PARLIAMENT OF VICTORIA

PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES

(HANSARD)

LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY

FIFTY-NINTH PARLIAMENT

FIRST SESSION

THURSDAY, 4 MARCH 2021

Internet: www.parliament.vic.gov.au/downloadhansard

By authority of the Victorian Government Printer

The Governor The Honourable LINDA DESSAU, AC The Lieutenant-Governor The Honourable KEN LAY, AO, APM

The ministry

Premier ...... The Hon. DM Andrews, MP Deputy Premier, Minister for Education and Minister for Mental Health The Hon. JA Merlino, MP Attorney-General and Minister for Resources ...... The Hon. J Symes, MLC Minister for Transport Infrastructure and Minister for the Suburban Rail Loop ...... The Hon. JM Allan, MP Minister for Training and Skills, and Minister for Higher Education .... The Hon. GA Tierney, MLC Treasurer, Minister for Economic Development and Minister for Industrial Relations ...... The Hon. TH Pallas, MP Minister for Public Transport and Minister for Roads and Road Safety .. The Hon. BA Carroll, MP Minister for Energy, Environment and Climate Change, and Minister for Solar Homes ...... The Hon. L D’Ambrosio, MP Minister for Child Protection and Minister for Disability, Ageing and Carers ...... The Hon. LA Donnellan, MP Minister for Health, Minister for Ambulance Services and Minister for Equality ...... The Hon. MP Foley, MP Minister for Ports and Freight, Minister for Consumer Affairs, Gaming and Liquor Regulation, and Minister for Fishing and Boating ...... The Hon. MM Horne, MP Minister for Crime Prevention, Minister for Corrections, Minister for Youth Justice and Minister for Victim Support ...... The Hon. NM Hutchins, MP Minister for Local Government, Minister for Suburban Development and Minister for Veterans ...... The Hon. SL Leane, MLC Minister for Water and Minister for Police and Emergency Services .... The Hon. LM Neville, MP Minister for Industry Support and Recovery, Minister for Trade, Minister for Business Precincts, Minister for Tourism, Sport and Major Events, and Minister for Racing ...... The Hon. MP Pakula, MP Assistant Treasurer, Minister for Regulatory Reform, Minister for Government Services and Minister for Creative Industries ...... The Hon. DJ Pearson, MP Minister for Employment, Minister for Innovation, Medical Research and the Digital Economy, and Minister for Small Business ...... The Hon. JL Pulford, MLC Minister for Multicultural Affairs, Minister for Community Sport and Minister for Youth ...... The Hon. RL Spence, MP Minister for Workplace Safety and Minister for Early Childhood ...... The Hon. I Stitt, MLC Minister for Agriculture and Minister for Regional Development ...... The Hon. M Thomas, MP Minister for Prevention of Family Violence, Minister for Women and Minister for Aboriginal Affairs ...... The Hon. G Williams, MP Minister for Planning and Minister for Housing ...... The Hon. RW Wynne, MP Cabinet Secretary ...... Ms S Kilkenny, MP

OFFICE-HOLDERS OF THE LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY FIFTY-NINTH PARLIAMENT—FIRST SESSION

Speaker The Hon. CW BROOKS

Deputy Speaker Ms JM EDWARDS

Acting Speakers Ms Blandthorn, Mr J Bull, Mr Carbines, Ms Connolly, Ms Couzens, Ms Crugnale, Mr Dimopoulos, Mr Edbrooke, Ms Halfpenny, Ms Kilkenny, Mr McGuire, Ms Richards, Mr Richardson, Ms Settle, Ms Suleyman, Mr Taylor and Ms Ward

Leader of the Parliamentary Labor Party and Premier The Hon. DM ANDREWS

Deputy Leader of the Parliamentary Labor Party and Deputy Premier The Hon. JA MERLINO

Leader of the Parliamentary Liberal Party and Leader of the Opposition The Hon. MA O’BRIEN Deputy Leader of the Parliamentary Liberal Party The Hon. LG McLEISH

Leader of The Nationals and Deputy Leader of the Opposition The Hon. PL WALSH Deputy Leader of The Nationals Ms SM RYAN

Leader of the House Ms JM ALLAN

Manager of Opposition Business Mr KA WELLS

Heads of parliamentary departments Assembly: Clerk of the Legislative Assembly: Ms B Noonan Council: Clerk of the Parliaments and Clerk of the Legislative Council: Mr A Young Parliamentary Services: Secretary: Mr P Lochert

MEMBERS OF THE LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY FIFTY-NINTH PARLIAMENT—FIRST SESSION

Member District Party Member District Party Addison, Ms Juliana Wendouree ALP Maas, Mr Gary Narre Warren South ALP Allan, Ms Jacinta Marie Bendigo East ALP McCurdy, Mr Timothy Logan Ovens Valley Nats Andrews, Mr Daniel Michael Mulgrave ALP McGhie, Mr Stephen John Melton ALP Angus, Mr Neil Andrew Warwick Forest Hill LP McGuire, Mr Frank Broadmeadows ALP Battin, Mr Bradley William Gembrook LP McLeish, Ms Lucinda Gaye Eildon LP Blackwood, Mr Gary John Narracan LP Merlino, Mr James Anthony Monbulk ALP Blandthorn, Ms Elizabeth Anne Pascoe Vale ALP Morris, Mr David Charles Mornington LP Brayne, Mr Chris Nepean ALP Neville, Ms Lisa Mary Bellarine ALP Britnell, Ms Roma South-West Coast LP Newbury, Mr James Brighton LP Brooks, Mr Colin William Bundoora ALP Northe, Mr Russell John Morwell Ind Bull, Mr Joshua Michael Sunbury ALP O’Brien, Mr Daniel David Gippsland South Nats Bull, Mr Timothy Owen Gippsland East Nats O’Brien, Mr Michael Anthony Malvern LP Burgess, Mr Neale Ronald Hastings LP Pakula, Mr Martin Philip Keysborough ALP Carbines, Mr Anthony Richard Ivanhoe ALP Pallas, Mr Timothy Hugh Werribee ALP Carroll, Mr Benjamin Alan Niddrie ALP Pearson, Mr Daniel James Essendon ALP Cheeseman, Mr Darren Leicester South Barwon ALP Read, Dr Tim Brunswick Greens Connolly, Ms Sarah Tarneit ALP Richards, Ms Pauline Cranbourne ALP Couzens, Ms Christine Anne Geelong ALP Richardson, Mr Timothy Noel Mordialloc ALP Crugnale, Ms Jordan Alessandra Bass ALP Riordan, Mr Richard Vincent Polwarth LP Cupper, Ms Ali Mildura Ind Rowswell, Mr Brad Sandringham LP D’Ambrosio, Ms Liliana Mill Park ALP Ryan, Stephanie Maureen Euroa Nats Dimopoulos, Mr Stephen Oakleigh ALP Sandell, Ms Ellen Melbourne Greens Donnellan, Mr Luke Anthony Narre Warren North ALP Scott, Mr Robin David Preston ALP Edbrooke, Mr Paul Andrew Frankston ALP Settle, Ms Michaela Buninyong ALP Edwards, Ms Janice Maree Bendigo West ALP Sheed, Ms Suzanna Shepparton Ind Eren, Mr John Hamdi Lara ALP Smith, Mr Ryan Warrandyte LP Foley, Mr Martin Peter Albert Park ALP Smith, Mr Timothy Colin Kew LP Fowles, Mr Will Burwood ALP Southwick, Mr David James Caulfield LP Fregon, Mr Matt Mount Waverley ALP Spence, Ms Rosalind Louise Yuroke ALP Green, Ms Danielle Louise Yan Yean ALP Staikos, Mr Nicholas Bentleigh ALP Guy, Mr Matthew Jason Bulleen LP Staley, Ms Louise Eileen Ripon LP Halfpenny, Ms Bronwyn Thomastown ALP Suleyman, Ms Natalie St Albans ALP Hall, Ms Katie Footscray ALP Tak, Mr Meng Heang Clarinda ALP Halse, Mr Dustin Ringwood ALP Taylor, Mr Jackson Bayswater ALP Hamer, Mr Paul Box Hill ALP Theophanous, Ms Katerina Northcote ALP Hennessy, Ms Jill Altona ALP Thomas, Ms Mary-Anne Macedon ALP Hibbins, Mr Samuel Peter Prahran Greens Tilley, Mr William John Benambra LP Hodgett, Mr David John Croydon LP Vallence, Ms Bridget Evelyn LP Horne, Ms Melissa Margaret Williamstown ALP Wakeling, Mr Nicholas Ferntree Gully LP Hutchins, Ms Natalie Maree Sykes Sydenham ALP Walsh, Mr Peter Lindsay Murray Plains Nats Kairouz, Ms Marlene Kororoit ALP Ward, Ms Vicki Eltham ALP Kealy, Ms Emma Jayne Lowan Nats Wells, Mr Kimberley Arthur Rowville LP Kennedy, Mr John Ormond Hawthorn ALP Williams, Ms Gabrielle Dandenong ALP Kilkenny, Ms Sonya Carrum ALP Wynne, Mr Richard William Richmond ALP

PARTY ABBREVIATIONS ALP—Labor Party; Greens—The Greens; Ind—Independent; LP—Liberal Party; Nats—The Nationals.

Legislative Assembly committees

Economy and Infrastructure Standing Committee Ms Addison, Mr Blackwood, Ms Couzens, Mr Eren, Mr Rowswell, Ms Ryan and Ms Theophanous.

Environment and Planning Standing Committee Ms Connolly, Mr Fowles, Ms Green, Mr Hamer, Mr McCurdy, Mr Morris and Mr T Smith.

Legal and Social Issues Standing Committee Ms Couzens, Ms Kealy, Mr Newbury, Ms Settle, Mr Southwick, Ms Suleyman and Mr Tak.

Privileges Committee Ms Allan, Mr Carroll, Mr Guy, Ms Hennessy, Mr McGuire, Mr Morris, Mr Pakula, Ms Ryan and Mr Wells.

Standing Orders Committee The Speaker, Ms Allan, Mr Cheeseman, Ms Edwards, Mr Fregon, Ms McLeish, Ms Sheed, Ms Staley and Mr Walsh.

Joint committees

Dispute Resolution Committee Assembly: Ms Allan, Ms Hennessy, Mr Merlino, Mr Pakula, Mr R Smith, Mr Walsh and Mr Wells. Council: Mr Bourman, Ms Crozier, Mr Davis, Ms Mikakos, Ms Symes and Ms Wooldridge.

