Budget Reply 2020-21

I rise to make a contribution on the take-note motion. It would be fair to say that last year we found ourselves in very extraordinary circumstances, and we were all shocked by the impact of the bushfires along the eastern seaboard over that Christmas and new year period. Then we were faced with a worldwide pandemic, and 2020 has certainly taught us many things and I think brought us to a point here in February 2021 where there remains a great deal of uncertainty and lack of clarity as to what might happen. We have a vaccine that looks imminent. Steps are being taken to provide that right across the country, but we look at other countries and see just how devastating the impact is. While Australia has escaped a lot of that devastation that so many other countries are suffering from, it has had a dramatic impact on all of us. I think it was really over the Christmas break that I noticed the really significant impact it had had on individuals both on a personal level and more broadly in relation to their businesses, their careers and so forth.

Here in Victoria we have had two lockdowns, and the impact cannot be underestimated. There are economic impacts that have been profound and no doubt have led the government to bring down the budget that it has. It is a big spend budget that is designed to create jobs and achieve significant infrastructure projects. As the pandemic eases—and probably I wrote this a couple of months ago, thinking that perhaps it would; I think we all recognise now that the pandemic is still with us and will be with us for some time—and we look at budgetary issues, both at a federal and a state level, there is no doubt that we all shudder at the amount of debt that has had to be incurred to get through this so far and to try and take us forward in the months and years ahead. Every dollar that is spent on projects needs to be spent wisely so that our communities really benefit from these sorts of things.

I have heard many contributions from many members in this place regarding that level of debt. I think it is fair to say that really what we are doing here in Victoria—what the government has chosen to do in terms of a big spend budget—is following along the lines of what the federal government has done and what the Reserve Bank of Australia has recommended ought to be done to keep us going, to get us back on our feet and to get people back into jobs.

My electorate has been a welcome recipient of a number of the budget spends. I suppose from a local member’s point of view it is hard not to come back and talk about your own electorate, because when you live in an electorate that was overlooked for so long, where there was very little spending on things like education and rail and other transport initiatives, it has been a really satisfying time to see the spotlight turned on Shepparton rail, for instance. You might recall that in May 2015 we had a big demonstration on the steps of Parliament. People travelled by train in their pyjamas from Shepparton to Melbourne to highlight the lack of train services. We were looking at Bendigo and Ballarat, with 20 services a day backwards and forwards, and Shepparton at that stage had four old trains. Now, it has only got five old trains at the moment, but there has been a $750 million investment over recent years, money which is about to be spent on the upgrade—and some of it has been spent. We are going to be at a point by 2023, all going well, where we will have had the track work, the signalling, the platforms, so much of the work done to provide us with nine VLocity trains each way each day, so that will be really transformational for our district in terms of public transport.

We are seeing more people move to the regions at the moment, and I think good public transport such as rail will quite possibly see a shift in the way people work, in the way people can live in regional communities but still commute to Melbourne on several days a week or whatever option might work for them. I do hope that one of the good things that comes out of what has happened during this pandemic in terms of this change in working arrangements is that it leads to the recruitment of more professional, trained, educated people to fill so many of the jobs in our regional areas that we simply cannot fill. Whether it be doctors in hospitals, accountants, agricultural scientists, people in factories, food technologists, we are short across the board in so many of these areas. To be able to attract people who will be able to buy a house in a regional city for probably less than half the price of any city house—for a very lovely house, might I say—may well be a side effect of the pandemic.

Housing is always an issue for those who are disadvantaged, and Shepparton has seen a lot of homelessness in its time. It has been really important and a massive injection into our community to see that Shepparton will get $45 million of the new social housing spend. The Minister for Housing is at the table but busy at the moment; however, I do commend him for including Shepparton in what is really a massive spend and will be transformational in terms of providing some of the social housing that is needed.

Education has also been a beneficiary of government spending, with $119 million to build the new Greater Shepparton Secondary College. That was underway all last year, and people are amazed to see what is coming up out of the ground in terms of the build. It is a very large set of buildings. There are three neighbourhoods, each with three schools, which will result in nine schools, each with 300 students in them—each operating effectively as a separate school during the early years of secondary education, but then our senior students just able to blend across the whole campus to pick up and do the subjects and the activities that they need to do, to hopefully really keep people in school for much longer and increase attendance levels. I cannot say more strongly how absolutely fabulous it looks. We had the Minister for Education there recently taking a tour through the building so far, and to have beautiful new buildings with modern, wonderful facilities I think is just going to be truly amazing for the students and the teachers who will inhabit that school over the years to come. As I say, hopefully some of these changing trends in our society might lead more people to live in regional areas so that recruitment for so many of these jobs does not continue to be the problem that it has been.

