Agriculture
1 June, 2023
Premier playing games with communities: Walsh
MURRAY Plains MP Peter Walsh has demanded Premier Daniel Andrews meet Loddon communities after the weekend’s new route announcement. “It will be the courteous and respectful thing to do ... the right thing for local people,” Mr Walsh said. And...
MURRAY Plains MP Peter Walsh has demanded Premier Daniel Andrews meet Loddon communities after the weekend’s new route announcement.
“It will be the courteous and respectful thing to do ... the right thing for local people,” Mr Walsh said.
And Loddon Mayor Dan Straub, a critic of the VNI West engagement and consultation process, said he would encourage Mr Andrews to visit the region.
“He can then hear first-hand the community concerns, the pros and the cons and what the effects will be on the ground,” Cr Straub said.
Mr Walsh, who is leader of the Victorian Nationals, said the weekend’s announcement show Mr Andrews’s disdain for regional and rural Victorians “has finally gone too far”.
“The Andrews Labor government is simply riding roughshod over the rights of rural and regional Victorians with its battering-ram approach to the proposed Victoria-New South Wales interconnector,” he said.
Mr Walsh said the decision to drop the “out of the blue” announcement of yet another change to the path of the project to mostly metropolitan media around 5.30pm on Saturday was “an absolute disgrace”. “Have the Premier and the Government learnt nothing from all the concern and complaints about the way communication and consultation around this massive project leading up to the weekend?
“Have the Premier or the Government even stopped to consider they are playing games with people’s lives and people’s livelihoods – because that’s exactly what they are doing.
“Surely decisions of this size and importance would warrant a personal visit from the Premier so the people of regional Victoria can ask questions and get answers – but that doesn’t happen in the Andrews empire. In that world you do as you are told, when they finally get around to telling you what you will be doing.”
Mr Walsh said the Government invoking legislative powers from the National Electricity Victoria (Amendment) Act 2015 (NEVA) “to bludgeon his agenda through what should be a democratic process” makes it all the worse.
He says the purpose, and intent, of this Act was to amend the original National Electricity (Victoria) Act 2005 to grant rights to the minister and consumer or user groups to intervene in appeals against certain decisions and determinations made by the Australian Energy Regulator.
“It was never intended to be hijacked by an agenda-driven government which clearly doesn’t give a damn about the little people who get in the way of its blue-sky vision that is already bankrupting our state,” Mr Walsh says.
“Once again regional and rural Victorians are the ones who will pay the price for the incompetence of the Andrews Labor Government and its total inability to manage an economy.”