Melina BATH (Eastern Victoria) (10:46): Well, it is motion 1584, and the theme of my contribution is: show us the money or show us where the money has gone. I want to put on record my concern around the fact that we have well and truly seen in Victoria – one of the most fire-prone regions in the world – a government over many years not perform the preparation to prevent bushfires in the first place, and I have gone on record many times in this place on that. And we have seen the devastation that those bushfires can cause not only to forests and forest systems but to communities, to roads and to businesses. They can certainly close roads, they can close national parks, they can be the formation of cancellation of events, they can cancel accommodation. There is a loss of tourism and there is a loss of supply chain flowthrough to businesses, and indeed there can be a pervading sense that the whole entire region is lost and shut, and I know that was the case in the 2019–20 bushfires.
I want to draw attention in my contribution to the fact – and I thank Mrs McArthur for her very good investigative work on this – that almost, let us round it up, $23 million was offered by the government in grants, with big fanfare. How many grants have been taken up? We heard 23 grants have been taken up – only $115,000 in terms of grants – and around $16 million is still in contingency. And then we see the administrative facilitation of that smaller number of grants. How much money is being wasted there? We have heard this time and time again with many implementation phases of the Andrews–Allan–Carroll government.
I want to just paint a picture of the difference in some of the grant schemes. In the 2019–20 bushfires 900 businesses in East Gippsland were able to access grant funding. At the time the administration worked with the community to design those grants to serve this impacted community. They set the bar. They enabled a way for small businesses, who were incredibly impacted, and others to be able to facilitate 900 grants. Now, that sounds like a good outcome for this very devastated region. There were $10,000 small business bushfire support grants, as I said. Across Mallacoota, Buchan, Bruthen, East Gippsland there were fire evacuations, road closures and impact, and that has to be the story. There is already a blueprint that this government has for how to work with community to best serve the very pain and agony that that community has held. I know my colleague the member for Lowan has raised issues around the Grampians on this and the impact of removal of water on the caravan parks and the like and how much fight she had to have to get these 23 grants of $5000. Surely a government with a conscience, surely a government with integrity would actually find a way to facilitate and expedite that facilitation and not, as we are led to believe, reprioritise funding somewhere else. It may well definitely be needed in Porepunkah for that poor community, but do not announce the same funding twice for your media headlines.
I think it is very important that this house passes this motion to get to that nitty-gritty, to understand where that funding has gone, where it has not gone and why it has not gone there. What we will see again – and it will not be any shock to anybody who is not in government – is that sometime in the next few sitting weeks the clerks, God bless them, will stand up and say, ‘I’m sorry, the government has not had enough time. We can’t facilitate this. There is no show.’ There is no transparency in this government. At the end of the day, these are people hurting out in the regions, which need to be able to access this funding to encourage people to come back into the regions, for our tourism to flourish and to rebuild and regenerate after devastating bushfires.