Electoral Matters Committee Assembly: Mr Guy, Ms Hall and Dr Read. Council: Mr Erdogan, Mrs McArthur, Mr Meddick, Mr Melhem, Ms Lovell, Mr Quilty and Mr Tarlamis.

House Committee Assembly: The Speaker (ex officio), Mr T Bull, Ms Crugnale, Ms Edwards, Mr Fregon, Ms Sandell and Ms Staley. Council: The President (ex officio), Mr Bourman, Mr Davis, Mr Leane, Ms Lovell and Ms Stitt.

Integrity and Oversight Committee Assembly: Mr Halse, Mr McGhie, Mr Rowswell, Mr Taylor and Mr Wells. Council: Mr Grimley and Ms Shing.

Public Accounts and Estimates Committee Assembly: Ms Blandthorn, Mr Hibbins, Mr Maas, Mr D O’Brien, Ms Richards, Mr Richardson, Mr Riordan and Ms Vallence. Council: Mr Limbrick.

Scrutiny of Acts and Regulations Committee Assembly: Mr Burgess and Ms Connolly. Council: Mr Gepp, Mrs McArthur, Ms Patten and Ms Watt.

CONTENTS

ANNOUNCEMENTS Acknowledgement of country ...... 863 RULINGS BY THE CHAIR Member conduct ...... 863 BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE Notices of motion ...... 865 DOCUMENTS Documents ...... 865 COMMITTEES Electoral Matters Committee...... 865 Membership ...... 865 BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE Adjournment ...... 865 MEMBERS STATEMENTS Ferntree Gully electorate hoon driving ...... 866 Knox student leaders ...... 866 Fairhills High School ...... 866 Fitlife ...... 866 St Andrew’s Catholic Primary School, Werribee ...... 866 Wyndham Street Surfer Bus ...... 866 Lowan electorate roads ...... 867 The Lakes South Morang College ...... 867 International Women’s Day ...... 867 The Shtick ...... 868 International Women’s Day ...... 868 Evelyn electorate transport infrastructure ...... 868 Get Active kids voucher program ...... 869 Alex Goudie Native Park ...... 869 Northcote electorate mental health services ...... 869 Native wildlife protection ...... 870 Bass electorate mobile phone coverage...... 870 International Women’s Day ...... 870 International Women’s Day ...... 871 Cranbourne electorate student leaders ...... 871 International Women’s Day ...... 872 International Women’s Day ...... 872 Ivanhoe electorate schools ...... 872 Ports Victoria ...... 873 Hawthorn electorate environment protection ...... 873 BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE Notices of motion ...... 874 BILLS Justice Legislation Amendment (System Enhancements and Other Matters) Bill 2021 ...... 874 Second reading ...... 874 QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE AND MINISTERS STATEMENTS Small business support ...... 882 Ministers statements: Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System ...... 883 Small business support ...... 884 Ministers statements: emergency services workers ...... 885 Breast screening ...... 885 Ministers statements: rural and regional mental health services ...... 887 Mildura electorate drug and alcohol services ...... 887 Ministers statements: Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System ...... 888 Government performance ...... 889 Ministers statements: International Women’s Day ...... 892 CONSTITUENCY QUESTIONS Eildon electorate ...... 893 Northcote electorate ...... 893 Gippsland South electorate ...... 893 Thomastown electorate ...... 893 Brighton electorate ...... 894 Pascoe Vale electorate ...... 894

Brunswick electorate ...... 894 Narre Warren South electorate ...... 894 Evelyn electorate ...... 895 Yan Yean electorate ...... 895 BILLS Justice Legislation Amendment (System Enhancements and Other Matters) Bill 2021 ...... 895 Second reading ...... 895 MOTIONS Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System ...... 907 BILLS Drugs, Poisons and Controlled Substances Amendment Bill 2020 ...... 936 Second reading ...... 936 MEMBERS Member for Kew ...... 938 Personal explanation ...... 938 BILLS Planning and Environment Amendment Bill 2021 ...... 938 Second reading ...... 938 Third reading ...... 943 Justice Legislation Amendment (System Enhancements and Other Matters) Bill 2021 ...... 943 Second reading ...... 943 Third reading ...... 943 Drugs, Poisons and Controlled Substances Amendment Bill 2020 ...... 943 Second reading ...... 943 Third reading ...... 943 ADJOURNMENT Trevaskis Road closure ...... 944 Clyde Road, Berwick, level crossing removal...... 944 Maternal and child health services ...... 945 Tarneit revitalisation project ...... 945 Gembrook electorate sewerage ...... 946 Cranbourne electorate transport infrastructure ...... 946 AGL Crib Point gas terminal...... 946 Kinder tick ...... 947 Elwood Primary School ...... 947 Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System ...... 948 Responses ...... 948

ANNOUNCEMENTS Thursday, 4 March 2021 Legislative Assembly 863

Thursday, 4 March 2021

The SPEAKER (Hon. Colin Brooks) took the chair at 9.32 am and read the prayer. Announcements ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF COUNTRY The SPEAKER (09:33): We acknowledge the traditional Aboriginal owners of the land on which we are meeting. We pay our respects to them, their culture, their elders past, present and future, and elders from other communities who may be here today. Rulings by the Chair MEMBER CONDUCT The SPEAKER (09:33): Just before moving into the rest of formal business, the Acting Speaker referred a point of order to me raised by the member for Gembrook at the conclusion of the matter of public importance debate yesterday. I have reviewed the Hansard transcript and rule the comments made by the member for Burwood out of order, as they made an imputation against another member. I remind all members of the requirement of standing order 118, which was done a number of times yesterday: it is not in order to make imputations against another member during the matter of public importance debate or by way of point of order. Mr Wells: On a point of order, Speaker, on that matter, I have also reviewed Hansard and have read the comments made by the member for Burwood and find them disgusting and outrageous. And I would ask you that we put a process in place that this particular matter gets referred to the Privileges Committee because of the seriousness of the claims that have been made by the member for Burwood. We cannot have a situation in this chamber where the member for Burwood can get up and make the most disgusting, outrageous claims against another member of Parliament, and that is why this matter needs to be referred to privileges. Ms Allan: On the point of order, Speaker, on your ruling and the comments from the Manager of Opposition Business, we often get told on this side of the chamber that some of us have been here long enough to know that for raising a matter of privilege or referring a matter to the Privileges Committee there are proper procedures. The member has been here long enough to know how those procedures should be followed. What I will say, though, is I do agree with the Manager of Opposition Business that there does need to be a dramatic improvement in the way members conduct themselves both in this place and on social media. There were comments made by the member for Brighton that many of us took great offence to. There were comments made on Twitter by the member for Kew that many of us took great offence to. Our behaviour as members of the Parliament is not just here in this chamber; it is everywhere and everything we do. I would welcome an opportunity from those opposite to sit down and do this job properly and not have a protection racket for members saying one thing on Twitter and doing another thing in this place— for saying it is freedom of speech over here but hiding behind that fig leaf, for not condemning the outrageous attacks that occur on women, which happened overnight on Twitter by the member for Kew and the member for Brighton. I would be delighted if the Manager of Opposition Business wanted to kick off a process that looks at this but looks at it properly and that condemns all forms of abuse by all members of this Parliament. We have reached a point where we have to say enough is enough. Too often there are those opposite who lecture us— Members interjecting. The SPEAKER: Order! The member for South-West Coast! The Treasurer! Ms Allan: Too often those opposite lecture us and say, ‘The standard you walk past is the standard you accept’. Well, I say to the Manager of Opposition Business: let us stop hiding behind phrases,

RULINGS BY THE CHAIR 864 Legislative Assembly Thursday, 4 March 2021 hiding behind freedom of speech claims. Let us stand up together and make a real difference in how all of us as members of Parliament respect each other in this place, in social media and in all forms of our interaction with each other. Members interjecting. The SPEAKER: Order! I am going to rule on the point of order. The point of order that was raised by the Manager of Opposition Business was a very straightforward point of order about a referral of the matter to the Privileges Committee. The member knows that there are very clear processes for that to occur. The debate that started to occur then as part of this point of order is one that the house may wish to have, but it should be done at the appropriate time rather than through a point of order. Mr Wells: On a further point of order, Speaker, in the very next section after where you have ruled, page 86 of Hansard, we had the extraordinary situation where the Government Whip called a point of order. He said, and I am quoting from Hansard:

… members of the Labor government stole money. I would like that equally referred to the Speaker. That is what is in Hansard. The Government Whip made the claim that money had been stolen by the Labor government. He wanted that referred to the Speaker. Now, the Acting Speaker, Ms Ward, said there was no point of order, but she accepted the first point of order put forward by the member for Gembrook—the matter that you have ruled on. We seek clarification around the ruling by the Acting Speaker that she would not accept that as a point of order—what I would have thought was a very serious claim by the Government Whip that money had been stolen by the Labor Party. He wanted to refer it to you. We think, because of the seriousness of that matter, that matter should not have been ruled out of order and that, firstly, you should investigate the claims by the Government Whip, and secondly, we on this side seek clarification about the ruling by the Acting Speaker. The SPEAKER: Order! I do not uphold the point of order. The issue was ruled out of order by the Acting Speaker at the time. Mr R Smith: On a further point of order, Speaker, just on your ruling, the Acting Speaker, Ms Ward, actually said, ‘It will be referred to the Speaker’. For clarity for the house, can you just let us know if the matter was in fact referred to you? The SPEAKER: Order! The member for Warrandyte will resume his seat. This is not question time. The matter was not referred to the Speaker. The point of order was ruled out at the time. Mr R Smith: On a further point of order, Speaker, just for clarity, whoever takes the chair, the house has to have confidence that what they say they are going to do they actually do. The Acting Speaker said:

It will be referred to the Speaker. You are telling us now that it was not referred to the Speaker. The SPEAKER: Order! The member for Warrandyte will resume his seat. I have ruled on this matter. I have confirmed— Mr Burgess interjected. The SPEAKER: Order! The member for Hastings will leave the chamber for the period of 1 hour. Member for Hastings withdrew from the chamber. The SPEAKER: I am not going to have members interjecting at me when I am trying to explain a ruling. My interpretation of Hansard and a confirmation subsequently with the Acting Chair bears out that that was ruled out of order. Mr R Smith: Speaker, respectfully, I think you have misunderstood what I have said. I feel that the response that we are getting demonstrates to me you have not really understood what I have said.

BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE Thursday, 4 March 2021 Legislative Assembly 865

The SPEAKER: The member for Warrandyte will resume his seat. Mr R Smith: I take the blame that I have not explained myself properly. The SPEAKER: Order! The issues that the member for Warrandyte may want to explore are best explored as questions to the Speaker, and there is a forum for those questions to take place—that is, outside the chamber through written notice or a conversation. I have ruled on the point of order. The matter was not referred to the Speaker. It is clear from Hansard to the Speaker and also from a conversation I have had with the Acting Chair at the time. That matter is now closed. Mr M O’Brien: On a point of order, this house relies on the integrity of the Speaker and the Deputy Speaker and acting speakers for the smooth running of the house. If an acting speaker makes a commitment to the house and that commitment is not followed through, could the Speaker please advise what remedies members of the house have? If we cannot have confidence in acting speakers to follow through on commitments they give to the house, that will impede the smooth running of the house. The SPEAKER: Order! I am going to consider this matter closed, but just in ruling to the point of order: the interpretation that I think the Leader of the Opposition might have of the Acting Chair’s contribution at the time is different to the interpretation that I have, because it was very clear she ruled it out of order. She was referring the matter that I have already ruled on to the Chair, which she has done and which I have ruled on today. Business of the house NOTICES OF MOTION The SPEAKER (09:42): General business, notices of motion 9 to 20, 44 and 45, will be removed from the notice paper unless members wishing their matter to remain advise the Clerk in writing before 2.00 pm today. Documents DOCUMENTS Incorporated list as follows: DOCUMENT TABLED UNDER AN ACT OF PARLIAMENT—The Deputy Clerk tabled the following document under an Act of Parliament: Financial Management Act 1994—Report from the Minister for Energy, Environment and Climate Change that she had received the Report 2019–20 of the Caulfield Racecourse Reserve Trust. Committees ELECTORAL MATTERS COMMITTEE Membership The SPEAKER (09:43): I advise the house that I have received the resignation of Ms Blandthorn from the Electoral Matters Committee effective from 3 March 2021. Business of the house ADJOURNMENT Ms ALLAN (Bendigo East—Leader of the House, Minister for Transport Infrastructure, Minister for the Suburban Rail Loop) (09:43): I move:

That: (1) the house, at its rising, adjourns until Tuesday, 16 March 2021, or an earlier day and hour to be fixed by the Speaker;

MEMBERS STATEMENTS 866 Legislative Assembly Thursday, 4 March 2021

(2) if, in the opinion of the Speaker, the next scheduled sitting or a rescheduled sitting should not proceed on the basis of health advice, the Speaker will consult with the Leader of the House and the Manager of Opposition Business to delay the next meeting and set a future day and hour to meet; (3) the Speaker will notify members of any changes to the next sitting date. Motion agreed to. Members statements FERNTREE GULLY ELECTORATE HOON DRIVING Mr WAKELING (Ferntree Gully) (09:44): I am very pleased to raise issues on behalf of the electorate of Ferntree Gully, particularly in regard to a recent spike in hoon driving across the municipality. Residents have raised concerns about drag racing, wheelies in the middle of major intersections and burnouts in our local streets. When I drive around the City of Knox I see tyre marks everywhere. Residents want to see a greater police presence on our streets, and they are also calling on Knox council to address the need for the implementation of speed humps throughout local streets in an effort to deter speeding from occurring throughout the City of Knox. KNOX STUDENT LEADERS Mr WAKELING: I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate the new school leaders at our primary and secondary schools across Knox. I had the privilege of presenting Ferntree Gully North and Wantirna primary school leaders with their badges, and they told me how much they are looking forward to their leadership roles this year. FAIRHILLS HIGH SCHOOL Mr WAKELING: I had a great opportunity to talk to the incoming principal at Fairhills High School, Mr Ian Van Schie, and congratulate him on the work that he is doing and to talk about their plans for the redevelopment which we have been working on together with the school for many years to see an upgrade to the school. He, I and school council president Scott Fraser had very important discussions. FITLIFE Mr WAKELING: I would just like to also congratulate Fitlife boxing club in Upper Ferntree Gully for their Rock Steady class program, which they are running to support people with Parkinson’s disease. ST ANDREW’S CATHOLIC PRIMARY SCHOOL, WERRIBEE Mr PALLAS (Werribee—Treasurer, Minister for Economic Development, Minister for Industrial Relations) (09:45): I am pleased to update the house today on two initiatives making a difference to the lives of young people in my electorate of Werribee. Thanks to the Andrews Labor government, St Andrew’s Catholic Primary School has received $1.65 million in support through the Non- Government Schools Capital Fund. I had the pleasure of recently officially opening the new classrooms and refurbished administration spaces. It was fantastic to be taken on a tour by the school’s outstanding student leaders and to see that students are already benefiting from these new facilities. WYNDHAM STREET SURFER BUS Mr PALLAS: I was also pleased to launch the new Wyndham Street Surfer Bus, supported by a $1 million investment from the Andrews Labor government’s Growing Suburbs Fund and $560 000 from Wyndham City Council. This brand new bus replaces an older model and has already hit the streets, delivering youth support in a modern, mobile, high-tech space. Youth services available through this mobile facility include counselling, legal advice, a food bank, employment information and alternative education programs as well as shared social and sporting activities. The Growing Suburbs Fund supports the construction of critical local infrastructure in diverse and fast-growing council areas like Wyndham, which has now benefited from $27.5 million of this fund over six years, delivering 20 local projects. I know that investments like these are crucial in Wyndham.

MEMBERS STATEMENTS Thursday, 4 March 2021 Legislative Assembly 867

They ensure that every child has access to great local schools, world-class education and wraparound support when they need it, and that is why we are getting these projects done. LOWAN ELECTORATE ROADS Ms KEALY (Lowan) (09:47): I raise a matter for the Minister for Roads and Road Safety, and it is in relation to our terrible road conditions in the electorate of Lowan. I recently put up a Facebook post asking local members of the community to nominate their worst roads, and my Facebook page really was overrun with comments. They are roads that we have heard of many, many times before. Recently of course we have had the gypsum movement—the farmers are moving gypsum from the gypsum pits at Rainbow around to their properties, and the roads are simply not built to sustain this B- double heavy traffic. So I would like to pass on my nomination to the minister for roads to make sure he includes fixing these roads in the upcoming budget: Nhill-Yanac Road, which has a pothole on a blind bend, Nhill-Netherby Road, the Rainbow–Beulah road, Jeparit-Warracknabeal Road and the Kenmare–Warracknabeal road as well. We have got other roads which have been damaged by recent bypasses: the Wimmera Highway east of Edenhope and west of Edenhope and west of Horsham. We have also got the Frances–Goroke road, Edenhope Penola Road and Blue Ribbon Road. Other roads in my electorate which desperately need work include the Borung Highway between Dimboola and Warracknabeal, the Glenelg Highway near Muntham and between Glenthompson and Hamilton, Murtoa-Glenorchy Road, the Dooen–Murtoa road, Mt Zero Road at Halls Gap, Casterton-Naracoorte Road, Fullertons Road at Poolaijelo, Western Highway west of Nhill and Buangor to the border, Warracknabeal-Birchip Road, and the list goes on. THE LAKES SOUTH MORANG COLLEGE Ms D’AMBROSIO (Mill Park—Minister for Energy, Environment and Climate Change, Minister for Solar Homes) (09:48): I rise to congratulate The Lakes South Morang College on an important milestone in its 14-year history. This year the school welcomed its first VCE class since it opened in 2007. Last week I had the opportunity to visit the school, meet with the year 11 students, hear about their VCE experience and see the new VCE centre facilities. I was also honoured to present the first VCE student captain badges and congratulate Emily Fyffe and Jakob Pike for their achievements as the 2021 captains of the school. I would like to thank the First Nations senior students Josh Thompson and Maddy Giampolo for the informative and comprehensive tour of the school’s VCE centre. My thanks also to the principals of each campus, Kerrie Heenan and Bill Panas, and their teaching staff for their efforts in providing all the support needed in order for the first VCE class to excel. It was great to hear that the students of the first VCE class at The Lakes are enjoying such newly established facilities as the Common Room, a specially designed quiet study space for the students to attend online classes or do their homework. To enable the students to choose subjects they are passionate about and enhance their prospects to succeed in their future endeavours, the school has established partnerships with Hazel Glen College and the largest online state government college, Virtual School Victoria. Education is for improving the lives of others and for leaving one’s community and world better than one found it. It is great to see that this is what The Lakes South Morang College school community is doing every single day, and I congratulate the school leadership, both students and staff, and parents. INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY Mr SOUTHWICK (Caulfield) (09:50): In the lead-up to International Women’s Day I want to congratulate a number of champion women in my electorate that have just done an awesome job, whether it be in community organisations or certainly helping those on a volunteer basis: Helen Lewin, the Victorian president of the National Council of Jewish Women of Australia; Ronit Chrapot, the president of the Women’s International Zionist Organisation Victoria; Philippa Caris, manager of the Glen Eira Adult Learning Centre, which does a great job helping migrants to learn English and work

