. The Greater Shepparton Family Violence Prevention Network, as part of the global 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence, held an event that really promoted the notion of gender equality and being able to talk about it openly. The Greater Shepparton Women’s Charter Advisory Committee is a really active organisation that tries to promote more women going into leadership roles, into local government and also into workplaces, community groups and local boards of management. There are many organisations in our region, I am pleased to say, because I think often in rural areas people think we are behind the times. But there is actually a lot going on out there, and we are right up with it and working hard towards those things.

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Question without notice – My question is for the Minister for Transport Infrastructure. Minister, what is the current state of the stage 2 upgrade to the Seymour–Shepparton line, and when can we expect that work to be completed? There is some concern in the community that these much-needed rail upgrades are falling behind schedule and that some elements of stage 2 have shifted into the yet-to-be-funded stage 3. With an investment of $313 million in the 2018–19 Victorian state budget for this project, people are keen to see that investment translated into reality.

Minister response – Ms ALLAN (Bendigo East—Leader of the House, Minister for Transport Infrastructure) (11:20): I thank the Independent member for Shepparton for her question and her ongoing and consistent advocacy for improved rail services for the Shepparton community. Shepparton is a fantastic regional centre, so important to our state’s economy, and it is only right that it have a modern train service. That is what the community of Shepparton have long been seeking.

Certainly since 2014 we have been pleased to work with the member for Shepparton on progressively improving and upgrading services along the Shepparton line because there is a lot of work to be done. There is quite a backlog of work along this corridor because it has been badly neglected in the past. Now, it has been great to work with a local member who is prepared to advocate and push for improvements to the corridor. As the member knows, as the community knows—

Ms Ryan interjected.

Ms ALLAN: Hang on, I am coming to you lot in a minute. You guys, honestly. They are brave, I will give them that. When it comes to standing up and talking about regional rail, gee, they are a brave lot, because they know I will remind them that they closed country train lines, they cut funding to V/Line—

Mr Walsh: On a point of order, Speaker, I might ask you to draw the member back to answering the question. And while she is doing that she might explain how she botched the Murray Basin rail project.

Members interjecting.

The SPEAKER: Order! I am going to have to run a session on points of order. I have warned members about interjecting. And I ask the minister to come back to answering the question.

Ms ALLAN: And I am, Speaker, because unlike those opposite, who neglected regional rail even when there were two ministers at the cabinet table representing Shepparton, we have been determined to work with the Shepparton community on improving the rail line. That is why a total of $356 million has been invested in the first two stages of the Shepparton line upgrade. Stage 1 has been fast-tracked, Speaker, and I will tell you what happened at the end of stage 1. We got to add a fifth daily return service to the Shepparton community in April 2019.

The member for Shepparton asked about stage 2. I can understand why her community is concerned, because they have been betrayed so often by those who used to hold the seat. They were betrayed so often by Liberal and National party representatives of the seat. I can advise the member that we are well advanced on stage 2 works. Geotechnical investigations have been occurring along the corridor. As I said, we have got a big job to do on this line—a big job to do. A contractor is expected to be appointed in coming months and construction is due to start later this year and be completed in 2022.

We are determined to deliver on what we have committed to the Shepparton community: an improvement to the track. A massive investment in the infrastructure—the track—means we can run more services. That is exactly what the Shepparton community deserve and what we intend to deliver.

Supplementary Question – I will not stop being vigilant on this because one of the main reasons that my community elected me to this place was the poor state of rail services. We now know that we have a business case that is to be completed for stage 3. Minister, I am just wondering where that business case is now up to, because that is part of the story that will ultimately deliver nine VLocity trains a day into the Shepparton railway station, something our community has been waiting for for such a very long time.

Ms Ryan interjected.

The SPEAKER: Order! The member for Euroa!

Members interjecting.

Minsiter response – Ms ALLAN (Bendigo East—Leader of the House, Minister for Transport Infrastructure) (11:25): Speaker, I will tell you where stage 3 came from. The need to do more works on stage 2 was identified, and we said this at the time. The works in stage 2 involve the development of a business case for stage 3 works because this a big job. Because of the decades of neglect of previous Liberal-National party members of Parliament we have got a big job to do.

Members interjecting.

The SPEAKER: Order! The member for Warrandyte has the call.

Mr R Smith: On a point of order, Speaker, as just an example of how good the government is doing, the Seymour line is now closed because of rain. So you are doing a great job.

Members interjecting.

The SPEAKER: Order! When the house comes to order. The member for Shepparton has asked a question that her community is interested in. The minister is giving an answer. I ask members to stop shouting across the chamber. I have warned members that they will be removed from the chamber without warning.

Ms ALLAN: The work on the business case for stage 3 is progressing well, and we will be taking advice from our expert engineers in Rail Projects Victoria on how to best deliver the works on stage 3. Unlike those opposite, who overpromised and underdelivered to the Shepparton community with a false and deceitful commitment to the Shepparton community about additional services before the last election, we are going to get on and deliver improvements to the Shepparton line. Work on stage 2 is underway, work on the business case for stage 3 is underway, and I look forward to continuing to work with the member for Shepparton on this.

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