Premier Allan: must tackle regional breakdown as fire and drought loom

Incoming Premier Jacinta Allan needs to pull back from inner city battles with the Greens to focus on drought, fire and traditional Labor voters.

The hard-hat era of Victorian politics is over for Jacinta Allan, she must now focus on re-engaging regional Victoria, a looming drought and catastrophic fire conditions.

ANALYSIS

Will incoming Premier Jacinta Allan pull her party back from inner urban battles with the Greens to refocus the government’s attention on workers and communities beyond the goat-cheese belt?

Timber workers, CFA volunteers, hunters, farmers and their irrigation communities must be hoping, that as Member for Bendigo East, Ms Allan rebuilds her government’s fractured relationship with regional communities.

Outgoing Premier Daniel Andrews will have schooled Ms Allan in the game of numbers, managing the party and keeping the Greens at bay in Northcote, Preston, Footscray and Pascoe Vale.

But the new Premier can prove she is no Dan Andrews by re-engaging regional voters and those in Labor’s heartland electorates.

A mountain of debt means the era of florescent vests and hard-hat politics has come to an end. Even scrapping together the funds needed to rebuild and pave the state’s broken road network will be a challenge.

But Ms Allan can still hit the ground running, by terminating Labor’s green-leaning policies that have so damaged regional communities.

Dismissing the push by one Animal Justice MP and a handful of green-leaning Labor MPs to ban duck hunting would be a good first step, especially when hunters are willing to adopt shooter proficiency testing to curb wounding rates.

The Premier also needs to step in on the wild dog debate, where her Agriculture and Environment Ministers seem to be kowtowing to the AJP’s demands not to renew an order allowing baiting and trapping of the predators on crown land within 3km of farm boundaries.

Then there’s the immediate issue of ensuring Victoria is prepared for drought and major fires over the next two summers.

Timber harvest and haulage crews need to be given the certainty of permanent contracts to bring their heavy machinery in to fight fires.

The Code of Practice for Timber Production needs to be amended to end environmental groups’ green lawfare, which most recently stopped firewood cutters from salvaging a ticking fire bomb of 600,000 windblown trees left lying on the Wombat Forest floor since June 2021.

Voters in Ms Allan’s own electorate, who rely on firewood for heating, are already seeing the impact of firewood shortages.

Meanwhile the CFA needs the resources to recruit more volunteers and funding to rebuild the nation’s oldest tanker fleet.

Forest Fire Management Victoria is also battling to curb fuel loads in the face of onerous regulations and lack of resourcing.

The last thing Ms Allan should do is cave into the United Firefighters Union’s demands for pay rises of up to 7 per cent annually and $117 million in what it claims are efficiency savings from Fire Rescue Victoria taking control of 38 CFA stations.

Ms Allan will also have to back Victoria’s claim that it opposes federal water buyouts of Victorian irrigation communities’ water, with action – especially when she has irrigators sitting across the north of her electorate.

As drought creeps across Victoria, the Premier will have to draw on her experience during the millennium drought as Regional and Rural Development Minister from 2007 to 2010 and then as shadow agriculture minister from 2013 to 2014 to keep regional communities resilient and safe.

The last thing Ms Allan wants is to front yet another Royal Commission to explain why so little was done under her watch.