Members Statement – Last week the Greater Shepparton Women’s Charter Advisory Committee announced Thelma Bull as its 2020 GSWCAC Women’s Award recipient at the Greater Shepparton International Women’s Day event. The award recognises those who have made a positive impact upon women and the Greater Shepparton community through their positive actions which embrace diversity, inspire and encourage women.

Thelma helps those most vulnerable within our community, working as a sergeant in the family violence investigation unit and is a strong advocate for gender equality and the prevention of family violence. She is the chair of the Greater Shepparton Family Violence Prevention Network, and with 28 years of service as a policewoman she is a key driver for community awareness through the 16 days of activism and gender equity and social inclusive initiative. Thelma is an admirable role model, who gives so much of her time, energy and love to our community to make it a better place to be. I congratulate Thelma and thank her for her continued service to our community.

To nominees Genevieve Simson and Zahra Haydar Big: thank you for the work and service you also give to our community. Genevieve is empowering our students, her peers and community to achieve the best possible outcomes in their education. Her generosity extends to mentoring female teachers and young women to build confidence in their ability to navigate potential opportunities. Zahra Haydar Big is empowering women within our CALD community, working as a community hub leader at Gowrie Street Primary School. She works tirelessly to foster relationships and partnerships to enable opportunities for local women to participate in our community, and supports them to achieve their goals and build confidence.

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Adjournment Debate – My adjournment is for the Minister for Health in the other place. The action I seek is for the minister to proceed with the establishment of a mother-baby unit in Shepparton. Advocacy for such a unit in Shepparton started back in 1997, when the first paper outlining the need for such a unit was written by local child health professionals. There has been a long-term commitment to such a service being provided from many stakeholders within the region, and the need for it just continues to grow. A KPMG consultancy report was completed in 2018 and provided to the government, which I believe fully supported the provision of such a service.

The Shepparton district is a great place to live. However, it is not without its challenges, one being insufficient access to health services for women and families during and after pregnancy. A service such as a mother-baby unit or parenting facility, such as has been established in metropolitan areas and some other regional communities more recently, can be justified on every indicator. We have one of the highest teenage pregnancy rates in Victoria. We have low levels of breastfeeding. We have high levels of disadvantage. Mothers and babies leave hospital usually one or two days after delivery, and many find themselves unsupported and unable to cope.

We all speak at great length about the importance of investing in early childhood and how getting it right in those first 1000 days means significantly better outcomes for children as they grow and learn and eventually become adults. The evidence is that in our region access to services is delayed, interventions are delayed and critical infant brain development time is wasted as infants wait for professional parenting assessment before stable parenting or care arrangements can commence. Travelling to metropolitan centres such as the Tweddle Child and Family Health Service in Footscray or the Queen Elizabeth Centre creates considerable hardship and results in many people not seeking the support that they need.

To have a purpose-built and integrated residential facility for the families of newborns in our region is the investment into early childhood development we need to support parents and their babies in those critical months post birth. Goulburn Valley Health Foundation has invested in a trust of over $1 million, which it wants to commit to the establishment of a mother-baby unit. It has held onto and grown this investment over the years, for the particular purpose of improving outcomes for and benefiting mothers, babies and families in these important early days. Much work has been done with great enthusiasm at the foundation level and with stakeholders in our community, who are all supportive of such a residential unit. Surely the time has come for Shepparton to receive this important service within our own community.

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I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak on this matter of public importance. I will say from the outset that I do not support the matter, not really because I am throwing my towel in with the government on this but rather because I am totally tired of the party politics that goes on during MPIs. I think they are unproductive, and it is for that reason I have long been advocating that we have general business on a Wednesday afternoon—general business where we get to introduce bills, where we get to debate petitions, where we get to debate motions that are relevant and up to date and that are brought on by members, that relate perhaps to their electorate, that perhaps relate to regional Victoria, rather than just the bit of mud-flinging that seems to go on in this place on Wednesday afternoons.

I will nevertheless speak to the budgetary issues that have been raised. There is no doubt that the state budget is facing increased challenges, partly due of course to the bushfires and to the totally random impact that we now have with us of the coronavirus on not only our economy in Victoria and the whole of Australia but globally. We are really seeing very significant issues around that. I say that that necessitates this government continuing to look after the most vulnerable in our communities, to look after those people who have been impacted but also to continue to invest and complete projects on time and on budget, as it must.