Education is such an important part of providing the services we need, including early education. In that regard the integrated early childhood centre at Mooroopna Primary School is also just about to be completed and will be transformational, in partnership with the Colman Foundation, providing services that will really provide a wraparound service for parents and children from the very earliest stages, with maternal and child health services and all sorts of things that just gather the family in and hopefully keep them there all the way through their primary schooling.

Quite a few of our regional schools received funding for a range of improvements and developments, and that is most welcome. A million dollars to a small school can do amazing things, whether it is solar panels, whether it is a new playground or whether it is just improving classroom space and other facilities. That has been most welcome, with six or seven of our local schools benefiting from that. There is always more to spend, and I think it is well known that many of our regional schools are old and shabby right across Victoria. That investment in upgrading them is an important job. While a lot of new schools are being built, it is important to keep up that investment in improving and making the schools that we already have more livable and more friendly environments for our teachers and students.

In that regard I would just mention St Georges Road Primary School, close to where I live. I see it regularly, and it is one of the most multicultural schools you could probably come across. Shepparton has a significant multicultural community. It is just so crowded; it is a popular school among many communities, and it is a local school where much of the multicultural community live. It is desperately in need of funding for further works, and I will be talking to the minister about that for the next budget, which surprisingly is not so far away.

The University of Melbourne has the Dookie agricultural college campus. It has been there for a very long time. It is a beautiful college situated at the foothills of Mount Major, and it also has received funding for modernisation, something that is very welcome. There was a time when we thought we would lose Dookie agricultural college and that Melbourne University would just move all its facilities back to Melbourne. It moved the agricultural sciences course and the vet courses all back to the Parkville campus, but we are in recent years just seeing that move back out to hands-on teaching and learning on what is a beautiful farm with a beautiful college and upgraded accommodation and facilities there that just make practical learning so much better.

Our justice system too has benefited. You will remember that Shepparton had a brand-new courthouse built several years ago, round about 2014–15, and that was something that was sorely needed and had been advocated for for a very long time. But since then we have also had the investment in subsequent budgets for a family violence court.

We are now part of a drug court trial, and in this budget we received funding for a family drug court treatment program to help parents escape dependency and be there for their children, with $1.2 million for that program—again, very welcome in a community where addiction is really a problem and where drugs proliferate in some of our regional cities. In providing the services and hopefully getting people through the justice system, hopefully without prison if they can address their drug problems, especially where young children are concerned, a program like this is very welcome.

There is our Aboriginal community. We have the largest Aboriginal community outside of Melbourne in the Shepparton and Mooroopna area, and we have some really quite amazing Aboriginal services in the town. We have an Aboriginal legal aid service, and we have the Rumbalara medical service, which provides and is a hub for a whole wide range of services. We have just recently—as in, say, two years ago—received funding for our Aboriginal community to build what is called the Munarra Centre for Regional Excellence, and that will focus again on education, upskilling, sporting excellence and cultural awareness programs, all of which will be extremely important for our Aboriginal community, because their inclusion not just in the sense of being acknowledged but in our economy is actually something which is extremely important. Aboriginal people need to know that they can finish their education and they can get jobs and there is a normality about that. That is something that we really all have to work towards, and this is a project that will try and push that forward in the months and years ahead.

Ever since I got here I have asked for a mother-baby unit, which is now called an early parenting centre—the terminology has changed over the years. But this is something that our community again really needs. We have been able to get $1.5 million from our local hospital foundation, which was always put aside for children’s needs as part of the bucket of money that would be needed to build a residential mother-baby unit—parenting unit—in the centre of town for those who after the birth of a child are simply needing support of one kind or another. It is something I will still be advocating for and hoping that the ear of government will be there.

Water policy is something that is not always a budget issue, but it is fair to say that the Connections Project in the Goulburn Valley region was completed in October last year. That turned out to be a $2 billion joint investment between the state and federal governments and has led to the modernisation of our irrigation district. Maintaining water in our district and being able to use what is now such a modernised system is an incredibly important thing and something that I talk to the Minister for Water about all the time. There are many threats to water availability, including climate change, which sees a considerable loss of water in our regions. But there is also water simply going down the river to other projects and people who can pay more, as in almond farms, and these are creating really big issues that will need to be addressed.