MEMBERS STATEMENTS 868 Legislative Assembly Thursday, 4 March 2021 in our community; Pia Akerman, who has been running the Carnegie Toy Library; Karen Boyd-Jones, who has been very active in Stop the Elsternwick Towers and passionate on the overdevelopment in our area; Barbara Hoad, the president of the Glen Eira Historical Society; Jane Banting from the Glen Huntly Village Traders Association; my aunty, Rosalie Silverstein, who runs the Posh Opp Shoppe, helping those young kids with disability; Amelia Morris, who spoke just the other day on the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System, was my parliamentary intern and did an amazing job; and also Sarah Bendetsky and Ellen Frajman, who both run programs for feeding the homeless. THE SHTICK Mr SOUTHWICK: Just finally, Henry Greener, a big shout-out to you for running The Shtick— over 2000 videos!—for 14 years. Henry, you do a fantastic job of keeping our community connected. Go Henry, go The Shtick. INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY Ms HUTCHINS (Sydenham—Minister for Crime Prevention, Minister for Corrections, Minister for Youth Justice, Minister for Victim Support) (09:51): On Monday, 8 March, we are celebrating International Women’s Day, with this year’s theme, ‘Choose to Challenge’. Local events in my electorate of Sydenham include an afternoon this Friday acknowledging champions in the fight against family violence, held by the women of the Multicultural Association of Community Empowerment. The City of Melton is also holding a screening of Women of Steel, a documentary which shows the true story of a group of women who fought against BHP for equal rights. I have always been a strong advocate for women’s rights and would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the invaluable contribution that women have made to my community, particularly during COVID, in their roles as mothers, caregivers, community leaders and workers and advocates. I would also like to congratulate a local woman who plays all these roles and more: Donna Stolzenberg, from Hillside, is a Ngatjumay and Mirning woman who works tirelessly to make a better tomorrow for the most disadvantaged people in our state. She runs the National Homeless Collective, the Melbourne Period Project and the Kala Space. Across Sydenham, Victoria and Australia she is helping the most disadvantaged people, and I am proud to say she was nominated 2021 Victorian Australian of the Year. In my electorate the mayor of Brimbank, Ranka Rasic, and the mayor of Melton, Kathy Majdlik, are both strong, hardworking women leading through local government. EVELYN ELECTORATE TRANSPORT INFRASTRUCTURE Ms VALLENCE (Evelyn) (09:53): The Andrews Labor government in their 2020–21 state budget last year massively failed my local community in the Evelyn electorate, with not one new project and not one new dollar. It was nothing but a kick in the guts for the people and communities in the Lilydale districts and the Yarra Valley after one of the worst years ever. In last year’s budget again the Premier and Labor failed to commit to duplicating the Maroondah Highway at Killara Road, Coldstream; failed to fix Warburton Highway in Seville East; failed to increase car parking at Lilydale train station; failed to duplicate the rail line between Mooroolbark and Lilydale; failed to put in a new train station at Kinley; and failed to upgrade any roads in Mooroolbark, Chirnside Park and Lilydale to cope with the thousands more cars expected on the road from the Kinley development. As new sky rail stations at Mooroolbark and Lilydale replace boom gates with traffic lights, locals are left scratching their heads to wonder how this will actually improve traffic congestion, and on train frequency the Lilydale train line is notorious for cancellations and poor punctuality. Only duplicating the line will address this. Now is the time to fix transport infrastructure bottlenecks between Mooroolbark and Lilydale properly, so ahead of the next state budget due in two months time in May I again call on the government to increase car parking at Lilydale train station, duplicate the rail track between Mooroolbark and Lilydale, build a new train station at Kinley and fix the bottleneck at Mooroolbark and Hull Road’s rail bridge.

MEMBERS STATEMENTS Thursday, 4 March 2021 Legislative Assembly 869

GET ACTIVE KIDS VOUCHER PROGRAM Ms ADDISON (Wendouree) (09:54): It is so important that children are encouraged to play sport. Involvement in a sporting club can have many benefits for a child’s health, wellbeing and sense of self. Participating in sport boosts self-esteem and helps a child develop teamwork and leadership skills. Exercise is also a great way for kids to release stress and pent-up energy. Being involved helps kids develop bonds with their teammates and creates additional support systems to family and school. Further, with many children spending lots of time on screens, participating in sport is now more important than ever as they develop lifelong healthy lifestyle habits—and of course it is fun. That is why we are removing the financial barriers to support eligible families to cover the costs of getting their kids involved in organised sports and recreation through the Get Active kids voucher program. The program offers up to 100 000 vouchers worth up to $200 over four rounds, helping families with the cost of membership, registration fees, equipment and uniforms. To be eligible kids need to be aged between four and 18, a Victorian resident and named on a current Australian government healthcare card or pension concession card and on a valid Medicare card at the time of the application. Applications are open for any amount above $50 and up to $200 for each child, with costs related to the child’s sport or recreation, including badminton, basketball, cycling, calisthenics, equestrian, Girl Guides, gym and fitness, judo, karate, netball, rowing, squash and racquetball. ALEX GOUDIE NATIVE PARK Mr BLACKWOOD (Narracan) (09:56): On Sunday, 21 February, this year I attended the Trees of Nations renewal official opening in Drouin’s Alex Goudie Native Park. The Trees of Nations were originally planted in July 1988 as a bicentennial project initiative by then Buln Buln shire president Vin Bibby. It aimed to acknowledge the various nationalities of people living in the shire, which today stand at 51. Volunteers from many different service organisations collaborated to plant new trees, give the park a facelift and install interpretive signage. Judy Farmer gave a background and history at four landmarks across the park. The first stop was the unveiling of the Alex Goudie Native Park sign, conducted by Alex’s daughter, Dora Scales. Mrs Scales, who will celebrate her 101st birthday in the coming weeks, spoke about the honour her father would have felt and how pleased she was to see the trees recognised. At the second stop I unveiled the biodiversity sign supported by John Butler and Jeff Smythe on behalf of Gerry Van Orsouw. Gerry was the Buln Buln shire parks and gardens superintendent at the time of the 1988 tree planting. The third stop was the acknowledgement of the Strzelecki gum tree planted in the place where Ma Mullet planted the first tree in 1988. Her daughter Cheryl Drayton spoke on behalf of the family, supported by her sisters Pauline and Sandra. The Trees of Nation sign was the final stop. Baw Baw shire mayor Danny Goss declared the park open as the sign was unveiled by former shire secretary Keith Pretty and former shire president Vin Bibby. There is no doubt that the amazing Dora Scales, the 101-years-young daughter of Alex Goudie, stole the day with her amazing speech. NORTHCOTE ELECTORATE MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES Ms THEOPHANOUS (Northcote) (09:57): This week we witnessed a moment in history; a moment that will define the future of Victoria. Every single one of us knows the anguish of mental illness, whether directly or indirectly. The Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System has shone a light on a system that despite the goodwill and hard work of so many people has failed to meet the challenge that confronts us. There are no words to adequately describe the experience of those who in their darkest moments have reached out for support, only to be turned away. The 65 recommendations in the commission’s report set out a vision and a blueprint for a mental health system that is responsive and compassionate. In the inner north, which includes the Northcote electorate, the data tells us that one in five residents experience anxiety or depression, and over one in 10 suffer high levels of psychological distress. The inner north is also impacted by key service gaps and growing demand, notably in perinatal mental

MEMBERS STATEMENTS 870 Legislative Assembly Thursday, 4 March 2021 health, youth mental health and mental health for older residents. I am so pleased to see these areas as key features of the recommendations. This includes expanding perinatal mental health teams and creating integrated infant, child and youth mental health and wellbeing hubs as well as older adult multidisciplinary teams. It means developing safe spaces, dedicated and reformed services and connections within our communities. There are so many historic reforms contained in this report. I want to thank the thousands of Victorians who contributed to its creation. This is your report, and we will not stop until we have built the mental health system Victorians deserve. NATIVE WILDLIFE PROTECTION Ms SANDELL (Melbourne) (09:59): Victoria’s native wildlife is incredibly unique. Every time I see a wombat waddle, an eagle soar or a kangaroo bound through the bush I am reminded just how lucky we are to share this land with so many wonderful creatures. They nourish our souls. But here in Victoria our legal system is failing to protect our precious wildlife. Let me give some examples. In 2018 a farmhand poisoned and killed 405 wedge-tailed eagles, yet our wildlife laws were so inadequate that the fine was just $6.50 per eagle, and the landholder who directed this horrific killing to take place could not be prosecuted. In 2019 we learned that high-roller tourists were being enticed to regional Victoria to shoot wombats for sport and that this was 100 per cent legal. The outdated laws classified wombats as pests because they can damage rabbit-proof fences. In 2020 dozens of koalas were killed or left to starve on private property when a blue gum plantation was harvested. On top of this we have the government continuing to allow and even promote native duck killing for sport, the decimation of native species for logging and so much more. The government issued permits to kill or control a staggering 185 286 native animals in 2019, with no compliance or monitoring of impacts. I welcomed the government’s announcement last year to review our wildlife laws. The review cannot come soon enough, and it must be a complete overhaul of the broken system. BASS ELECTORATE MOBILE PHONE COVERAGE Ms CRUGNALE (Bass) (10:00): The good people of Clyde and Clyde North would like to make a phone call, and having made a phone call they would not like the line to drop out—not an unreasonable expectation in outer Melbourne in 2021. They thought that the recent installation of a tower at Casey Fields would fix the problem, but not quite. I have lodged an e-petition with the federal Parliament on their behalf calling for the provision of reliable phone coverage. Telecommunications is a federal responsibility. Connectivity is a 21st-century expectation and imperative for people’s livability, livelihood and social connection. We have also asked that tower construction is not based on the current competitive mobile blackspot grants processes as even those base stations nominated now may not commence operation until mid-2022. It is simply unacceptable for residents and businesses to wait patiently for years for a mobile tower and reliable coverage— unacceptable, dangerous and life-threatening. In the extremes my constituents cannot get through or the line drops out when ringing 000. Many also cannot work from home due to poor connectivity and in the current pandemic have struggled with remote learning, telehealth appointments and operating their businesses. Mobile phone reception even in my local schools and childcare centres is also very problematic. The e-petition is open for signatures until 24 March, and information obtained, such as email addresses, remains private and inaccessible. Thank you to everyone who has signed already. INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY Ms BRITNELL (South-West Coast) (10:02): Today I acknowledge that Monday is International Women’s Day, and I stand here wearing purple to symbolise the importance of such a day, along with many in the chamber, which is terrific. I want to take the opportunity to acknowledge all the good work that women do in our society, be they mothers, be they sisters, be they daughters, be they grandmothers, caregivers, leaders, role models or mentors.

