Ministerial Reshuffle

Leader of the Opposition, Matthew Guy

This reshuffle is like Fremantle’s selectors swapping their centre-half forward with centre-half back and thinking they are going to win the premiership.
Like most things Daniel Andrews does, this reshuffle is about politics and not people.
Today Daniel Andrews has conceded that tens of thousands of Victorians are out of a job, because former Employment Minster, Jacinta Allan, wasn’t up to hers.
Allowing beleaguered minister Jacinta Allan to keep the major projects portfolio is simply rewarding failure.  Jacinta Allan can’t even make a minor decision much less a deliver a major project.
The corrections system is a shambles with prison riots and cost blow outs and with sex offenders and violent criminals now living in the community.  The minister who recently couldn’t even track his own movements is now responsible for tracking convicted criminals in the community.
Lisa Neville, who was the worst minister responsible for child protection in a generation in the former Brumby Government, is now in charge of public safety and protecting the community from the Apex Gang.
The Apex Gang will hardly be quivering in their boots about the appointment of Lisa Neville and Steve Herbert.
Daniel Andrews has signalled his intention to increase energy costs by shutting down Victoria’s coal industry by putting the Climate Change, Environment and Energy portfolios under Lily D’Ambrosio.
The mixture of some of the portfolios given to individual minsters appears as though Daniel Andrews has drawn the names out of a hat.
There is no natural complement between some of the multiple portfolios that some ministers are managing.  Two of these unnatural shared portfolios are:
•             Lisa Neville, who now has the portfolios of Police and Water; and
•             Steve Herbert, who recently admitted he couldn’t remember where he had signed an overseas MOU, now manages both Corrections and TAFE.
This reshuffle by Daniel Andrews is yet another missed opportunity to make the hard decisions necessary to fix Victoria’s economy and jobs crisis and to make our streets safer.

Media contact: James Duncan     0457 758 018     james.duncan@opposition.vic.gov.au