Tuesday, 2 August 2022

Grievance debate

Government performance

Mr SOUTHWICK (Caulfield) (16:01): Today I grieve for the state of Victoria and the state government, a Labor government, that cares more about itself than the people it is meant to represent. It is a government that does not care about the health crisis we are in at the moment and that does not care that we see people dying on waiting lists and waiting for ambulances that just do not come when you call them in the 000 crisis that we have. We all know that we have great health workers that are doing the very best they can, but we have a government that does not care about fixing the health crisis.

We have a government that does not care about the cost-of-living pressures that each and every Victorian is dealing with at the moment. We have a government that does not care about the mental health crisis that our state is in—that our state is in largely because this government presided over the world’s longest lockdowns, which put many Victorians in this situation where they are trying to pick themselves up from the struggles that the government caused them. It is a government that does not care about small business. Many small businesses in our state are closing their doors simply because we have a state that is in crisis and an economy that is in freefall. Many of those small businesses were not supported when they needed support. Our state of Victoria is a great state. We have had the great reputation for many, many years of having the world’s most livable city, and it is being ruined on the global stage thanks to a government that has presided over the world’s longest lockdowns, using fear, control and power to damage us all.

In 2014 this government was elected on the back of promising accountability and transparency to all Victorians. We remember the promise made on Channel 7 on the eve of the election when the Premier said, ‘No new taxes under a government I lead’. And what do we have if we fast-forward? Forty-two of them and still counting. After eight years this will be a Labor government which will leave office with a lengthy charge sheet for corruption and improper behaviour that would rival any government around the world. Caught up in controversy and in scandal and guilty of rorting and corruption, its leader, the Premier, displays a complete absence of integrity and decency, the likes of which Victoria has never seen before. The Premier has been the Leader of the Labor Party since 2010, and the Premier has claimed all along that he takes responsibility for everything that happens under his leadership. That was said back in 2015. Fast-forward to today and we can see where we are now at. We all remember:

Operation Watts found a political culture—condoned or even actively encouraged by senior figures—of ends justifying means and of bending or breaking rules.

When asked on 3AW last week by Neil Mitchell:

Does that include the current party leadership?

Commissioner Redlich said:

Of course.

Neil Mitchell asked if that included the Premier. Commissioner Redlich said again:

Of course.

The report details how the Premier agreed that he has been aware of widespread recruiting of non-genuine members over the previous few decades and that there have been people who have been hand-picked who have paid for memberships for long periods. He also agreed that the practice was not limited to one faction but happened across the board.

We all recall and we all remember that Operation Watts has detailed further similar cases of misuse of public money by the Labor Party. The Premier has spent the past fortnight saying that he will not repay the $1.38 million of Victorian taxpayers money that was misappropriated. Why? Because, the Premier states, it was not reported in the Operation Watts recommendations. Well, again we have a Premier who has been caught by his own web of spin. We all remember that in 2018 the Premier repaid $388 000 of taxpayers money that was fraudulently misused as part of Labor’s infamous red shirts scheme. In the Ombudsman’s 2018 report that exposed the rort no recommendation was made to repay the money. So on one hand we have a Premier saying, ‘Well, I’m not going to pay the money back because there’s no recommendation’, and yet on another he did pay it back because he thought it was the right thing to do. Well, if you are caught once, maybe that is a mistake. If you are caught twice, well, we know what that is; it is all about intent and corruption.

The Premier’s transcript from the corruption commission remains hidden. Why? Why is the Premier so demanding that the questions and answers under oath remain under lock and key forever? What does the Premier have to hide? The Premier today can write to the corruption commission and ask that the transcripts be released. If it is okay for others in Parliament to do that, then the Premier can do the same. Why will the Premier not do that? Perhaps there is a reason the Premier does not want to have his transcript released; it may reveal that there is more involved when it comes to the red shirts scandal.

We know that we have many, many instances of where the Premier has been well and truly up to his eyeballs in all of this. This was a government that, when asked to cooperate with Victoria Police fraud squad investigators, turned around and said, ‘No, thank you’. Imagine what the Victorian watchdog would do, watching today, if someone stole from their employer and the police came knocking and they just said, ‘No, thank you. We’re not cooperating’.

This is a government that are very, very happy to do what they like, to say one thing when they went to the election in 2014—that this was going to be a transparent and accountable government. This has been the most secretive and corrupt government that the state has ever seen. This is a government that wants another four years. Well, not under our watch. You only have to ask Victorians that are struggling each and every day. They do not want another lot of a corrupt government that has been up to its eyeballs in corruption, in scandals—in IBAC after IBAC after IBAC report. Not once, not twice, but three times—we have had the Premier before three IBAC investigations.

We all remember Operation Richmond, the anti-corruption commission for the last two years investigating suspected corrupt conduct involving dealings between the firefighters union and the state government. We all remember Operation Sandon, investigating the Premier’s links to the dodgy developer John Woodman. We all remember the Premier’s cut to the budget of the corruption commission and when he lied to the parliamentary committee about it. We all remember the Premier bullying an MP about being overweight and standing accused of slurring another female MP suffering from bowel cancer, saying she would ‘soon be shitting in a bag’. We remember this disgusting behaviour by a Premier who claims to hold some kind of integrity in his job. The Premier would not know integrity if he fell over it.