My electorate, Shepparton district, has been in the midst of a very long-awaited overhaul over recent years, and there has been a lot of spending in the region to deal with issues that my community had been calling out for for a very long time. Health, education, transport, infrastructure investments cannot be allowed to stall midstream just because the Treasurer has said he is going through the budget with a fine-tooth comb and needs to cut. This is simply not a time to cut. This is a time when we even have the federal government looking at an economic stimulus for the whole of the country. This is not a time to start cutting back, to pare back projects that might be underway. It is very important that projects that have been started are completed and that people have confidence in the state and in our economy.

In Shepparton, for instance, we have got the Shepparton Art Museum. That will be completed in December. This is going to be an outstanding art gallery in regional Victoria—dare I say ‘the most’ to you, Deputy Speaker, sitting there from Bendigo. It will certainly be the most modern and truly outstanding. It is great to see that up and going. We have got the first stage of Goulburn Valley Health just being fitted out now—a five-storey building being fitted out now to serve the needs of our community. The master plan for stage 2 is underway at the moment, and it is so important that stage 2 occurs and that we get the infrastructure and the investment in health in our community so that people in our communities can be looked after there.

We have got the Munarra Centre for Regional Excellence, money dedicated to our Indigenous community to create opportunities for further education broadly and with many ideas of what will actually be able to go into that to advance our local Aboriginal community, which of course is the largest Aboriginal community outside of metropolitan Melbourne. But there is much more that we need. We are waiting on a business case for the Shepparton bypass. We have long advocated for a mother-baby unit for our region to help those young mothers and families who are not coping immediately after the birth of a child. This is something really important for our community.

Because of all the projects that are happening in Shepparton we actually have traffic problems, can you believe, and we need something like $11 million in this Victorian state budget to deal with major intersections along the way to the new Shepparton Art Museum, the new hospital and the new secondary college that is to be built. On the issue of education, of course the Shepparton Education Plan is being rolled out. Greater Shepparton Secondary College has commenced according to plan, and we are awaiting an announcement of $100 million approximately in the budget to commence the building of that new school to open in 2020—something that I believe the state government is very committed to. These are all very important projects. They all take money, and that money needs to be spent.

I often talk about water, and I often say that it is not about money or a budgetary bottom line, but the reality is that our agricultural community contributes so much to the wealth of not only this state but the whole of this nation. It is essential that regional communities are invested in so that they can continue to contribute to the wealth of the nation and to produce food. It is interesting that in times like this we will be starting to think about food security, when borders could be challenged more and more. When we see production in China being reduced dramatically and stopped in some areas, then we understand that what we produce in this country could become critical and that not only might we want to be exporting but we might indeed need the produce we have just to support our own people. So we are very important in regional Victoria, and again we do not have enough opportunity to debate and discuss that in this place.

Water policy is of course fraught in so many ways. There is the Murray-Darling Basin plan and the inflexibility in the rollout of that. There are the transitions that are going to have to occur in our regional communities because of climate change. We are seeing that in the dairy industry. We are seeing predictions that if our temperature increases by 1.5 degrees by 2040, it will become untenable for our dairy cows to actually be out in the open in paddocks all the time. They will need to be under cover. They will need to be fed under cover. They are currently milked under cover. This will change the nature of a dairy operation. It will be more expensive to provide the infrastructure that is needed, but these are all changes and transitions that we are all having to face.

We are facing the loss of water in our region as water is being pulled down the Goulburn and Murray rivers to service foreign-owned, huge almond plantations further down beyond the Barmah choke. That is having a very significant impact on our region and it is also having a very significant impact on the Goulburn River and on the Broken Creek. The banks of those rivers are being eroded beyond all belief, and yet the Murray-Darling Basin plan was put in place largely out of the damage that was seen to the Coorong back during the millennium drought. While that was well intentioned, I am sure it was never intended that we would have to damage our own environment upstream to deliver water down there. These are really important issues that need addressing.

The flood plain harvesting we are seeing in the north of New South Wales and Queensland at the moment is horrifying in the sense that the first flush is going into dams—dams like Cubbie Station—rather than running down our rivers to the sea at least once. Surely at least that first flow should have gone down our rivers, but it has not.

We have had something like eight water ministers in nine years. I am not sure of the exact figure, but you can see why this is such a troubled area when we have those issues. On a smaller local level we have something like the Murchison nursing home—currently empty, likely to be closed, with attempts being made to keep it open. The local neighbourhood house has nowhere to go as the liquidator sells it off. It sells off the nursing home, sells off the neighbourhood house and sells off the medical practice of a small community in a regional area. It is just an example of the hollowing out in so many other small communities that is occurring as I speak. These communities need to be supported because they do form the backbone of that whole rural economy.

