Family First’s Jane Foreman says the revelation that Labor’s secret $8 billion rail levy was disclosed to the full cabinet in June 2024, when Premier Ben Carroll was Deputy Premier (The Australian, 2 September), settles what this Premier knew and when, and asks why Victorians should take his word on anything now, the roads included.
The Australian revealed on Wednesday that the details of the rail improvement charge sat in the briefing pack for a June 2024 cabinet meeting, in minutes recording a December 2023 meeting of the government’s budget and finance committee. Mr Carroll did not deny the report.
“Either the Premier read his cabinet papers or he did not,” said Mrs Foreman. “There is no third answer, and neither of the two is good enough.”
“A tax was charged on every fare in Victoria for twenty months and nobody was told. It was sitting in the cabinet papers the whole time.”
Mr Carroll says the charge was conceived, designed and implemented by previous leadership, and he names the 2021 cabinet meeting where it began: Daniel Andrews, Tim Pallas, Jacinta Allan and James Merlino. What he doesn’t say is that he was the Minister for Public Transport when it was conceived, and he was Deputy Premier when it reached the cabinet papers.
“The Premier can name everyone in that room except himself,” said Mrs Foreman.
Robert Redlich, who ran the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission from 2018 to 2022, says the secrecy around the charge may amount to corruption under the expanded integrity laws Mr Carroll has promised, if it was imposed for improper motives.
“The Premier is promising Victorians tougher integrity laws. A former IBAC commissioner says they may reach his own cabinet table.”
Last weekend Mr Carroll promised to fix 500,000 potholes by the end of January for $352 million. Three days later his cabinet papers turned up. Family First has already shown what happened the last time this government counted road repairs: a maintenance target beaten by 25 per cent, which only stacked up because the hard structural repairs were shelved and cheap patch jobs counted instead.
“Band-Aids were counted as brain surgery so a shrinking repair program could be sold as a record one,” said Mrs Foreman. “First they hid the tax. Then they dressed up the road figures. Now we are asked to take the same government’s word on half a million potholes.”
“This is not one bad decision. It is the pattern, and this Premier has been at the table for all of it.”
Mrs Foreman says this is all further evidence of how carefully Victorians should use their two votes in November. One changes the government. The other puts Family First in the Legislative Council to keep whoever wins honest.
