2016-11-22
Mr BARBER (Northern Metropolitan) — So much for all the things that the Liberal Party did not dare put in their motion because they are too embarrassed to talk about them, like the environment. We heard a great exposition on cage fighting but not a word on Hazelwood, because that might have required the alternative government, the opposition, to actually say what their climate change policy is.
So much for this claim of divisiveness in the first line of the motion when we have just seen from the federal Liberal Party one of the most divisive statements ever to come out of the mouth of a senior government figure, with an attack on the Lebanese community. There has not been one demurring word from any Liberal in this place against what the federal minister for immigration said.
However, let us talk about some of the issues the Liberals did raise in their motion and in the contribution of their lead speaker, because there are a number of matters where they are actually on point. There are genuine concerns among the community about economic inequality and insecurity of employment. There are genuine and readily heard concerns from the community about the loss of livability in Melbourne and the impact the growing population has had on that.
The lead speaker for the government said he did not want to bore us with a lot of Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) statistics, but one of those statistics that he did not mention was from his own electorate — that is, of course, the 2 per cent increase in unemployment that we have seen in the Latrobe Valley and Gippsland region. That is a 2 per cent jump over just 11 quarters of reporting from the ABS. Certainly we need a response to that. It is not enough to simply come in here and deliver good news of overarching figures of employment or unemployment results for the whole state if you then use that to roll over and go to sleep and ignore the pockets of the community where disadvantage and unemployment are in fact getting worse. It is a danger to pat yourself on the back about an overall statewide employment and unemployment outcome if you then turn around and ignore communities who are having great difficulty, and Latrobe Valley is one of those communities.
There is no plan from this government about how to deal with the inevitable transition that is happening in the energy industry and the inevitable closure of brown coal. The reason there is no plan is that the government is not actually in the driver's seat. They are simply waiting around to see what electricity companies decide. If they are feeling generous, they will give us six months notice until the day the thing closes. The government, by definition, has to then run around and scramble in response to a decision that they played no part in. But it will continue. Even a few years ago there were about eight brown coal plants operating in Australia. Four of those have closed. Hazelwood has announced its closure, so that leaves just three, one of which, Yallourn, is almost as polluting in emissions intensity terms as Hazelwood. It is facing the same pressures from renewables, the price of which is rapidly dropping.
The lead speaker for the opposition mentioned crime on public transport. Public transport overall is actually quite safe. There are very few incidents occurring on public transport, but she kind of let the cat out of the bag by saying that the incidents that were occurring were actually happening at times when protective services officers (PSOs) are not on duty. It was the former government's, now opposition's, plan to put PSOs on from sunset until dark because they thought people were scared of the dark. In fact people who know anything about the crimes that occur on public transport, the public order offences which are sometimes just threatening behaviour or even antisocial behaviour, actually occur when the most people are there and at the busiest stations.
The previous method of deployment was to have transit police at the biggest stations during the times when crimes occurred and to use an intelligence-based deployment system. The Liberals came in and invested all this money into PSOs. They put them at every station, even though many of those stations had not even had a recent history of crime. They put the PSOs on in the evenings because they thought it was spookier in the dark. They actually avoided a chance to really make a strong contribution with those extra resources.
Of course the Liberals came out again with the old east–west link. They love that one. They are giving us a big debate at the moment about population — we are hearing a lot about population — but when we get to the end of that, what we are going to hear as a solution is the east–west link. That is what they are building up to. They have very little to contribute towards a sustainable city. They just want to build a another dirty great freeway with a cost of $25 billion over the long term for the taxpayer, one which will actually shift the traffic jam from Hoddle Street to Flemington Road. When the government cancelled the contract for the east–west link, they actually saved the taxpayer tens of billions of dollars, and the Liberals do not like it. They are still flogging that dead horse.
However, the Liberals certainly had a point when they condemned the government for its lack of action to reduce congestion, both on the roads and also on the trains. The government came to office after four years in opposition. They had plenty of time to think about it, but they had no actual plan to invest sustainably and get overcrowding down, whether it be on the roads or on the trains. Of course running more trains is the only sure-fire way of reducing congestion on the roads. Every new train takes a thousand cars off the road. At the moment some lines are so overcrowded people are actually giving up and going back to their cars, which is a disastrous outcome. But this problem did not arrive overnight; it came after decades of neglect from both the Labor and Liberal parties.
Labor point to the Melbourne Metro rail tunnel; that is their big project. It is certainly a big project. It is not a plan for the city, but it is a big project. I will give them a tick for that, but it will cost $10 billion, it will take 10 years and it will increase the capacity on certain lines by 60 per cent. By that time patronage on those lines will have grown by 60 per cent. This is according to the government's own business case. So it is a project, but it is not a plan and it will only address overcrowding on certain lines. I hope they have something that is going to deliver before those 10 years are up, and I hope they are looking beyond 10 years as well.
For that matter we have seen very little from them on buses, which are actually the only form of public transport for large parts of metropolitan Melbourne. The 2.7 per cent increase in the number of services provided in the last budget is of course welcome, but what that means is that there will be very little relief for those who are on overcrowded buses. There were very few extra late-night services. There will be very little increase in frequency, and there will be very little extension of those buses out into the new suburbs that are growing all the time. A 2.7 per cent increase in bus services is not going to be enough, and we have not even started to talk about V/Line or the V/Line coaches.
This motion fails to recognise that there have been decades of neglect from governments, both Labor and Liberal, and that some of these failings are actually failing to address, after four years in opposition and two years in government, problems that we have all known about for a very long time — problems that have been around for a very long time and which were created over a long time.
On the other hand, the government came to office with very little idea about what they wanted to do about most of these problems, and it now shows. After two years they have been caught flat footed. The problems are getting ahead of them, whether it be unemployment, whether it be overcrowding and congestion in Melbourne or whether it be a lack of service provision to areas outside Melbourne. I have my doubts that in two years time we are going to be standing here applauding some great turnaround that they have achieved, because they squandered their four years in opposition. They have achieved some milestones in their first two years, but they do not seem to have anything that sets us up for the next term of Parliament and the next term after that, which is certainly very much where the voters are looking.
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