Melina BATH (Eastern Victoria) (16:55): I am pleased to rise to make my contribution on the Fire Services Property Amendment (Emergency Services and Volunteers Fund) Bill 2025. What an indictment on the government that they are going to call something a volunteers fund and then redirect funds from this tax burden on property owners, farmers and the like to organisations and agencies that once were funded through consolidated revenue. This government has a lens of arrogance that I find astonishing. I have been here near coming up 10 years. I was there for the CFA bill the first time around in 2016, and I was there in 2019. That was an unacceptable – I will try not to swear – bill that provided severe disloyalty and regrettable, contemptuous actions and motivations towards our volunteers, and now we see this. The fact that the government has the idea to call it a ‘volunteers fund’ is, to my mind, an abomination.
We are the highest taxed state in the nation. This is the bottom of the pits. This is not what we want to be achieving, but we are through this government. We are up to I think now around the 60th new and increased tax. This tax is another hit to everyday Victorians. Under Labor, Victoria is an economic basket case, and this spending will not fix it. More spending will not fix it. We are getting a second-rate service. What is going to happen through this bill is that from 1 July everyday Victorians will have imposed upon them an additional $2.1 billion worth of taxes over the next three years as this tax takes hold. This government cannot manage money, and regional and rural Victorians are paying the price.
So what is it doing? It is shifting the fire services property levy – of course that did come in as result of the royal commission as one of the recommendations. It came through the former Liberal and Nationals government as a fairer way to apply a levy that supported our volunteers fund and the CFA to provide those emergency services. But what this bill does is it extends it to the core government agencies. It extends it to Triple Zero Victoria. It extends funding to the State Control Centre, Emergency Recovery Victoria, Emergency Management Victoria, the emergency alert program, the emergency management operation communications program and Forest Fire Management Victoria (FFMV) in my new portfolio of public land management. It does this without acknowledging the vital work that our SES, our CFA and FRV do. What does it do? It doubles the rate of a residential tax from 8.7 cents to 17.3 cents per $1000 of capital improved value. Commercial and industrial rates are substantially increased, and primary production will see somewhere around a 154 to 189 per cent increase on their tax. It is $2.1 billion over the forward estimates. This is a massive impost and increase. Rural Councils Victoria have written to many of us, and they say that, in comparison, their calculations show that primary production landholders will on average be expected to fund a 154 per cent increase from the fire services levy to the Emergency Services and Volunteers Fund.
There are three startling examples: South Gippsland – it is actually my home shire – Wellington shire and Colac Otway shire will each have an additional $5 million taken out of their communities every year. That means that is $5 million that is not spent by people living in their communities, organising their lives and buying products and services in our regional towns. They have to find this funding, and it is going to hit everybody’s hip pocket – in a cost-of-living crisis, I might say. Let me give you another example, from Baw Baw shire – and I thank the mayor Mr Danny Goss for providing this information. Their finance team has calculated that there will be a further $5.37 million in levies raised above the existing $8 million – and again they go to specific increases.
And what happens to our farmers? They face a staggering increase in their average levy. One of the comments was – and I have been speaking with the Victorian Farmers Federation president Brett Hosking – on average there will be a $50,000 annual increase for certain farms above a certain acreage or hectare area. Fifty thousand dollars extra – that is an abomination. You can imagine even for the average well-off person on a good wage that would be incredibly hard to bear.
Brett Hosking said this, and I quote from a media release:
This is an outrageous new tax that will hit every Victorian’s hip pocket, and farmers are being forced to pay the highest price with no justification. It’s a direct attack on the people who put food on our tables.”
At a time when families are already struggling with skyrocketing costs, and farmers are battling drought, bushfires, and rising expenses, this tax grab couldn’t come at a worse time. It’s completely unacceptable …
I concur entirely with him.
The other thing about this tax is it has actually got a new charge. If you look to the government website, it is taxing residential non-principal place of residence applications, so property owners who provide rentals will be hit with a double fixed and a double variable charge. And of course what is that going to do for property owners who rent out their homes? In regional Victoria it is paramount that we get these people. Whether they be teachers, nurses, doctors, firies, people who work in the IGA, people who work in small school settings, whatever, they are going to be hit with this increase because property owners who supply those rentals are going to have to pass on those costs.