MEMBERS STATEMENTS Thursday, 4 March 2021 Legislative Assembly 871

There are particular women, at the risk of naming a few and leaving some out, that have been great mentors in my life and committed enormously to our community—women such as Glenys Philpott, who was the mayor of Warrnambool and left a legacy of the boardwalk that many enjoy today, and I do often, and the protection of the penguins by maremma dogs on Middle Island as depicted in the movie Oddball, which was during Glenys Philpott’s time as mayor. Judy Troeth, a senator, has been a particularly great mentor to me, and Joy Howley from Caramut, who was president of the Liberal Party, was again another fantastic mentor. And on mentors from before my time in this place, as an industry representative and dairy farmer Shirley Harlock led the way as a United Dairyfarmers of Victoria representative, and I followed in her footsteps under her guidance. And before her was Anne Adams, who often sat on boards, as we all did, with very few other women. INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY Ms KILKENNY (Carrum) (10:04): This Monday marks International Women’s Day for 2021, a day to acknowledge women’s achievements, leadership and progress on gender equality. But this year feels very different. It is a time when many women and men are feeling utterly disheartened by the allegations coming out of Canberra and the response or lack of it. Many of us watched the federal Attorney-General’s press conference yesterday. Many of us too have been following the story of Brittany Higgins, someone who deserves to have her allegations of sexual assault and rape investigated not as someone’s daughter but as someone in her own right. And there is the petition by Sydney schoolgirl Chanel Contos with nearly 25 000 signatures and allegations by nearly 2000 women of sexual assault and rape from their time as students. A recent Australian survey of high school students found that 28 per cent of sexually active students reported unwanted sexual experience. I believe the number is probably higher than this. The issue of what is consent and what is not consent is always going to be relevant, and much more education and law reform needs to happen, but so too is the culture of attitudes towards girls and women. In Victoria all government schools offer Respectful Relationships programs as a core component of the Victorian curriculum. This needs to be taught in all schools, not just government schools. It is crucial that independent and Catholic schools right across Victoria commit to this, and this needs to be rolled out nationally. If we are going to address these attitudes and we are going to make real change, all governments, starting with our federal government, must commit, all parliaments must provide safe workplaces and all elected members of Parliament must commit to the highest standards of equality and respect. CRANBOURNE ELECTORATE STUDENT LEADERS Ms RICHARDS (Cranbourne) (10:05): We are fortunate to have so many young, articulate members in our Cranbourne community, and today I wish to congratulate those who were recently elected as student leaders by their peers. Congratulations to Elijah Jones, Emily Ben, Tia Garlick and Zach Lumley, newly elected school captains of Cranbourne Secondary College. Congratulations to Abbie Robilliard, Angelena Binu, Joel Kimiora and Riley Collard, school captains of Cranbourne East Secondary College. Congratulations to Grace Ngawaka and Hudson Hyde, school captains of Alkira Secondary College, and to Callum Pola, Milly Cortese, Alliah Garcia and Corey Coupar, school captains of St Peter’s College Cranbourne and Clyde North campuses respectively. Thank you for putting your hands up to serve and good luck with your last year of schooling. I would like to congratulate up-and-coming leaders from the primary schools: Ahmed Basir, Ashley Burns, Emily Noel, Faith Ashby, Lakeesha Haffi, Poutekchan Tany, Rani Allan-Brown and Rose Marshall from Cranbourne West Primary School; and Evette Paternott and Ruviru Rajapaksha, school captains of Courtenay Gardens Primary School. Congratulations to Bomi Shin and Joshua Rusec, school captains of Cranbourne Park Primary School. Congratulations to Methuki Bogahapitiya and Tom Watson, school captains of Lyndhurst Primary School; to Buthmi Cooray and Reubann

MEMBERS STATEMENTS 872 Legislative Assembly Thursday, 4 March 2021

Saldanha, school captains of Cranbourne Primary School; Caitlin Haig and Chloe Barbaressos from Cranbourne South; and Sajida and Xavier from Casey Fields. I look forward to meeting all these students and wish them all the best for 2021. INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY Ms SULEYMAN (St Albans) (10:07): Monday, 8 March, is International Women’s Day, and today I want to thank the women and young girls in the electorate of St Albans—thank you and congratulations for all your contributions. My mother arrived here with nothing more than a suitcase and no English, like many, many others. We know that when women work together we can achieve everything. We can smash the ceiling, but for some it takes knocking down the door and then smashing the ceiling. Especially in politics we know that that journey can be tough, in particular for women and young girls. I am so proud to be amongst women in this chamber, in particular in our government, who make me proud and who continue to support one another. International Women’s Day 2021 is all about choosing to challenge, and I want to thank all the women who continue to speak up, be brave, be bold and take on the challenge. I am looking forward to joining the annual International Women’s Day event run by Women of the West on Sunday, hosted by the fantastic Lidia Neskovski. It is an amazing event attracting many, many people across the west and celebrating the contribution of women in the west. Thank you again. Continue to be bold and be brave. INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY Mr McGHIE (Melton) (10:08): As we approach International Women’s Day I stand to speak about some unlikely heroes. They do not wear capes and they cannot leap tall buildings in a single bound, but what these ladies have in spades is an enormous capacity to give. These superheroes are the ladies of the Bacchus Marsh hospital’s ladies auxiliary. Relying solely on donations from the community, since 1948 this dedicated group of volunteers have raised funds in a variety of ways. They have baked, made jams, knitted, cross-stitched and op-shopped their way into the very soul of the Bacchus Marsh community. Last week I had the pleasure of meeting some of those volunteers, who had just handed over a $270 000 cheque to the hospital. I witnessed the pleasure the ladies derived from seeing their hard work converted into practical results and I saw the special place they hold within the Bacchus Marsh hospital family and the broader community. Collectively the ladies auxiliary volunteers have dedicated hundreds of years of volunteer service and in the last decade alone raised $4 million. It would not be uncommon for volunteers to be acknowledged for their decades of service. Such an example of their absolute dedication occurred just a couple of years ago when in that one year alone a total of 10 ladies were acknowledged to having amassed a staggering 300 years of service between them. The stand-outs were Mrs Heather Linsdell and Mrs Margaret Broad, reaching 55 years of voluntary service each. At the sprightly age of 91 Mrs Linsdell has only recently retired and will continue to be an honorary and honoured member of the auxiliary, as will all our wonderful ladies auxiliary volunteers. Thank you all so very much. IVANHOE ELECTORATE SCHOOLS Mr CARBINES (Ivanhoe) (10:09): It was a busy week. On Monday we were at Macleod College for the $4.9 million science lab sod turn with Kendall Construction, a local group—I was very pleased to catch up with them—and Kennedy Nolan Architects. There is more to do at Macleod College, but we are well and truly underway and I thank the school community. There was the $10.8 million Kew High School sod turn—we were there on Monday as well—for the new STEM centre. Laura and Elliot, who are the school captains at Kew High, are formerly of Ivanhoe Primary School and Ivanhoe East Primary

MEMBERS STATEMENTS Thursday, 4 March 2021 Legislative Assembly 873

School. Across my electorate and the electorate of Northcote many students and families rely on Kew High School for their senior education. That is a huge project and it is well underway now. We also on Monday were at Viewbank Primary School with the Minister for Energy, Environment and Climate Change and member for Mill Park. There is a $3.8 million classroom redevelopment that is now being used by the school students this term 1. We have got the $6 million Olympic Village Primary School project that is now providing great services to the community of West Heidelberg. And of course Ivanhoe East Primary School, where we annexed the former Mother of God Catholic school next door for the long-term expansion in enrolments in the East Ivanhoe community, received a $144 000 grant from the accessible buildings program just last month. And also of course over at Ivanhoe Primary School a $4.5 million, eight-classroom senior building is underway, and at Banyule Primary School, for the $12.386 million project for the complete modernisation of the remaining parts of the school we have appointed architects. We are cracking on with education in Ivanhoe. PORTS VICTORIA Mr EREN (Lara) (10:11): It was great to be part of an announcement last week with the Minister for Ports and Freight that Geelong will become Victoria’s centre for maritime excellence, with the Andrews government establishing a new statewide ports body in the Geelong region. Ports Victoria will bring together the Victorian Regional Channels Authority and Victorian Ports Corporation (Melbourne) to lead the strategic management and operation of Victorian commercial ports and waterways. The new organisation will begin operating out of Geelong on 1 July, recognising the city’s important role in Victoria’s ports systems through the port of Geelong and the future relocation of the Spirit of Tasmania. The creation of Ports Victoria is a key finding from the independent review of the Victorian ports system, a comprehensive review set to cut red tape, boost safety and improve the way this vital industry operates. An industry round table took place last week to present the findings of the independent review and to put forward some suggested actions to implement recommendations from the report. This is great news for Geelong, recognising the role our city plays in this ports system. It will create more local jobs and boost our economy, and I look forward to working with Ports Victoria as we prepare for the arrival of the Spirit of Tasmania in Corio Quay next year. This announcement shows the Victorian government’s continuing commitment to the economic success of Geelong and specifically my electorate of Lara. HAWTHORN ELECTORATE ENVIRONMENT PROTECTION Mr KENNEDY (Hawthorn) (10:12): My office has faithfully issued the Hawthorn fortnightly update every other Monday since June 2019. I suggest my colleagues sign themselves up to keep abreast of the ever-evolving Hawthorn. Beyond Hawthorn promotion this is an opportunity to thank environmental groups in the Hawthorn community for their contribution to our fortnightly update in recent months. The Boroondara branch of the Australian Conservation Foundation recently concluded their six-article series through the fortnightly update, which began last November. The ACF in this series integrated education around preservation of the environment, with useful guides such as how to go solar or survive heatwaves. Earlier in 2020 I hosted a series by Lighter Footprints, another environmental group in my community. Their climate series was a great refresher on the serious issues of climate change. When I was a boy we were not taught this type of science, so I appreciate any opportunity to encourage climate literacy. Hawthorn and Victoria boast beautiful environments. Our grandchildren deserve to experience them as we have, and I take pride in my community’s commitment to preserving them.

BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE 874 Legislative Assembly Thursday, 4 March 2021

Business of the house NOTICES OF MOTION Mr PAKULA (Keysborough—Minister for Industry Support and Recovery, Minister for Trade, Minister for Business Precincts, Minister for Tourism, Sport and Major Events, Minister for Racing) (10:14): I move:

That the consideration of government business, notice of motion, 1, be postponed until later this day. Motion agreed to. Bills JUSTICE LEGISLATION AMENDMENT (SYSTEM ENHANCEMENTS AND OTHER MATTERS) BILL 2021 Second reading Debate resumed on motion of Ms HORNE: That this bill be now read a second time. Mr SOUTHWICK (Caulfield) (10:15): I rise to make a contribution on the Justice Legislation Amendment (System Enhancements and Other Matters) Bill 2021. Before I do that, could I pay tribute to the great work that our Shadow Attorney-General, Edward O’Donohue, is doing in the other place. As somebody that takes the lead on a number of his bills, I get to see the huge workload in this particular portfolio when it comes to legislation matters. And I note a former Attorney-General is at the table. I do not think there is any other portfolio really that has the legislative workload that the Attorney-General portfolio has. In saying that, some bills that we have had before the house in previous weeks have been pretty detailed and in some instances fairly controversial, but I am happy to say this particular bill is not one of those. There are a number of changes proposed in this bill that are fairly straightforward, and for that reason the opposition will not be opposing this particular bill. Members interjecting. Mr SOUTHWICK: I can hear the cheers from the government benches. They do not have to smash up the member for Caulfield today. They can get up in their contributions and say what a fantastic contribution the member for Caulfield made in delivering the opposition’s report when it comes to this particular bill. If I could just begin by looking at the changes proposed here as part of this bill, a large part of it is dealing with the amending of various courts, integrity entities and justice acts to ensure the ongoing operation of processes and procedures implemented during the COVID pandemic. Obviously during the pandemic there were a number of businesses, a number of schools and a number of different activities that would normally occur that could not occur because of the pandemic, and courts were one of those. Without getting bogged down in some of the details and the issues with that, there has been very, very little in terms of issues to write home about in terms of what the pandemic has been able to achieve, but getting us to look differently at how we approach things is probably one by-product that allows us to challenge the way that we do business and do things differently. These are things like using audiovisual links (AVLs) in courts rather than people having to appear in person. Again this is something that was championed when we were in government. It is something that has been proposed by the Liberal-Nationals for some time now, and it has taken a pandemic to look at the way we manage the courts and the systems and particularly giving evidence and running trials and being able to use audiovisual links to be able to provide evidence.

