The State Government has been accused of severely cutting back on work given to contractors engaged in fire mitigation in East Gippsland.
Gippsland East Nationals MP, Tim Bull, said the contractors who rely on this work for their income, had also been misled by the Environment Minister, Steve Diomopoulos.
Mr Bull told Parliament that when Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action (DEECA) contracts were granted to former timber industry harvest and haulage contractors when that sector was closed, concerns were raised they may take work from the existing external plant panel workers.
“When I raised this, in the Minister’s response on June 6 last year, he attempted to allay those concerns, stating “similar volumes of forest and fire management work as previous years will be made available to the panel.”,” Mr Bull said.
“He also said the funding to the harvest and haulage contractors was “new funding”, indicating it would not impact on the external plant panel. However, despite this, we saw a major reduction in work being awarded
to the panel.”
Mr Bull said he raised it again in December and the Minister responded, saying the reduction in work was a “temporary variation” and “the volume of work will increase for the balance of the financial year and will align with previous volumes of work.”
“Again, this did not eventuate as promised with little – and in some cases no work offered,” he said.
“Then last week at an information session for external plant contractors, a slide was shown saying ‘(former harvest and haulage) contractor assets are considered internal assets and must be considered before external plant are engaged’. This flies in the face of the ‘new money’ claim and that there was to be no competition.
“Hence, I have asked the Minister to both restore the same levels of work to the external plant panel and provide me with the budget of works they have received over each of the past five years, so we can see the level of reduction.
“It’s quite clear there should be plenty of work for all with the bush desperately needing high levels of management,” he said.
