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The Nationals will deliver for Murray Plains says Hosking

By Contributed

Oct 30, 2026

Brett Hosking will contest the district of Murray Plains for The Nationals. Photo by Zoe Phillips

In the lead-up to the Victorian state election on Saturday 28 November, The Riv invited candidates to outline some of their party’s policies so voters can make an informed choice.

The one condition was every policy discussed be costed, either by an independent source or by the candidate.

This article is written by Brett Hosking, The Nationals candidate for Murray Plains.

The Nationals have clear and costed policies which will directly benefit the residents of Murray Plains, running in parallel with the statewide policies which will become legislation when the Liberals and Nationals are elected on November 28.

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But as your Member for Murray Plains, I can guarantee having The Nationals in government will deliver the following:

Scrap the outrageous emergency services and volunteers levy.
Employ 3000 new police officers across the state.
Invest $5 billion to start repairing our ruinous road network

In addition to these major policies, which have been fully costed through the Parliamentary Budget Office to prove their viability, we are also delivering a range of specific projects for Murray Plains.

Projects such as providing a safer school crossing for the community of Gunbower, introducing traffic speed control lights in the 100km/h stretch of road alongside Kyabram cemetery and, on a larger scale, giving Echuca Regional Health the old Echuca South Primary School site so it can better accommodate the growing needs of the community.

The emergency services levy will be scrapped, and the nett government revenue loss from returning it to the traditional and equitable fire services levy which served us so well for so long will be offset by a massive saving in administration costs.

Much of the billions of dollars which are being ripped out of our pockets with this tax are being used to fund the bloated bureaucracy which has expanded at a frightening rate after 12 years of Labor.

Under a Liberals and Nationals government that expansion and the costs which come with it will end.

The crime spree which has been condoned by Labor’s nonstop refusal to take any form of intervention – either on the frontline or in the courts and prisons – has started to spill out of the metropolitan area and into regional Victoria.

Which is why we must act now and stop the rot before it consumes our lifestyle.

And that means more police in our stations, more police on patrol and police who know the government and the system have their back.

Our frontline police are leaving in droves because they are drowning in paperwork, are burning out because stations are undermanned, and are frustrated by working hard to catch criminals, only to see Labor’s laws let them walk, thumbing the officers on their way out the door and past them.

This brings us to our roads, and I doubt there is a driver, or indeed passenger, in regional Victoria, who does not have their own story of a flat tyre, broken wheel, damaged car, near miss or worse because our roads have been left to waste for 12 long years under Labor.

There are too many roads down which you find yourself weaving from side to side, dodging ever-growing potholes and collapsing road shoulders and no-one does anything about it.

Just this week the Northern Highway, one of our major arterial links to Bendigo and Melbourne, achieved the dubious shame of being in the sytate’s Top 10 for worst and most dangerous roads.

And let’s be up front here – fixing our road network is a huge job, and it is going to take years to remedy, so I will be advocating we start on the worst affected major roads and working down from there.

But to achieve that, and all the other policies we have, we must all agree Labor has to go so the real business of governing Victoria, and getting our great state back to being the envy of Australia, not the cash-strapped joke it has become.

Once that is done, it must be replaced by a government with the experience, the expertise and the fully-costed policies to make a real change – and that can only be a Liberals and Nationals government.