BILLS Thursday, 4 March 2021 Legislative Assembly 875

It is interesting. I did a prison visit, as the Shadow Minister for Corrections, in New South Wales, and New South Wales, particularly in the women’s prisons, use AVLs very, very effectively. We know the real problem—and the Minister for Corrections is at the table—and one of the big issues with prisons at the moment is just the huge amount of people that are on remand. We have remand prisoners effectively waiting for trials to take place. The uncertainty of being on remand means that you are on edge. It causes a lot of disruption in the prison population. Many of those people on remand do not get access to various services that a sentenced prisoner does because, as we obviously know, in our system a person is innocent until proven guilty. In many of those instances, in terms of doing things like a drug program or other things, it is just not something that many prisoners would necessarily put their hand up for. And also the system is not focused on dealing with remanded prisoners as much as it is sentenced prisoners. So going back to the New South Wales visit and looking at the way they do things over there, particularly in women’s prisons, they actually allow for an early guilty plea, and they allow AVLs to be used in that instance to be able to get that early plea done quickly and then to expedite the women’s time through the prison system, which works really, really well. It is interesting because for a lot of the prison population quite often you might be waiting 10-plus months for your court date and your trial to go through, only to find out that you are sentenced for six months—and you have been in there for 10. There is that discrepancy, whereas an early plea allows all that stuff to be fast-tracked and you have not got prisoners in prison for any longer than they should be. I think, again, that works really, really well. With that certainty, using technology to effectively fast-track that for the prison population, the courts are not clogged. It just seems to really work well. I know that I have got into a bit of granular detail, not necessarily in terms of where the AVLs may be targeted in using audiovisual links, but I would certainly be proposing to the government that they are the kinds of things that we should be looking at doing more. We should be questioning that. It is interesting that there was an article recently in the Herald Sun, on 24 February, with the title, ‘Virus delays justice: case backlogs soar’:

Justice is being delayed across almost all Victorian courts, with case loads surging as a result of coronavirus. The reality of … the … backlog crisis was laid bare at a parliamentary inquiry on Tuesday … It goes on to say the Magistrates Courts waiting list for cases to be heard has soared to 145 464 people waiting for their hearings:

… an increase of 50 per cent for criminal matters, and 45 per cent for family violence matters. That is just ridiculously high for somebody to have to wait that long for a hearing.

Children’s Court cases have spiked 28 per cent to 14,249 while Coroner’s Court matters are up 29 per cent. It does mention that legal sources are worried about these backlogs. Even once these cases are cleared the government will need to intervene to help reduce delays. Otherwise we are just going to have a merry-go-round effectively of these things still being a problem. There was a problem of backlogs before coronavirus, so you cannot just say that before this we had an efficient system. We have not had an efficient system. Also:

Criminal Bar Association chair David Hallowes SC said the growing backlog was “clearly a concern to everyone in the criminal justice system”. We know that justice delayed is justice denied, and therefore we have got to fix this with different ways of doing things—different ways of ensuring that we get a faster process. I know the Shadow Attorney-General has suggested looking at different courts, new technologies, using vacant properties to open up as temporary courts and different hours of operation. Again, the opposition has not just been oppositional in this particular instance. As we have done many times throughout the COVID crisis, we have offered alternatives and options. That is seen in the Back to Work and Back in Business program that we put forward, which does have a number of suggestions when it comes to law and order. The Back to Work and Back in Business document has 69 different recommendations of how we can get things moving in Victoria. I know quite often that the government

BILLS 876 Legislative Assembly Thursday, 4 March 2021 jump up and down and say that we only complain, but I have got to say there have been a number of recommendations, and I do not think there has ever been a time so long out from an election when there has been such a comprehensive document and comprehensive plan. It was developed to look at alternative solutions to get Victoria open, get Victoria back to work and get many of the backlogs and systems from the courts to schools to businesses—everything we work with in our lives—going again. Obviously another by-product is with the justice system, and some of the issues have been in police stations as well. There have been a number of station closures. I know that Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Shane Patton revealed that 25 stations had been closed completely and a number of stations were on reduced hours. There have also been suggestions of using QR codes, like we have been using for coronavirus, to scan and see whether your station is open and what station might be your nearest station. I have got to question that particular one. I know it is not necessarily specifically caught up here, although this is an omnibus bill, so it has the potential of looking at something like that. To use a QR code to determine whether your station is open I do not think is the kind of path that we should be going down. You have got to have police stations that are open, police stations that are available to the public when the public need them. There have been many, many occasions and many concerns raised with me by constituents and others where they have gone to stations only to find that they are closed when they need them the most. We know the important role that police stations play within a community. They are often a safe place of refuge for many. You know that if you need a police officer—or you should know—that is certainly where you are meant to find someone. In terms of some of the further details in the bill, there are various amendments, including to the Justice Legislation Amendment (Criminal Appeals) Act 2019; the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission Act 2011, to provide for the ongoing operation of certain processes and procedures implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic and to provide for the deputy commissioners to be examined; and the Fines Reform Act 2014 in relation to time served and fines. In terms of amending the Fines Reform Act, I am not sure whether there is room in there to effectively discount a number of the fines for youth offenders, people that have experienced fines during the COVID period. Certainly we know, as part of the deal done to extend the state of emergency, that the government has now taken up the offer of the Greens to effectively have their vote on the basis that some 1800 fines that were issued to young people would be discounted at a 50 per cent discount. I find that quite strange. I know that there were a number of fines that were challenged. Victoria had the largest amount of fines of any state. We also know that of the 40 000 fines issued only about 5000, I believe, or less actually, have been paid. I know there have been more fines overturned than have been paid. There are certainly issues in terms of a number of those fines and questions as to whether a lot of those fines will ever be recovered. I found it quite odd that the government and the former Attorney- General said, ‘We’re not about to give people a holiday on those fines’, only to find out, because the government wanted a deal on these state-of-emergency powers to the end of the year, that all of a sudden they are giving special deals to those young people that had received those fines. So there is a real question about consistency with all of this, and a little bit of hypocrisy, I must say. Also, other parts of this include extending default commencement and repeal dates for the Justice Legislation Amendment (Criminal Appeals) Act 2019 and also amendments to the Interpretation of Legislation Act 1984 and provisions in a number of other acts as well. The bill has three key aims. The first is to make permanent certain temporary justice portfolio measures enacted during COVID-19, including facilitating remote court attendance, enabling matters to be determined on the papers and electronic signing and remote witnessing of documents. On that, the Shadow Attorney-General, Ed O’Donohue, made contact with Paul Mracek. Paul is the president of the Royal Victorian Association of Honorary Justices. I have a number of honorary justices in my electorate of Caulfield, and many of them have contacted me on a number of occasions when it has come to changes to the law or issues in terms of the work they are doing. They do a fantastic job in an honorary capacity, and I want to pay tribute to the honorary justices for what they do. On this particular occasion they were consulted in terms of the changes to this bill, and Paul mentioned that:

BILLS Thursday, 4 March 2021 Legislative Assembly 877

Our view is and has been for sometime after setting up and providing electronic remote witnessing during the Covid shutdown, that there is certainly a need to continue with remote witnessing. We have come across a number of cases where people have been in distress with needing documents to be witnessed in Victoria, Australia and Victorian residents stuck overseas. The remote witnessing option has been their only means of being able to get their Affidavits and Statutory Declaration documents signed. On reviewing the proposed legislation the proposed approach appears to be in line with current Covid Omnibus Legislation practices. That is very good. He also talked about some technicalities in terms of documents and documents themselves as part of the software locking, and then when you need to go and change the document you are not able to do that:

The inclusion of the Special Witness in the Wills Act seems to be worthwhile and we would be supportive of this proposal. There is no need for this process in relation to Affidavits, which makes the process and lot easier. It would be of benefit to change the Statutory Declaration process to be the same as Affidavits, and delete the need for additional text block to be included. Again, these are some of the technicalities. I suggest that the government actually take up Paul Mracek’s suggestions and possibly meet with him in terms of the implementation of some of these things. One of the things also where Paul makes a very good point is in talking about the Bail Act 1977:

There is no explicit reference providing for the same methodology for afterhours bail hearings … because it would only further disadvantage accused people (children, Aboriginal persons and those with mental health or cognitive challenges). This is something that the Law Institute of Victoria (LIV) also pointed out in their submission:

Our position is that non-verbal cues in bail hearings are a critical part of the communication (communication is 80% non verbal) and input to the risk assessment Bail Justices undertake in their decision-making. The point they make here, which is really, really important, is that the use of audiovisual should be the exception rather than the rule in regard to bail hearings. It has to be the exception. Thanks to the honorary justices and the Royal Victorian Association of Honorary Justices for their input to this and for the great work they do in general. The other parts of this bill look at managing court listings, monitoring community corrections orders, streamlining procedures of integrity agencies to allow and serve documents, remote examination of documents—which we have covered. The other two elements are that the bill extends the operation of a small number of temporary measures across several portfolios, as adopted in the government’s response. It includes measures relating to child protection, corrections, youth justice courts, occupational health and safety, local government systems and parliamentary committees, even to the point of enabling local government and parliamentary committees to sit remotely. I know that the City of Glen Eira and the City of Port Phillip had remote council meetings during the pandemic. It took a while to get that going, but finally when that did get up and running that actually worked quite well, and that is an important change to at least facilitate the operations of business in council. Again maybe we could be looking at some of the technology, when we do use this on an ongoing basis, to allow more participation from community groups. I know that during many of the council meetings there were many residents who contacted me about an inability of community groups to participate during council meetings. We know ourselves that there is a lot of technology that we have used as parliamentarians, and we have been invited to a number of things online where there is an ability to have effectively town hall meetings online. I think that is something that should be further considered. In terms of parliamentary committees, I know that in our Legal and Social Issues Committee when we were looking at the anti-vilification laws the meetings were done predominantly in recent months using technology, and that was very good. That gave us the ability to meet and to keep the committee going. I think if we did not have the use of that technology, we would not have been able to have the report tabled that we did this week, so the ability to do that more often is a positive thing.

