Concerned Councillors

Mr RYAN (Leader of The Nationals),speaking in Parliament on 11 June 2009, said, "Yesterday, together with the member for Bass and other members of Parliament from the conservative side of politics, I was on the front steps of Parliament House when yet another rally was conducted by Victorians who came to the Parliament to complain about the excesses of the Brumby government.

The organisations involved in yesterday’s rally [10 June 2009] were the Coalition of Concerned Councillors, an organisation called Planning Backlash, and another organisation called Watershed Victoria. I was presented with about 3000 letters in relation to issues to do with the desalination plant. Part of one letter reads as follows:

I am dismayed by Mr Brumby’s intention to build the largest, climate-change-accelerating desalination plant in the southern hemisphere on the pristine Bass Coast. There is no mandate. It is a total about-face to ALP re-election Water Policy of ‘recycling and conservation, that will secure Melbourne’s water supply’

… Desalination uses enormous energy, and is enormously expensive. The Brumby government has spent millions of tax payers dollars attempting to deliberately distort and mislead the community into accepting this disastrous project without openly and transparently evaluating sustainable and superior water alternatives …"

I have undertaken to provide these letters to the Premier, and I will. The people of Victoria are sick of the taint of corruption, issues to do with financial management, taxation, matters to do with the destruction of people’s rights — all things this government campaigned on and is now ignoring.

Source: Victorian Hansard June 11, 2009