What do we not get with this legislation? It does not offer additional support for volunteer and emergency services like the CFA and the SES. They do not get the equipment that they need – and I am going to discuss that shortly. They have outdated equipment to the nth degree. It also lacks clear guidelines around how exemptions for these groups will operate.
Indeed, from speaking with Adam Barnett from Volunteer Fire Brigades Victoria, this government has had no conversation with the grassroots volunteers on this tax. They have not gone to them at the grassroots level and provided that opportunity to discuss and thrash it out. That is in complete contrast to when we, the Liberals and Nationals, back post the 2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission, introduced the property services levy. There was a white paper and a green paper, and they went out to all volunteers who had the capacity to provide feedback. How much consultation has this government done? Zero with the people who matter the most – indeed zero with many, including our property owners and our farmers, but zero with those grassroots volunteers. This is the contempt that they continue to dish out to our volunteers in the CFA. Let us look at what else it does not do. We know that it cost shifts. We know that the legislation cost shifts from a government that cannot manage money. We heard Mr Davis. I will not repeat all of his comments, but I endorse them – the fact that this government has blown out metropolitan-based construction projects to an eye-watering multi-multibillion dollars, and it is just frightening the level of ineptitude that lets this happen.
Let us talk a little bit more about the CFA. The government has said, and I have heard these comments, that it will provide $10 million for new CFA vehicles. But in practical terms, what does that actually mean? They are roughly, give or take, about half a million dollars a tanker, so out of $10 million you are going to get 20 tankers. The CFA has over 1700 tankers across the state and about 220 pumpers, and many of them are so far past their use by date it is not funny. So many trucks are well overdue for replacement. If we have the ability to replace them, it is going to take decades upon decades upon decades. So this government, in spruiking that it actually cares about the volunteers, is redirecting these funds into core government services, which is solely about propping up its bottom line, its budget blowouts. It is not about producing better outcomes for our volunteers and the trucks and equipment that they have. Alarmingly, over 230 CFA trucks are already between the ages of 31 and 35. I did hear my colleague Mr McGowan speak about them being able to get different licence plates because of their age. As I said, it is completely unacceptable.
What is also concerning is around FFMV. That is my particular passion in public land management and the need for better management of our public land, our forests, and the need to have better fuel mitigation. We know that this government over the last 10 years has introduced a thing called Safer Together and it has a target of 70 per cent residual risk. I was actually talking to someone recently who was in the department some years ago and he said that they were part of the team that helped design it and so many people now are saying that it is too confusing, that the government does not meet its own targets – and it does not – and indeed that it needs to be disbanded. Over the past 10 years we have seen under Safer Together a rough average of around 1.6 per cent of fuel reduction across the forest estate when the royal commission spoke about a 5 to 8 per cent rolling target of treatable forests. This is what the government should be focusing on, and yet it is not. I have met many of the people who work in forest fire management and I respect them entirely, but the government is spending more on the bureaucracy and not doing these preparatory burns and not having these bushfire mitigation practices and actually bringing them to fruition.
Over the past five years FFMV has consistently overspent its fire emergency management budget by approximately $550 million – a 27 per cent blowout. Now, instead of fixing this mismanagement, the government is shifting onto everyday Victorians the cost burden of this government bureaucracy. Well, it is not the people on the ground lighting these fires that are the issue, it is the suits in Melbourne, where there is government mismanagement and government waste.
I have said that the Nationals strongly oppose this tax. This is not in support of the wellbeing of those agencies. We value our SES. Again, if you talk to SES members in my Eastern Victoria Region, they have ageing equipment and I know they have to rattle tins and raise funds for basic services like chainsaws, like fuel, just to keep themselves rolling out the door when that pager goes off. We on this side value these people. We know that this is a wasteful government and that these taxes only burden our communities when they can least afford the impost. We know that this government cannot manage money. The Nationals most strongly oppose this new tax and this new legislation. We do support the amendments put up by Mr Davis on behalf of the Liberals and Nationals. We do support the retention of the Country Fire Authority, Fire Rescue Victoria and SES as funding recipients but deleting the others, which are core government services.
