Hansard debates

Mrs McARTHUR (Western Victoria) (16:38): I rise today to speak on this Great Ocean Road and Environs Protection Amendment Bill 2021, which outlines the powers and functions of the Great Ocean Road Coast and Parks Authority as a public land manager, including the power to prescribe regulations. It also provides for the transfer of land management responsibilities for public land managed under six acts of Parliament within the Great Ocean Road coast and parks area, along the Great Ocean Road, to the Great Ocean Road Coast and Parks Authority. It also provides for the creation of a new trust account and a trust fund as part of the public account, which will receive all revenue generated by the Great Ocean Road Coast and Parks Authority in its capacity as a land manager, and it makes other minor amendments.

When I spoke on this bill in its first incarnation I said various things, and I can repeat some of them. The Great Ocean Road is an extraordinary asset for Victoria and for Australia, and yet this bill fails to do it justice, to create the governance which could truly enable residents and local businesses to thrive. Prior to entering this place I was a local councillor in the Corangamite shire, which is responsible for the iconic Twelve Apostles site, road and hinterland and coastal towns like Port Campbell and Princetown, and it had council jurisdiction over these areas. It presented a significant cost burden to local ratepayers, with virtually no economic benefit. It was estimated that less than 20 cents in the dollar got returned to the local communities and ratepayers.

As for the Twelve Apostles site itself, which Parks Victoria currently manage—which in reality is effectively a lavatory block in a container and a very inadequate car park—the visitor experience is appalling. This land, incidentally, is all privately owned and could be far better managed and developed if the government was not involved and was out of the picture.

I would like to also acknowledge my colleague in this area the member for Polwarth, Richard Riordan, who worked with me for a very long time before we went into Parliament to try and get some better system for managing this very important area. We were very passionate about having one authority, but that is not what we have got here. The 243 kilometres of National Heritage listed road between Torquay and Allansford is Victoria’s top tourism attraction—pre COVID of course—and 2.6 million people visit each year. That is more, as Ms Terpstra has said, than Uluru and the Great Barrier Reef combined.

But the problem is clear: the Great Ocean Road itself and the surrounding land is currently managed by at least 14 authorities, as Mr Grimley has referred to, so for any issue of consultation, planning and everything, extraordinary overlap is involved. Different public entities are responsible for strategic development and implementation, land use, planning and development, infrastructure delivery, asset maintenance, emergency management, investment facilitation, destination promotion and the management of the environment and local ecology. I could list so many of them. But what we have got now is all these authorities staying in place and another one over the top. That just beggars belief. We were hoping to have one authority, not one sitting on top of everything else.

Alarmingly there also appears to be no business case and no identified new funding. Princetown, for example, currently earns nearly $200 000 a year from its caravan park. Will the new authority, bereft of other funding, continue to spend the money, as Princetown does, on the community itself, or will it go to consultants, for example? I am pretty confident I know where it will go, and it will not go back to the community.

The minister in her second-reading speech in the Assembly noted that there would not be a single job lost, and the Premier’s press release following the bill’s passage in that house notes:

All staff working for existing committees of management that will be eventually incorporated into—

the Great Ocean Road Coast and Parks Authority—

… will retain their jobs, conditions and working locations.

Well, how do we make something more efficient if we keep everybody in place? In a briefing I attended it was actually suggested that we would need more. So we are not making this more efficient, more streamlined, we are making it more heavy handed and more bureaucratic. With that level of bureaucracy, if it is going to be self-sustaining, can we just imagine where the money is coming from to fund all this? That just beggars belief in itself.

We have also of course learned that we do not like local people being involved in the authority. They have been excluded. We are going to have hand-picked directors. I think a former Premier’s wife might be on the authority. I quote from Mr Andrew Mason, the CEO of Corangamite shire, who is very concerned about this matter. He said that:

Clause 212 of the Bill amends section 57 of the Act preventing councillors or officers to be appointed to the Board. This appears to be extremely heavy handed and appears to presume that councillors/officers are inherently untrustworthy and unable to manage conflicts of interest, and thus the integrity of the Board would be compromised and confidence in the Authority undermined. It is noted that no such limitations currently apply to councillors and council staff being on other State Government Boards, such as the Regional Waste Management Group or Regional Partnerships. Presumably the State Government is not contemplating changes to the Local Government Act to stop State Government employees from becoming councillors? Why don’t similar restrictions apply to former politicians, public servants or academics?