BILLS 878 Legislative Assembly Thursday, 4 March 2021

I think one of things that we should learn from the pandemic is that we should constantly be challenging ourselves about how we do our business. It is just crazy for us to be travelling an hour into the city to have a meeting for an hour and then travel an hour back—2 hours of travel for a 1-hour meeting is just silly. So if there is an ability to be able to have technology to enable those meetings so that we can do it from our office rather than travelling, I think that is something that we would all support. There are obviously some times where a face to face is very, very important, and I am not saying that technology is the be all and end all for everything, but we should be looking at better ways to do things as we run our own offices as members of Parliament. The final parts of the bill relate to the appeal reforms, the time served scheme for infringement fines and responses to COVID impacts, which I have covered. To some areas of concern, some of the issues are—again the Law Institute of Victoria do cover some of this in their piece—access to clients and restrictions of access to justice by clients. The increased use of audiovisual link technologies to facilitate remote virtual hearings reduces the role of advocates and the benefit to the judiciary in court of in-person hearings to ascertain a sense of truthfulness from an accused person and a witness. And I note the extension periods for most provisions for a further 12 months to April 2022. It has an end date of 16 December 2021, which is in line with the proposed state-of-emergency powers. We had consultation with the Law Institute of Victoria, the Victorian Bar, the Police Association Victoria, Liberty Victoria, the Human Rights Law Centre and the honorary justices, and I want to commend all of them for their contributions back to us on this bill. On the issue in terms of just getting back to the courts, I have a case—it is before the courts at the moment, so I will not go through details—that is involving allegations made against members of Victoria Police, and we have a situation of somebody who has lost a son. There is a court process at the moment, and I know we have written to the Attorney because that process was going to be done without the ability to have witnesses and family members present. I know that that was quite traumatic for this particular family in terms of wanting to ensure that they are able to be present. I think that going forward there needs to be that flexibility. There certainly needs to be that flexibility. We often talk about putting victims first and the trauma that many victims go through in losing a loved one, and so I just think that is something that needs to be properly considered. Again the Law Institute of Victoria does talk about issues with families and children placed in out-of- home care and issues in relation to the permanency amendments imposing strict time limits for family reunification orders to be made. It also talks about maintaining the consent of parties in terms of AVLs, which is what I have raised. The LIV supports electronic monitoring of an offender under a community correction order but reserved only for serious offending, so the Law Institute of Victoria has an issue with using electronic monitoring as a be-all and end-all. I thank Tania Wolff, the president of the law institute, for their contribution that they have made to this bill. In the final time that I have remaining, the reasons why we believe that it is important for us to look at going forward with some of these changes and the reason why we are not opposing this bill is the justice system infrastructure in the courts. We need to look at ways of clearing backlogs. We need practical alternatives and measures that have been adopted. We need to look at allowing the justice system to operate—albeit during a COVID period in a restricted manner, but nonetheless still being able to operate. I think that is one of the important things. And I suppose again, we have been at this for a while now. It was the end of March last year that COVID started to play out in our community, and we had the 111 days of lockdown in Victoria. It took a while before we started to look at some alternative arrangements in the courts, and therefore we did have a huge backlog as a result of that. I appreciate that times are very, very uncertain, but I just think we have got to be innovative in the way that we approach these things going forward. We were pretty quick.

BILLS Thursday, 4 March 2021 Legislative Assembly 879

Even though some of the remote learning was very, very challenging and a lot of families went through absolute hell in being able to practically implement that, nonetheless there was still an alternate system. I think, again, when you have got systems that are the responsibility of the state—and the courts are one of those, and that extends through to our prisons and our police stations—we have got to be flexible, we have got to be nimble and we have got to look at ways to ensure that their operation happens. I think there have been a number of challenges when it comes to the justice system here in this state at the moment. I will just finish by saying that there are some real challenges within policing, and I know that police have been diverted doing a whole range of other things during COVID. It is really important to get our Victoria Police men and women back on the front line. They have been diverted into a whole range of other things. I know corrections staff have been diverted and PSOs have been diverted doing other things. I do not know what normal is going forward, but we have got to be looking at other states and how they do things—rather than reinventing the wheel, see what is working well and see if we can adopt some of that stuff in Victoria. Maybe even with the fee system that we have got of charging for hotel quarantine, rather than creating one of our own we should pull one off the shelf that is available already—rather than having to again reinvent the wheel. I am big fan of innovation. We need to be a bit more innovative in our approach going forward. We have got to ensure we can deliver a timely justice system, unclog our courts, free things up and ensure that we can get justice moving a lot faster than it currently is. Ms HUTCHINS (Sydenham—Minister for Crime Prevention, Minister for Corrections, Minister for Youth Justice, Minister for Victim Support) (10:45): It is my pleasure to be able to rise to speak on the Justice Legislation Amendment (System Enhancements and Other Matters) Bill 2021. As Minister for Corrections and Minister for Youth Justice it is really important that I make a contribution on the specific aspects of this bill that relate to my portfolios. I would like to start by thanking the staff working in Victoria’s prisons and youth justice centres for their work in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic and keeping Victorians safe through this very unprecedented time. Due to the specific nature of the corrections system COVID-19 presents a significant threat and challenge. Prisoners are in close, confined quarters, and social distancing can be very difficult. And of course bringing new prisoners into the prison system, particularly in the youth justice sector, was a very challenging time during many weeks of lockdown last year. Many of our staff had to wear very intense PPE. Those that were dealing with our isolation wings had PPE from head to toe for many hours on end. For anyone in the chamber that has had to wear those gowns, the gloves, the goggles and obviously the masks and wear them for long periods of time while you are working, you would know that it is not the most comfortable attire to be wearing. It can be quite hot, and you have got to wear that for long periods as well as keep up with the demands of prisoners that are in isolation and calling on our prison officers for support on a very, very regular basis. When I started this role at the start of the second wave of COVID in Victoria it was pretty clear to me that across the adult and youth systems a highly cautious approach was needed in order to stop the spread of COVID-19 across our prison system and beyond, and I appreciate that this resulted in significant changes to the day-to-day lives of our staff, our prisoners and indeed the entire system. Sentences turned out to be more harsh than otherwise intended, especially with the loss of personal visits from family and loved ones, but for the broader community we had to take unprecedented actions to protect everyone we could from the pandemic. So far the actions taken by Corrections Victoria and youth justice have delivered safety. They were facilitated by an earlier version of this bill and have totally prevented any prisoner-to-prisoner transfer within the correctional system or within youth justice centres. At the height of the pandemic last year there were a number of positive cases that came into our system, particularly in our youth justice centres. The only incidences of COVID-19 came from external community transmission, and it was stopped at the door. Many people were fearful of what we had seen in countless other nations where the pandemic ran rampant in their jails and they saw many deaths

BILLS 880 Legislative Assembly Thursday, 4 March 2021 and of course it spread through their workforce and there were many deaths there. Indeed some asked the government to let people out of jails early. This was not a decision that we took. This was, according to the laws of this state, a highly dubious request and one that was certainly not agreed to. We have put our faith in staff and management of correctional and youth justice systems, and they have done an exceptional job. That brings me to today’s bill and the specific measures which we are seeking to have extended for 12 months to 26 April 2022. We are seeking that amount of time because health expert advice indicates the risk of community transmission from COVID-19 into prisons will remain in place until in fact we can vaccinate as many prisoners and staff as humanly possible. With that in mind, these provisions ensure Corrections Victoria retain the necessary powers to manage the risk of COVID-19, including through restricting personal visits and professional visits, quarantining people upon arrival in custody and quarantining and isolating people in prison to address any health risks that arise. This bill will also make permanent COVID-19 response measures in other legislation that impacts the corrections system, including amending the Sentencing Act 1991 to make permanent the powers for the Magistrates Court to attach electronic monitoring requirements to community correction orders. This bill also makes permanent provisions in the Criminal Procedure Act 2009 and the Evidence (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1958 to continue the broad use of audiovisual links to facilitate remote attendance at court for people in prison. What our system has also been able to do is stand up in a very short time frame the use of tablets—AVLs and iPads—to be able to do community visits with prisoners online. I had the extraordinary experience of seeing a prisoner do an online visit with his family at the very start of our second-wave lockdown. For him to be able to see his family home, his dog, his kids in place was, he told me, an extraordinary experience that he had not had in many years. So there have been some amazing things happen during this time. The availability of those technologies will continue into the foreseeable future when we need to stop those face-to-face visits. The COVID-19 response measures were introduced as part of the COVID-19 Omnibus (Emergency Measures) Act 2020 and are currently set to sunset on 26 April this year. These provisions give youth justice staff the necessary powers to successfully manage the risks associated with COVID-19 and have been critical in preventing transmission in custodial facilities and to the ongoing and safe supervision of young people in the community. Like Victoria’s adult corrections system, youth custodial facilities are very much a high-risk environment for COVID-19 transmission due to population density, often close quarters and associated transportation but also the short time periods in which young people come in and leave the system. It is really critical that our youth justice centres are equipped to deal with this risk and protect children and young people, staff, service providers and others in the youth justice system from the risk of infection. The COVID-19 isolation provision has supported the identification and isolation of 19 COVID-19-positive young people entering custody. I think the most stark thing about having so many young people come into the system in the middle of last year who were COVID positive is the fact that many of them did not test COVID positive on the first day they arrived in the justice centre. In fact for some of them it was not until day 11 that they were detected as being COVID positive, and that shows the risk that was pending for our staff. Had we not enacted those isolation provisions, we would have certainly had a spread at that time, so again I thank the staff for their hard work, particularly at Parkville in the Sapphire unit where they looked after so many kids in isolation. As I have mentioned, cases among young people originated in the community and they brought it into the system but we were able to stop it at the front door. This bill seeks a 12-month extension of COVID-19 isolation provisions on the basis of expert medical advice. It will take time for us to ensure we roll out the vaccination, and it is vital that we maintain these measures to keep the safeguards there to keep our workforce, our prisoners and our broader community safe. I note that the key safeguards and entitlements that have been built into the isolation provisions to support young people were developed in consultation with the Commission for Children and Young People. Youth justice teams have acted swiftly to protect custodial centres by reintroducing isolation periods when they have been needed, when we have had a broader outbreak in the

