Mr BAYLEY (Clark) – Honourable Deputy Speaker, I thank the Leader of the Opposition for bringing on this matter of public importance: failure to deliver. My greatest challenge in this debate is choosing where to start and where to stop. I will let the opposition and the government fight it out over infrastructure spends and so forth and deal with some other issues that are important to people, culminating in housing and homelessness. Being Homelessness Week, I think it is important to rest on non‑delivery in that space.
I want to start with the Aboriginal people and their expectations. Today is 193 years since Robinson made the treaty with Mannalargenna and others about the original Tasmanians, the palawa, leaving their homelands and heading to the islands in the expectation that they would one day return. It is famous now, whether it be premiers Hodgman, Gutwein or Rockliff, that they have put rebuilding a relationship with Aboriginal people and progressing truth and treaty and other issues front and centre in their agenda and have consistently failed to deliver. They have failed to deliver such that last week we had Aboriginal people camping on the lawns of Parliament House to force the Premier’s hand and get him to at least have a conversation with them about that. Considering our expectations for Aboriginal people, that is despicable and we owe them a process to work towards a treaty.
We had the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs come into this place over three years ago and say that the Aboriginal Heritage Act does not work and does not protect Aboriginal heritage. We have had successive large-scale destructive developments on acknowledged Aboriginal landscapes progress under that ineffective act in the time since, yet we still have not an amendment bill or new bill that introduces new Aboriginal heritage protection legislation. That is a shame when it is three years since we have acknowledged that it does not work.
When it comes to the environment, the State of the Environment Report is completely missing in action. We had one in 2009, but despite this being a statutory review period, the 2014 State of the Environment Report and the 2019 State of the Environment Report failed to deliver, and we are now waiting until the end of August for the 2024 State of the Environment Report. Why is this? Number one, it is clearly not a priority for this government, but we can expect it to deliver and demonstrate some very significant issues as well. Some of these are realised because government continues to fail to deliver on other commitments to the environment. Things like reform of the reserve activity assessment process that Parks undertake to assess developments in national parks and reserves was promised many years ago; there has been tiny little tinkerings down on the edges but absolutely no comprehensive reform put on the table.
It is the same with state policies. We have this situation where this parliament is going to consider special legislation to retrospectively approve large industrial and destructive developments that are counter to the State Coastal Policy. In 2014 when this government got elected, it pledged to introduce more state policies. State policies are important to underpin and inform the business and decisions of government, but we have had not one. Instead, we have planning policies and a statewide planning scheme that does anything but take the complications and the cost out of planning in this state.
As to housing and homelessness, we still have a situation where there are 4700 applications on the housing waitlist and a 90‑week wait for people to receive social housing in this state. We have the despicable situation where this government is effectively cooking the books for housing by adding in vacant land and including crisis accommodation in the numbers they are demonstrating, and we have had the situation revealed where only six houses have been built on land that was released many years ago under housing supply orders. This is largely because the government is not funding it properly. We have Homes Tasmania completely reliant upon debt-funding its agenda going forward. Regarding homelessness, the sector is pointing out that we have a new crisis here in this state. We have hundreds and thousands of Tasmanians sleeping rough, we have youth homelessness running rampant and we still do not have a youth homelessness strategy.
It is very clear that this government should be prioritising people and not large developments like a stadium, because those developments are what is consuming this government’s energy and contributing to its failure to deliver. They are projects that are coming completely out of the blue, unannounced. They are not failures to deliver. They are completely unannounced.
Time expired.