He also is very concerned about the revenue generation aspects:

Council accepts that the Authority will need to generate independent revenue and the Bill will allow this to occur, with enablement of the Authority to generate and retain revenue on land that it manages to fund its operations, removing this revenue from both Parks Victoria and Consolidated Revenue. We believe that local people should be exempt—

as Mr Grimley has referred to—

from any revenue generating activities and this should be explicit in the legislation. Further, if revenue generation impacts on Council, such as car parking charges, this must be done in consultation with Council and consideration given to cost recovery.

He went on about the recognition of community use:

The Authority will take over some parcels of Crown Land that are currently used by the community for recreational purposes, examples include the Princetown and Port Campbell Recreational Reserves. The Bill should recognise that existing community uses of Crown land should be allowed to continue without additional costs or control.

There are many problems with this bill. There is limited scrutiny; the bill is complex and grants extensive new powers and responsibilities to this authority. It transfers responsibility for land managed under six acts to an authority, but it does not create any efficiencies. Instead it creates a new superstructure. The bill is structured to ensure that the authority enters into agreements for the provision of certain services with Parks Victoria and the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning, requiring ministerial approval before it can enter into certain service agreements with third entities. This means it will largely be dependent on existing agencies for delivery of services. This is inefficient, as there is now uncertainty around how these arrangements will work and no time frame for determining how these agencies will continue to deliver existing services. And I might say that our experience recently with governments passing legislation and then providing the regulations later has been extremely problematic, and I have only got to point to the camping on farmland issues that arose. We gave carte blanche to a government to produce regulations, and look what happened with that. So I have no confidence in a government producing regulations after they pass a bill. That will be problematic.

The bill sequesters all state revenue generated through the management of public land. The bill also gives the authority the ability to levy new parking fees and charges, increasing the likelihood that attractions which are currently free will be subject to access and parking fees and, as I have said, with no exemption for local ratepayers. That should be paramount. Locals who pay the rates in these areas should be exempt from any charges. Tourists, quite rightly, should pay for the ongoing maintenance and development of the Great Ocean Road, not the locals.

The consultation has been poor with licence-holders in particular. Many of them could not get ongoing leases. We have heard how extensive the negotiation was with the Indigenous community, but certainly not with local councils and local businesses—not at all. It is appalling in that regard that everybody has been neglected. It is a bill that sets out with good intent but I am afraid has delivered the worst of all worlds. As Mr Riordan said in the other place:

… what do we get in this legislation? We get a huge tax grab by this government aimed and directed at local communities. There is not one protection in this legislation, not one. Not once are local people, local towns or local communities mentioned, and not once are they afforded any protection … We know from departmental briefings this will mean charges …

So locals are going to be disadvantaged by this whole bill, right along this Great Ocean Road, and not protected.

Now, there have been a number of people that have been very concerned about this bill, and I am sure most members of Parliament have been contacted by them. I can just quote from the Victorian National Parks Association, who said that:

The Bill unnecessarily, and dangerously, sets a new authority above Victoria’s national park management agency, Parks Victoria, as outlined in our … media release … It is a level of over-reach unprecedented in land management in Victoria.

They go on to suggest various things that might amend this problem, and I am sure we will discuss that further in committee.

But in conclusion, this is a bill that does not enhance the Great Ocean Road—this famous iconic area. This overreach by government without actually streamlining the processes that were originally asked for is incompetent and inefficient in the extreme. It is denying local people involvement, and to deny local people the ability to sit on the board is quite extraordinary. Yet to allow the hand-picked government favourites to manage this authority—most of them probably with no relationship to the area whatsoever—is outrageous. I do not believe that we are going to enhance the assets at all. They are going to be diminished, and this is extremely unfortunate. I hope that the Council will support the reasoned amendment that the coalition are putting up which would seek to delay the legislation, highlighting the limited time frame for consultation and review, the lack of opportunity to provide scrutiny and the level of uncertainty left open by this legislation and the unwritten regulations.