2016-06-07
Ms DUNN (Eastern Metropolitan) — I rise to speak on the Appropriation (2016–2017) Bill 2016. I am going to cover two areas in my contribution: the first is around public transport in the metropolitan area, and secondly, the Leadbeater's possum will feature heavily as part of my contribution tonight. Public transport in Melbourne has long been a low priority in budget commitments over the past two decades. Crowded trains, aged trams and incoherent bus services have plagued commuters. Funding commitments were deferred when the demand for fast and frequent transportation services grew.
The 2016 state budget does throw a lot of money at two headline projects: the Melbourne Metro tunnel and the elevated rail project on the Cranbourne-Pakenham line, although I do note with the Melbourne Metro tunnel a lost opportunity in that South Yarra station is not integrated as an interchange station as part of that project. The station is the busiest train station outside of the city loop and has the most passengers going through it, so it is a lost opportunity for Melbourne and its commuters.
This budget does not represent a long-term plan for public transport infrastructure. Most of the funds are spent on one train corridor, and there is no plan to improve services for the millions of people who live outside the Sunbury and Cranbourne-Pakenham corridors. If you are a commuter who lives on the Belgrave or Lilydale lines, the Hurstbridge line, the Craigieburn line, the Frankston line, the Upfield line or the Werribee line — they are not all the lines, but they are a lot of our lines in metropolitan Melbourne — you are not getting high-capacity signalling; you are getting same old, same old.
There is no commitment to continue feasibility studies, corridor preservation or initial design work for the Rowville or Doncaster heavy rail lines. The east, I note as a member for Eastern Metropolitan Region, loses out again. When we consider the development that is going to be encompassed in the Doncaster Hill area, putting even more people in that region, it is a travesty that we do not see any forward planning on Doncaster rail. Then when we look to the Rowville line, we see that 30 000 students a week go to Monash University, and they are either stuck on the bus or in their cars. They are not the only people who are stuck, because those people from Doncaster and Rowville are stuck in congestion on the Monash Freeway or the Eastern Freeway, which are only getting worse, not better. It does not matter how many lanes you add to the Monash Freeway; you will only get more and more congestion. So the budget is very disappointing for commuters, particularly in those regions of Doncaster and Rowville. There are no options for them in terms of heavy rail transport in this budget.
There is insufficient funding and no hard plans for a rollout of 21st century high-capacity signalling technology. Melbourne will be stuck with fixed block signalling developed in the 19th century for all lines except the Sunbury and Cranbourne-Pakenham corridors, something that was confirmed at the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee hearings. What we did hear as part of that was that the trial for high-capacity signalling was in fact abandoned on the Sandringham line. Last year apparently we needed to trial it on that line as a separate line, whereas this year we hear we do not need that trial on that line, and it is in fact now transferred to the South Morang line as a limited deployment. But we know in terms of trialling high-capacity signalling that your trial can only be as fast as the slowest point in your line, so to have a limited deployment on the South Morang line is really not doing justice to a high-capacity signalling service.
The Greens note that there is no funding commitment to the Melbourne Airport link. There is no commitment to augment the tram network. Of note for me is the lack of a tram extension to Knox City — a reservation to put on a tram that would link Vermont South to Knox City, a major activity centre within the Knox municipality, linking thousands of commuters with that central area. However, we do not see any mention of augmenting the tram network in this budget. The typical experience of bus passengers will continue to be nasty, brutish and interminably long, and this is just the deficit in capital expenditure.
The less eye-catching but critical maintenance deficit builds up year on year. I quote from the editorial in the Age of 25 May:
… any new stretch of track is only as good as the one it connects with, and Victoria is now paying the price for years of chronic underinvestment in rail maintenance … a staggering 13 000 faults needed repair or renewal in Melbourne's rail infrastructure. The government currently allocates about $250 million a year to fix the faults in the rail network. Metro estimates three-quarters of that is spent on broken signals, tracks and power wires alone. The scale of the problem has forced the company to adopt a patchwork system of urgent and targeted repairs.
The lack of a plan is simply not good enough in a city that prides itself on being one of the most livable in the world. It is simply not good enough in a society that wants to provide a fair go for all. It is simply not good enough for an economy that needs to remain competitive in the face of unprecedented technological change. If Melbourne's public transport system is to cope with burgeoning demand, the state government must develop a long-term plan for investing in a network-wide rollout of high-capacity signalling.
We saw in our Public Accounts and Estimates Committee hearings that it was confirmed there is no plan for a rollout of high-capacity signalling across the network. There is no plan for wider deployment and no budget allocation within the next four years.