We are seeing terrible threats in relation to regional media. We have seen the closure of AAP, which employed something like 180 journalists nationwide, which supported not only our major print and online media organisations but many of the smaller ones. The Shepparton News has relied on AAP constantly, and it has since the 1970s, for much of its news. The impact of that will be really very hard-felt, and people are feeling very sad about that loss in the face of other losses and in the face of what has happened with the ABC. We have lost Radio Australia, located in Shepparton—gone. The ABC is under pressure in so many ways. There is much more I could say, but I would say this is not a time to cut. This is a time to spend.

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Members Statement – Shepparton will be truly alive during the month of March. The 24th Shepparton Festival rolls out for the month of March, and this year’s theme is ‘Evolve’. The festival will be over 17 days with more than 60 events comprising more than 250 artists in 40 different venues, with unique experiences in music, comedy, film, culture, performance, workshops, a festival feast and visual arts.

Some of the events on offer are the literary lunch with Jill Barclay at The Barn at Buchanan’s Bridge and Women of the White House, which is listed as a tell-all exposé of true facts, fake news and modern-day right-wing conservative feminism from inside the big orange world of Trump. Rust & Wine, an exhibition of large-scale sculptures scattered around the spectacular landscape at Tallis cellar door, showcasing local artists Tank and Steve Tobin, will be a wonderful experience. The Quarry Chorus held in the extraordinary amphitheatre of the Dookie quarry is a sensory experience of sound, light and movement. Art and events from Indigenous and multicultural artists will feature along with the Shepparton Albanian Harvest Festival. There is much to see and do, and you should all make a point of coming to see our fantastic regional area for some of these events.

To Shepparton Festival board chair Fiona Smolenaars, vice-chair Leigh Findlay, Peter Kelton, Kirsten Green, Bruce Hunt-Hughes, Ellie Phillips and creative director Jamie Lea and the team, well done, and I wish you a very successful event and look forward to seeing you at many of them.

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Adjournment Debate – My adjournment is for the Treasurer, and the action I seek is that he visits Shepparton to view the transformational projects that are being delivered in my community and to understand the reason why I am seeking funding in the forthcoming Victorian state budget to fund a number of intersection redevelopments, all of which will facilitate the great work that is underway.

Shortly after I was elected to this place the Treasurer visited Shepparton to hear about the projects that were needed to move Shepparton forward. After years of underinvestment and neglect for our region, the government has taken the step of investing, and that is very welcome. In March 2016 the Treasurer came to Shepparton, visited Goulburn Valley Health with me and met with many members of the community to hear the plea for investment in our hospital, and in response he delivered the $170 million needed for the first stage of Goulburn Valley Health in that 2016–17 Victorian state budget. We now see a five-storey building at Goulburn Valley Health nearing completion. This investment and the additional investment earlier this year of another $58 million means that residents of the Goulburn Valley will have much-improved access to facilities, including new operating theatres, new surgical beds, a new emergency department delivering three times the capacity we currently have, a new dialysis unit and refurbished maternal and child health facilities—the list goes on. While all of this is happening, work is underway on the master plan for stage 2 of Goulburn Valley Health.

Another crane in the sky at the moment is at Victoria Park Lake, where the Shepparton Art Museum is rising from the ground. This will see the home of an outstanding regional art gallery that will truly be renowned throughout Australia. The Victorian state government has made a $10 million investment in this project to date, and the Treasurer will be very impressed to go to the top storey and see the view from that facility.

With an investment of $356 million in rail upgrades to make the Shepparton line VLocity ready, the Treasurer will see the works currently underway at the Shepparton station and hear of the works that will soon commence as tenders are finalised for the passing platform extensions and other works.

A site visit to the new fish hatchery will give the Treasurer a vision of what will become the largest fish hatchery in our region. It is in a beautiful setting on the banks of the Goulburn River.

He will want to meet representatives from local Indigenous communities to hear of the progress of the building of the Munarra Centre for Regional Excellence, which among other things will be the new home of the Academy of Sport, Health and Education.

The Shepparton Education Plan has been a major undertaking over the course of the last three years, culminating in the bringing together of four secondary colleges onto one campus, known as Greater Shepparton Secondary College. Just last week I stood with the Deputy Premier as we turned the sod on the site of the old Shepparton High School for the new building.

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