A fair go for rural and regional Victoria

One in four Victorians live outside Melbourne where access to essential services is often worse than in the capital city. The population outside regional cities is shrinking and ageing rapidly. Financial capital and agribusiness have financialised food markets to increase yields and growth through methods that have contributed to land degradation, water pollution and loss of biodiversity, often due to an acceleration in land clearing and excessive use of chemical inputs. The workers in the fields are often subjected to long hours for low pay. This sector is heavily reliant on workers on insecure visas, and there have been many instances of exploitation of their status. Programs that draw upon Indigenous people’s knowledge of land management should be expanded to increase the sustainability of production.

What we think

1. Regional Victorians shouldn’t get a worse deal than those in Melbourne.
2. PALM scheme workers are highly exploited and deserve the same rights as any other worker in Victoria.

We’ll fight to

Essential services

1. Guarantee access to suitable and equivalent health care in every region of Victoria.
2. Introduce a workforce plan to train the doctors, nurses and other health workers needed by 2040, with subsidies into areas of greatest need.
3. Provide free housing for regional health workers to fix chronic understaffing and reliance on poor temporary accommodation.
4. Introduce a properly funded, paid fire and emergency service for rural Victoria.
5. Increase funding for regional schools and TAFEs, universal public childcare that reaches the regions, and expanded public aged care.
6. Increase the number of paramedics and ambulance stations to speed up response times.
7. Immediately begin construction of the promised West Gippsland Hospital.
8. Introduce new specialist health centres in the regions including oncology and women’s health to include abortion services.

Transport

1. Provide equal per-capita public transport services with Melbourne.
2. Build an electrified rail loop in Geelong from Waurn Ponds to service the Bellarine Peninsula and Torquay.
3. Build dual electrified rail lines between Melbourne and Ballarat, and reopen the Ballarat–Geelong line.
4. Upgrade the Warrnambool line to support a high-speed service.
5. Create a dedicated communications network for V/Line, so regional rail doesn’t go dark in outages.
6. Fund a dedicated rural and regional roads maintenance program to fix the backlog of potholes and road damage.

Rural communities and housing

1. Reverse rural population decline by building public housing where it’s needed, including for workers in regional areas crucial to the state’s supply of food, timber, energy and other resources.
2. Retrofit low-income rural housing in bushfire-prone areas to meet Bushfire Attack Level standards, paid for by fossil fuel companies.
3. Address the extra cost of living that comes with fuel-dependent rural life.
4. Reverse population decline in rural areas by creating attractive worker towns — dense, cheap public housing, and ensuring schools, healthcare centres, post offices, banks, libraries, pubs, petrol stations and supermarkets stay open, state-run if necessary, with freight and passenger rail to agriculture hubs.
5. Fund genuine community "Third Places" in regional cities and towns — staffed community spaces, warm libraries with extended hours, all-ages community hubs — so that regional Victorians have somewhere to be with others and enjoy life without needing to spend money, rather than an empty park or a library that closes at 5pm.

Jobs

1. Fund public sector employment programs targeting young people and the unemployed in regional areas hit by industry closures, creating ongoing real jobs in the municipal, farming and tourism sectors.
2. Create publicly owned alternative energy generators serving local communities.
3. Provide incentives for electric vehicles to be manufactured at the old Ford factory site in Geelong.
4. Ensure the Public Energy Operator invests heavily in the rural communities where large-scale green energy is generated so that jobs, infrastructure upgrades and community support acknowledge the contributions rural Victorians make to enable clean energy at scale.

Farming and food

1. Re-establish a government single-buyer body offering fair prices on the model of the old wool and grain boards.
2. Tax land-banking of agricultural land out of existence.
3. Establish state-owned food processing plants, turning surplus into long-life products for aid where it’s needed.
4. Facilitate the sale of surplus Victorian farm produce to the state processing plant and foodbanks at fair cost.
5. End the PALM visa scheme in favour of full migration rights: the same tax treatment, the same freedom to change employer, and a path to citizenship for every worker.
6. Abolish intellectual property claims over seeds and agricultural machinery.
7. Rehabilitate Victoria’s waterways and rebuild sustainable soil composition, reversing the land degradation, water pollution and biodiversity loss driven by agribusiness’s push for ever-higher yields.
8. Expand programs that draw on Indigenous people’s knowledge of land management.