We see there is no plan for investing in Doncaster and Rowville heavy rail lines such that they will be in operation by 2026–30 and taking advantage of the capacity benefits of the Melbourne Metro tunnel. There is no long-term plan for investing in tram network augmentation, adopting our plan to fill 17 missing links in the tram network with 56 kilometres of new tram routes. There is no plan for more SmartBuses and a redesign of bus services so they operate across a better span of hours with greater frequency and so they better connect with other public services. How long do we need to wait? I look locally at the experience on the SmartBuses operating out of the Doncaster park and ride, where commuters cannot even get on the buses in order to get them to the city. They have to wait for bus after bus. It is a very poor response to what is a growing demand for public transport in our suburbs.
I am going to turn for just a moment to cycle funding. It was staggering to hear that the minister in the other place at the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee hearing could not identify any separate and distinct standalone projects for bicycle paths — not one in this budget; they are all included in road projects or rail projects. Such is the priority given to cycle funding and dedicated cycle infrastructure in this budget.
I turn now to what the budget says about our forests and the species that live in these important and special places. I note in this budget there is more provision for consumers of nature-based tourism in the form of a new facility for penguin watchers down at Phillip Island. Look, I congratulate the government for recognising that nature-based tourism is an incredibly important element of Victoria's economy. However, this budget is a lost opportunity, because there is no such provision in relation to our forests and our threatened species.
That said, I acknowledge and congratulate the government for maintaining the pathway to creating the nature reserve in Yellingbo to help and preserve the helmeted honeyeater, not only a state emblem but also critically endangered. This funding will also possibly assist the genetic line of the lowland Leadbeater's possum and likewise acknowledge ongoing funding to zoos for breeding programs between this genetic line and the last two alpine Leadbeater's possums. I am pleased to introduce to the house three different sets of Leadbeater's possums — being the highland, lowland and alpine — for members. But with only 57 lowland Leadbeater's possums and just 2 alpine animals left, while worthy, these endeavours are by no means anywhere close to sufficient to give the species its best chance of survival.
I also acknowledge that there is some money in the budget to help volunteer groups with weeding and restoration programs that will provide habitat for species associated with the lowland and farming areas of the Leadbeater's possum. But again, this will do nothing to protect the mountain forests and the species for which I will continue to be a tireless advocate: our state faunal emblem, the Leadbeater's possum. The very best chance to ensure the survival of the Leadbeater's possum is to invest in the populations of our montane ash forests, and on this matter the budget earns a massive: fail.
Here we are with the second budget of the Andrews Labor government, and the neglect of these animals' needs represents another year along the path to leaving a legacy of being the last government that could have actually done something meaningful to stop extinction. I hear from this government about building nesting boxes and trying to artificially cut hollows into trees, and I realise that this is a government that is more interested in taking a punt, in having a gamble with taxpayers money on speculative endeavours to protect a species rather than prudently acting to guarantee the best possible chance for species survival.
It is incontrovertible that the best possible course of action to save this species is to stop the destruction of all current habitat of this animal and to invest in rehabilitating the landscape that has been destroyed by decades of government-auspiced clearfell logging. This practice continues at the behest of the forestry division of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) to support a relatively small number of jobs in a very small number of business that have had plenty of time to transition but are legally required to take timber and pulp from a threatened ecology.
That great irrationalism in the legal framework seems deliberately designed to doom our ash forests, the ancient temperate rainforest gullies and faunal species, not only the endangered Leadbeater's possum but many other faunal species as well, including greater gliders, yellow-bellied gliders, quolls, brush-tailed phascogales, powerful owls, sooty owls and masked owls. Then there is the barred galaxias. In the aftermath of the Black Saturday bushfires tens of thousands of dollars were spent by the museum to protect one of the very last populations of this species, and now we watch that money go up in smoke as each logged coupe along the Yea Link Road in Toolangi makes it more likely that the creeks in which this endangered species lives run dry.
Where is the money in this budget to make a difference to the future for these forests and species? If this government is interested in jobs for the future, as the Greens are, then where is the vision, where are the mechanisms to roll timber and paper milling jobs into jobs that rely on sustainable inputs?
The Greens would be very happy to see transition provisions in the budget to help the industry move on and thereby allow the forestry division of the CFMEU to maintain its membership base, but it has to be 100 per cent tied to the complete exit of logging in native forests. There should be no more effective gifting of precious resources that are a great treasure belonging to all the people of Victoria to benefit such a small number of interests which are vested in an entitlement that should be held commonly.
For 18 months this government has stalled on meaningful actions to protect what is left. I am looking forward to the report of the Forest Industry Taskforce, not so much from a belief that the inevitable compromise position will be satisfactory but simply from relief that this government will no longer be able to use the task force as a shield to deflect the legitimate accusation that this government is doing way too little in protecting our forests and our endangered species and is doing too little, too slowly.
There is no long-term plan to ease commuter overcrowding and make public transport a viable choice, particularly for those in the suburbs. There is no long-term plan for our state emblem, the Leadbeater's possum. This budget fails to secure a future plan for Victoria that values action on public transport or on protecting our forests.