Melina BATH (Eastern Victoria) (15:09): Acting President Galea, it seems like every time I get to speak you are in the chair. That is a very good thing, I am sure. It is actually a referral to a committee that both Mrs Broad and I are members of. I have been a long-term member on the Environment and Planning Committee. It is some very interesting and important work this committee does – just a shout-out to the secretariat, who has only this week been party to handing down a very comprehensive report on the flood inquiry which saw 73 recommendations. We are happy to receive another important piece of work.
I want to go into some of the points that Mrs Tyrrell put in her motion today in relation to community consultation. The first point – and it is a very real and relevant point – is that Victorians do expect a high standard of community consultation on matters that affect them, and it goes forth from there. Victorians who genuinely engage in a consultation process have the right to expect that those conducting the consultations are prepared, across the detail and fully equipped to answer questions – another fair and reasonable point.
What I want to bring to this discussion today is about what the government often brings to the table in terms of consultation. Indeed what is the purpose of consultation? We have heard some contributions this afternoon, but what is it for? What is consultation for? Does the government regularly and often have its mind made up, as we have just heard from the former speaker? The community can bring their issues to the consultation table, but it is not all about winning because the government may already have its mind made up. You can bring your conversation and your consultation, but you do not necessarily get to win. Well, I find that a very abstract and odd form of consultation, because consultation from the very outset should be about thoroughly examining an issue, an object, an understanding, a proposition or a policy from all sides – a multifaceted discussion around consultation – not that the government has already made its mind up and will just let the plebs go out and have a bit of a conversation about it and say that they have actually consulted. But what about the holistic sense of consultation?
We have heard from my colleague Mrs Broad about the duration of engagement. I regularly hear from people in my electorate, from frustrated constituents, that a consultation process is open for only a very short period of time. People have lives – they work to put food on the table and have busy lives – and sometimes they see that a consultation process can be a month to a couple of weeks. That is not a fair and reasonable proposition for people. Sometimes we see – and I will give some examples shortly – a very targeted approach about consultation, and the government cherrypicks who it wants to come. It sends out some letters. We even just heard before that sometimes members of Parliament come and in good faith want to understand the issue and they are locked out of the consultation. Apparently, even though we have been elected to Parliament, even though we are part of this whole conversation, we are told, ‘No, sorry, you’re not permitted to be part of a consultation.’ It actually shows quite a level of disrespect to people who have been elected into this place to be leaders and to understand.
What are the government’s objectives about consultation? Is it to be able to come in here later on and say when we ask questions at question time, ‘No, no, no, you don’t get to challenge that because we have consulted.’ Sometimes that consultation, as I have said, is very, very limited and with a private agenda previously ordained by a minister or a policy that it then requests, demands and asks the department to fulfil. I do not blame departments. They are often made up of quite often very reasonable bureaucrats implementing a minister’s policy and decisions. Is there that sharing of information? Is it a two-way street? Does our community actually get to have those conversations? We know in regional Victoria there are some classic examples. The Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action has 60 per cent of the whole department’s employee list, of the whole staff, operating out of metropolitan Melbourne. Well, how much do they know about rural and regional Victoria? Then when I speak to some very good people who work in the department on anonymity grounds, they are saying, ‘Look, we can’t do anything. We’re being hamstrung.’
Let me give you some examples. Currently we have a very important discussion going on – some would say consultation – about the future of our forests. The Minister for Environment has got this Great Outdoors Taskforce going on. There are five people on that taskforce: first of all, a former minister for environment the Honourable Lisa Neville; a former history teacher, and I am sure a very good local person, Karen Cain; Melissa Wood, who is a Victorian Environmental Assessment Council member – she crosses over with Ms Cain as being on the eminent panel, and there is great contradiction and overlap there that I probably do not have time to go into – and a couple of very good people from Gippsland Mr Dear and Mr Terry Robinson.
This consultation process happened, and it happened a little while ago in various spots, and people flooded a Drouin meeting and they were given sticky notes. I do not know about you, but they could record their information on a sticky note and hand it in. There was no formal way of recording that information and providing the level and depth of understanding of that community – and there were a variety of people there with a variety of interests and stakes in the future of our state forests and what should happen to them. They gave sticky notes. Given the seriousness and breadth of discussion, I do not believe that sticky notes are a fair and reasonable level of consultation, and then there was no feedback to those people. They did not record their emails. How are they going to receive that two-way information? Incidentally, when the question went out by one of those local persons there, who said, ‘Do we want any more new national parks?’, universally that group of 250 people said, ‘No, no new national parks. We need to look after the ones we’ve got, and we need to continue with public access to public land.’ I am fully in endorsement of that, and I thank the 17,000 people who have already signed the petition in this vein that I am sponsoring in this house.
Let me go to some other points that are very important as well. We see wind and solar companies setting up and establishing in order to roll out the government’s agenda, and I am all for a mixed energy market providing a whole range of energy solutions. But when you have got a government that takes the right of consultation away by removing the opportunity of locals to go to VCAT and appeal to VCAT when decisions are being made about these wind installations and also solar factories on good farming land – the government has removed that right of appeal – you can consult as much as you like, but basically the government has removed your right.
We also understand in terms of other issues, and there was one that came to my mind the other day from a constituent in Lang Lang – again, the development facilitation program. One of its first rulings was taking out the ability of the Lang Lang community to debate, to argue, the issue in relation to quarries. We all need quarries, but that whole environmental issue and the community engagement factor has been overruled in this government development facilitation program.
Finally, the Nationals certainly do not have a problem with this inquiry. We acknowledge the need for it, but we also acknowledge that this government needs to do better in terms of consultation. I would finish on the issue around consultold. There are many, many of my constituents that feel the government has consultold them what the outcome would be and they have not been respected in their views in the process.
