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NOT WORTH THE PAPER IT’S WRITTEN ON: MLC
■ The completion date for the Yarra Ranges Special Developmental School upgrade in Evelyn electorate has been pushed back another 12 months, Renee Heath has told State Parliament. “This has been a terrible budget. It is not worth the paper that it is written on,” Ms Heath told the Legislative Council. “This Government is hopeless. The Treasurer is a complete failure. We have got to come back to serving the people that put us here, to actually looking after their money like it means something, rather than spending like drunken sailors. “I rise to speak on the Budget take-note motion with great pleasure. The reason it is with great pleasure is because there is so much to say about this pathetic document that is already out of date. It is unbelievable. “There is no better evidence for it being out of date than the Treasurer’s own words. I was absolutely amazed two weeks ago when out the back at the steps of Parliament the Treasurer literally had to tell his colleagues to ‘Hey, rein in a bit of the spending here.’ “He gave one of the most amazing press conferences at the back door that I have ever seen, where he admitted to losing control of his own budget. “You are the Treasurer. Managing the budget is literally your job. And then he went on to say: ‘… so that will essentially mean that the government’s going to have to make further adjustments in terms of our budgetary settings’. Ms Heath said there was an ominous warning for all Victorians from the Australian Financial Review: “Asked on Wednesday if he had reached the end of the line in how much he could lean on business and property investors to pay off debt, Mr Pallas said: ‘We’ve pretty much done most of what we could do’. “But he refused to “rule in or rule out” other
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● Renee Heath, Eastern Victoria MLC taxes, saying he could give “no assurances about where the government is going with this matter”. “This is absolutely extraordinary. We have a government that has either increased or introduced 55 new taxes that have just driven us into the ground, so much so that we have more debt than New South Wales, Queensland and Tasmania combined, where our people are literally taxed to poverty, taxed to oblivion, and then the Treasurer is saying, ‘Look, we just can’t rule anything in or out.’ It is just a state of disaster under these guys here.” Ms Heath said: I would like to talk about the impact of this financial mismanagement – the impact that it is having on my community – and some of the most disappointing revelations of this budget. “It has now been 2134 days since Labor promised Pakenham a community hospital. In this budget the completion date was, unsurprisingly, pushed out a further 12 months. However, work has not even begun, so we all know that it will not be delivered on this timeline either. “In the original media release from Premier Daniel Andrews, the former Premier, it speaks about how we are going to have this community hospital that is going to service the local community, works will start in 2018 and it will be complete by 2024. Well, it is now 2024, and there has not been a shovel in the soil,” Ms Heath said.
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