Wednesday, 8 June 2022

Ombudsman

Investigation into Environment Protection Authority Decisions on West Gate Tunnel Project Spoil Disposal

Mr FINN (Western Metropolitan) (17:28): I rise to speak on the Victorian Ombudsman’s Investigation into Environment Protection Authority Decisions on West Gate Tunnel Project Spoil Disposal. I want to thank the Ombudsman for the work that she has done on this and commend her most strongly for officially confirming what many of us have known in the western suburbs for some time, and that is that the Andrews government has been bullying and has been unduly influencing the EPA and various other bodies for quite some time on this issue. I refer to Ms Deborah Glass’s foreword in this report, where she says:

While senior officials denied there was any government interference, there is little doubt the EPA was under pressure to ‘fix’ the problem to get the project back on track.

And that is the bottom line. What we are seeing in Sunbury Road at the moment, what we are seeing between Sunbury and Bulla, is a direct result of a decision made by the Andrews government, not the EPA. The EPA is a useless organisation that is being told what to do by government and it just meekly follows whatever it is told, and that is clear. It is clear from this report. The EPA might as well be wound up. I do not know how many millions of dollars it spends every year or how much it costs the taxpayer, but it might as well be wound up for all the good it does. This report clearly indicates that the people really making the decisions in the EPA are the Premier’s office and the minister. And that is something that I think we are all infuriated about, particularly those of us who live out that way. The Ombudsman said:

Residents … were ‘left in the dark’.

People expressed concerns about ‘toxic soil’, including fears it might increase the risk of birth defects and terminal illness in the community, and worries about dumping it close to schools and waterways.

My very word we did, and we still do. And what did the EPA do? The EPA did nothing. They said, ‘Oh, well, we know what the community thinks. We won’t bother asking them’, and they did not. It is beyond a joke. It is reprehensible behaviour from the EPA, and in my view the chairman of the EPA should resign over this. I think this is just disgraceful. It is deplorable behaviour, and I refer again to Ms Glass’s foreword, where she said the EPA:

… plainly failed to convince the community … The EPA told us consulting the community would be a ‘waste of time’ and that discussions ‘could not be fruitful because of the level of anger in the community’. In effect, the EPA thought there was no point in consulting because it knew—

it knew—

what the community thought. Instead, it took the approach of ‘putting factual information on the website’, but much of it was redacted.

Fair dinkum. That is just not good enough. It is not good enough for a government organisation to say, ‘The people are angry. We will just ignore them. We will pretend that this community consultation has been done, that it’s finished, that it’s over with’, when in fact it never really was conducted in the first place. This, unfortunately, I have to say, is a trend of the Andrews government, to use government bodies to promote their policies and to push through the particular projects that they might have.

But on this particular occasion there is absolutely no excuse for the EPA not to do its job. It is a clear dereliction of duty. It is a clear failure on the part of the EPA on this particular issue. The people of Sunbury and the people of Bulla and the people who use Sunbury Road have every right to be furious at the way that they have been treated, the fact that they have been taken for granted and the fact that they have been dismissed by the EPA and indeed by the Andrews government. This is just despicable behaviour, particularly when the health and the lives of people in that part of Melbourne are directly impacted. The EPA will not tell us what impact this will have on our health. They are not interested. They just want to do what they are told by the Premier, and on this occasion they have. I will speak again on this report at the first opportunity.