We all know, we all remember, accusations of bullying of three senior female MPs, some forced to take the hit for the Premier, and the Premier refusing to investigate those members from his own side of Parliament—three female MPs who have all called this behaviour out. We all remember the Premier approving a $10 million grant to Trades Hall, some of the largest financial supporters of the Victorian Labor Party. We all remember the dismantling of the CFA—good, hardworking volunteers—in order to satisfy union demands. We all remember the Premier spent more than $1 million of taxpayers funds to buy friends on Facebook, and no wonder—when you are up to this kind of behaviour you need to buy friends, because no-one else would want to be your friend with this kind of behaviour and performance. We all remember the Premier endorsed more than 90 of his former ministerial staff being parachuted into plum executive public service roles, including a former staff member charged with family violence offences. The 90 staff are currently being investigated by the special investigator of the Victorian Ombudsman.

We all remember the Premier backing in former corrections minister Steve Herbert, who ordered his pet dogs be chauffeured in a ministerial vehicle. We all remember former Speaker Telmo Languiller and Deputy Speaker Don Nardella misusing the second residence allowance. We all remember how the Premier continues to accept political donations from the CFMEU, collecting more than $3 million. We all remember the Treasurer approving a $31 billion deal with Transurban while having a financial interest in the company. We all remember the Premier’s staff member who admitted to destroying a journalist’s dictaphone which was stolen from the ALP state conference. We all remember the Premier’s hand-picked whip was forced to resign after it was revealed during a royal commission into the trade unions that a deal with a cleaning company left workers on lower pay in return for cash payments to the AWU when he was the secretary. Now, that is not looking after workers. We all remember the Premier backed a sports minister who kept a $2000 bike given to him by a major events company. We all remember the Premier broke his promise not to introduce 42 new taxes, and we all remember how the Premier has trashed our reputation as the world’s most livable city under his watch—we have gone from number 1 to number 10. And number 20 of the top 20 hits by this disgraceful, hopeless government: we all remember Victoria went through the world’s longest and toughest lockdowns while this Premier lectured us every morning in his North Face jacket about what we could not do—fear and control.

The Premier—this government—has failed Victorians. We know and we remember all the decisions—to use untrained private security guards in hotel quarantine, which led to the deaths of more than 800 people. We remember that despite spending $4.8 million to hold an inquiry into the hotel quarantine disaster, no-one was held responsible—and guess what? The Premier could not remember. We all remember the fact that legal fees of government departments totalling over $15 million were all spent to actually cover up, and that dwarfed the actual cost of the Coate inquiry itself. We remember playgrounds closed and children not being able to access them for two weeks; we remember the curfews; we remember the 5-kilometre rules; and we remember the night curfews that were effectively the captain’s call when the Chief Commissioner of Police at the time, Shane Patton, and the chief health officer, certainly said they knew nothing of them. We all remember the six lockdowns.

We all remember that it took the Andrews government until Christmas Eve 2021 to make their first large order of RATs. This came months after the Liberal-Nationals initially called for the use of rapid antigen tests here in Parliament. We came down and we stood out the front and we showed that this could be done, and what did the Premier do? He called it a stunt—the very test that we all use today. The Premier called it a stunt.

We all remember the former health minister, Jenny Mikakos, promised 4000 ICU beds. Where were they? Where were the 4000 ICU beds? We are in the middle of a health crisis, and even today in question time the fourth health minister—we have been through four of them in four years; that just shows how bad things are, when you are turning over more health ministers than you are an egg—was suggesting that when it comes to somebody experiencing issues in terms of intensive care and saying where those beds are, well, you know what? It is not about those beds. Well, we all remember those 4000 beds that were promised and never eventuated.

We all remember the $28 billion in infrastructure blowouts—$28 billion which would build 28 Royal Children’s Hospitals, which would fix the healthcare crisis. And again, what has the government done? We remember that there has been not an increase in the health budget but a $2 billion cut in the most recent health budget, in the middle of a health crisis—a $2 billion cut.

This is a government that absolutely does not care. We all remember the lockdowns. We remember the Ombudsman reports. We remember COVID restrictions that were stronger and harder than everybody else’s, and we all remember the damage that this cost each and every Victorian in terms of their businesses, their mental health, certainly their state of mind and this state’s reputation—a state that was number one, a state that we have so much work to do to fix up. And we all will remember in November to change the government. We will remember in November that this is the worst government we have ever seen. We will remember in November the rorts, the corruption and the scandals that this Premier has presided over as the number one. We will all remember that the Premier said he will take full responsibility for everything and every decision made. We will all remember a rorting, corrupt government that needs to go in November, and we hope that Victorians will make the decision in November to boot out Daniel Andrews.