A backlog of submissions to the Legislative Council’s Environment and Planning Committee remain unpublished as a result of the inquiry running in conjunction with Victoria’s recreational native bird hunting arrangements.
Parliamentary staff responsible collating the submissions to the 2022 VIctorian Flood Event Inquiry are also working on the “duck hunting” inquiry.
An update of the flood inquiry was provided to a full house at a submission workshop in Rochester last week, where it was unveiled that almost half of the 750 submissions made to the flood inquiry were from Rochester.
The figure was revealed as the deadline for submissions to the inquiry was extended for a second time, on this occasion by two weeks (to the end of June).
An original submission deadline of Monday, June 5, was extended to include the June 14 Rochester workshop and people who attended the Rochester seminar will have another two weeks to put their contributions together for the inquiry.
Scheduled public hearings and site visits will occur between August to October 2023, with the committee due to report to parliament with findings and recommendations for government by June 30, 2024.
The committee will hold the first of its public hearings in Rochester on August 23, with Echuca the following day and successive hearings at Shepparton and Seymour on September 13 and 14.
Only 200 of the 750 submissions are currently online as a backlog has been created because of a second parliamentary inquiry creating an overflow of submissions.
Given a clear run the committee staff are able to prepare about100 submissions a day onto the website.
All submissions are expected to be on the parliamentary website in the next week or two.
The delay will not affect the planning hearing dates in August.
Three members of the planning and environment committee are also sitting on the select committee on Victoria’s Recreational Native Bird Hunting Arrangements.
Several of the same Parliamentary staff are responsible for collating submissions to both committees, which is causing a bottleneck in the transferral of the contributions for online viewing.
Thousands of submissions to the duck hunting inquiry require redacting of personal information to ensure submitters’ privacy is maintained. There are already 1832 submissions to the native bird hunting committee published online.
The time-consuming process has created a delay for inquiries, and submissions will continue to be published online in the coming weeks after they have been processed.
According to planning committee researcher Keiran Crowe the submissions to the inquiry were “incredibly valuable”.
He said any new submissions should focus on recommendations for the committee regarding what could have been done better, both before and after the event.
The inquiry is focusing on what caused or contributed to the Flood Event, emergency services, government policy and flood mitigation strategies.
“What would be useful for the members is to have submissions include ideas to help in the future,” Mr Crowe said
Campaspe Shire emergency management director Shannon Maynard and flood recovery officer Lachlan Couzens were at the event.
Serious business: State Member for Murray Plains Peter Walsh, and his staff, have read through all 200 of the submissions that have been posted online as part of the Victorian flood inquiry. More are expected to be made available in the coming week.