State Member for Gippsland East, Tim Bull has laughed off Labor’s criticism of the Liberal National Coalition’s population decentralisation plan to grow rural and regional Victoria.

The Coalition this week launched the Victorian Population Policy Taskforce with the intention of tackling Melbourne’s population growth crisis by supporting rural and regional growth.

“It is well known that with Melbourne bursting at the seams with road congestion and trains, trams and buses overcrowded, it’s vital ways of distributing this growth is incentivised.

“The Victorian population grows by one person every five minutes and almost all of this growth is in Melbourne, while in many rural areas we are seeing the number of residents decrease.

“Planned growth of our regions in a sensible and sustainable way is what we need to achieve and that is what the population growth plan announced today is all about.

“For Labor to come out and say this plan will wreck the character of regional Victoria with no plans for any additional infrastructure is completely laughable on two counts.

“The first is we have population declining in areas like western Victoria and the Latrobe Valley and that is before the Hazelwood closure. These areas need a population injection just to reverse this declining trend and to sustain local economies and jobs.

“The second is the hypocrisy of this Government in talking about infrastructure in rural areas.

“This is the government that removed the Regional Growth Fund that was delivering so much to regional Victorian communities. It also completely removed the Country Roads and Bridges Program and severely cut the Road Asset Management Budget and the Road Operation and Network Improvement Budget, which both benefited country roads.

“It also failed to commit to the continued improvements to the Gippsland rail line upgrade pre-election which the Coalition did and hence nothing is being delivered.

“There is far less being spent on our roads and community infrastructure in rural Victoria under this government and it has the hide to talk about rural infrastructure concerns.

“Their response to our announcement is only criticism, with no alternate plan to support rural economies.  The sooner we get rid of this city-centric government and get funds flowing back into rural areas and boost local economies the better,” Mr Bull said.

Caption: State MP Tim Bull says rural areas need sensible population and economic growth to sustain local economies and jobs.

Tuesday, November 15, 2016