BILLS Thursday, 4 March 2021 Legislative Assembly 881 community. We know that the pandemic is not over. Thankfully, due to the hard work of our staff, our prisons have remained safe from COVID and stopped that spread into our community. We must not stop now. This bill will help Victoria stay safe and will help us defend against the spread of the virus throughout our community. I commend the bill to the house. Mr D O’BRIEN (Gippsland South) (10:55): I am also pleased to rise to speak on the Justice Legislation Amendment (System Enhancements and Other Matters) Bill 2021. Like the member for Caulfield, I feel like I stand up here on justice legislation amendment bills several times a month, and I echo his comments about the workload of the Shadow Attorney-General and indeed the Attorney- General, obviously, who is doing all of this, but doing it all with the support of the department. It is a big workload, and I know there are some members in the house now who are former attorneys-general who are probably enjoying the reduced workload that they have at this particular time. This legislation is not being opposed by the opposition, as again we are talking about extending some of the provisions that improve efficiencies, particularly through our court system but also through the operations of things like local government and the parliamentary committees process. The bill is a sensible response to the COVID pandemic, and extending those sensible arrangements is certainly welcomed by this side. I note, as the member for Caulfield said, that when these changes were brought in in the original omnibus bill, I believe in April last year, they were supported by the opposition and have continued to be so through this process. We often get accused of simply being obstructionist, but given the uncertain times we were certainly happy to support those changes at the time and are happy to continue those that are most beneficial for our justice system and for the administration of government. We have seen plenty of negatives from COVID, that is for sure, but hopefully we are seeing through this legislation perhaps the adoption of some technologies and some streamlining of process that actually will be beneficial for the whole community. Certainly COVID has had dramatic impacts on the community more broadly and continues to do so. Most recently, as we have discussed before in here, the five-day lockdown statewide certainly had a massive impact. What I must say is the business community, everywhere I go, just talk about the dent in confidence to their own businesses but also to consumers. While we can address issues that are affecting us because of COVID through the court system, it is very difficult for the business sector to have any confidence going forward when the threat of lockdowns continues over them. I urge the government to reconsider the way it is managing COVID in that respect, because particularly for regional businesses who knew that they were not affected directly in the most recent lockdown but had to shut up shop, the dent in confidence, the dent in the ability for people to put on workers, was very big. To some of the detail of this legislation, certainly the concern about the delays in the court system is real. As the saying goes, ‘justice delayed is justice denied’, and we heard in the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee hearings last week the extent of that. We have seen I think a 50 per cent increase in the waiting list for Magistrates Courts, a 45 per cent increase in family violence cases and a 28 per cent spike in children’s court cases, so these are issues that the government needs to address. I am sure it is very much aware of them and will be attempting to address those, but there are many things that the government could be doing to try and clear that backlog and get them happening, including one I have mentioned in my own electorate. In 2018 I raised with the then Attorney-General my concerns about the fact the Sale County Court—the oldest court in Gippsland—a beautiful old building, had stopped being used, with Court Services Victoria saying it was no longer appropriate, no longer fit for purpose. Well, there is a good job for this government now. It could do a couple of things. It could throw some money at the Sale County Court to get it upgraded, to get it refurbished. It is a beautiful old building right on the highway in Sale, but it is not being used now because it is apparently not fit for purpose. I know many of the lawyers in town are very upset about that, and I have made representations on their behalf that the Sale County Court should continue to be used. That is one where you could stimulate the local economy by some works on the court and also help to get the justice system unclogged. Business interrupted under resolution of house of 2 March.

QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE AND MINISTERS STATEMENTS 882 Legislative Assembly Thursday, 4 March 2021

Questions without notice and ministers statements SMALL BUSINESS SUPPORT Mr M O’BRIEN (Malvern—Leader of the Opposition) (11:01): My question is to the Minister for Industry Support and Recovery. James and Michelle operate a swimming school. During the government’s third lockdown James and Michelle had to provide their customers with over $8000 in refunds when they were closed over five days. To their dismay because of their business type they discovered they were not eligible for support under the government’s business support package. Why are the minister’s criteria for supporting small businesses so narrow that a swimming school that has suffered an $8000 loss is refused any assistance at all? Mr PAKULA (Keysborough—Minister for Industry Support and Recovery, Minister for Trade, Minister for Business Precincts, Minister for Tourism, Sport and Major Events, Minister for Racing) (11:02): I thank the Leader of the Opposition for the question. I completely reject the suggestion that the criteria are narrow at all. There is $143 million worth of support on top of $6 billion worth of support that has been provided to businesses over the course of the last 12 months. I make the point to the Leader of the Opposition that if you look at circuit-breaker lockdowns that have occurred around the country over the last few months—in the Northern Beaches of Sydney, in Brisbane, in Adelaide and in Perth, as well as in Melbourne—this is far and away the biggest package that has been provided to anyone. Mr Battin: On a point of order, Speaker, in relation to relevance, these people in my electorate have struggled and have had to refund $8000 to their local community. We are asking on behalf of them: why are you ignoring their— The SPEAKER: Order! The member will resume his seat. Repeating the question is not a point of order. Mr PAKULA: Thank you, Speaker. I say to the member for Gembrook— Mr Battin interjected. The SPEAKER: Order! The member for Gembrook can leave the chamber for the period of 1 hour. Member for Gembrook withdrew from chamber. Mr PAKULA: I say to the member for Gembrook and to the Leader of the Opposition that if you look at the response of those governments to those short circuit-breaker lockdowns that occurred in those other jurisdictions, there was no business support provided at all—none in Brisbane, none in Adelaide, and I think in Western Australia a $500 energy rebate. By comparison in Victoria, payments of $2000 and $3000, $143 million in total— Mr M O’Brien: On a point of order, Speaker, the minister is debating the question. Blowing his own trumpet does not help James and Michelle or all the people in their situation who have been cut out. The question is: why is the criteria so narrow that these people get nothing? The SPEAKER: Order! Points of order are not an opportunity to repeat the question. Mr PAKULA: Speaker, I am being directly relevant to the question. The fact is that by comparison to any other jurisdiction, this has been extraordinarily broad and generous—$143 million on top of $6 billion of support, payments of $2000 and $3000 targeted to those most affected and done in consultation with business groups in the lead-up to the announcement by the government. It is quite clear that the opposition wants to do nothing other than play politics with this. The fact of the matter is that this— Mr R Smith: On a point of order, Speaker, we are charged in this place with bringing the concerns of Victorians to this chamber and having ministers answer questions about them. These people have

QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE AND MINISTERS STATEMENTS Thursday, 4 March 2021 Legislative Assembly 883 come to us, asking us to raise their issue here in this Parliament. As a member of the Victorian Parliament I could not really care what is going on in New South Wales and Queensland. What I do care about is that this minister and this government are leaving people like James and Michelle in the lurch, because they have suffered an $8000 loss and this government is abandoning them. The SPEAKER: Order! There was no point of order. Mr PAKULA: I note the audition by the member for Warrandyte, but the fact is that this, as I say, has been an extraordinarily broad and generous package in comparison to all other jurisdictions in the country. It is on top of by far the most generous business assistance package of any jurisdiction in the country. We have supported business not just through the cost assistance through the lockdown but through the Business Support Fund (BSF), tranches 1, 2 and 3, the Licensed Hospitality Venue Fund and the support for accommodation providers, and we will continue to support business through the balance of the pandemic. It would be good indeed if those opposite supported some of the government’s calls for the commonwealth to maintain some of their assistance that they are seeking to end just three weeks from now. Mr M O’BRIEN (Malvern—Leader of the Opposition) (11:06): I am sure James and Michelle will be delighted with that answer and the minister blowing his own trumpet and giving them nothing. Holly is an audiologist in country Victoria. She specialises in helping children and the elderly. Due to the government’s snap lockdown, Holly lost over $20 000 in bookings and sales but still had to pay $3000 in wages and a week’s rent. Why are the minister’s criteria for supporting small business so narrow, so mean, that an audiologist like Holly, who suffered over $23 000 in losses, is refused any assistance at all? Mr PAKULA (Keysborough—Minister for Industry Support and Recovery, Minister for Trade, Minister for Business Precincts, Minister for Tourism, Sport and Major Events, Minister for Racing) (11:07): Again, an additional example does not change the fact that by any comparison the support that has been provided by this government over this circuit-breaker lockdown has been by far the most generous of any jurisdiction in the nation: $143 million targeted to those who need it most, on top of a whole series of payments that have been made through BSF 1, 2 and 3 over the course of the pandemic and ongoing assistance in a range of circumstances, whether it is through sole trader support, whether it is through Licensed Hospitality Venue Fund support or whether it is through the accommodation assistance. The government’s support has been unparalleled across the nation, and we will continue to work with business groups, whether it is the Victorian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, whether it is the Council of Small Business Organisations of Australia, whether it is the Australian Hotels Association or others, to make sure that the assistance is appropriately targeted, as it was for this event that lasted for five days. MINISTERS STATEMENTS: ROYAL COMMISSION INTO VICTORIA’S MENTAL HEALTH SYSTEM Mr MERLINO (Monbulk—Minister for Education, Minister for Mental Health) (11:08): This morning at an ambulance station in North Melbourne the Premier announced another important step in implementing the recommendations of the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System. Recommendation 10 of the royal commission final report is about adapting how our emergency services respond to mental health crises in our community. It is a powerful recommendation. For 000 calls to a mental health crisis the first responders should be our paramedics. For call-outs where both ambulance and police are required to attend, our paramedics should take the lead. We have a magnificent ambulance service in Victoria, and we put our trust in our paramedics to care for us every day of the week. As the CEO of Ambulance Victoria, Tony Walker, said this morning, ‘We don’t get police to respond to a cardiac arrest. We don’t get police responding to a stroke’. Mental health is a health issue and we must treat it that way. The Parliamentary Secretary for Police and Emergency Services, the member for Frankston, will immediately chair a new working group

QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE AND MINISTERS STATEMENTS 884 Legislative Assembly Thursday, 4 March 2021 bringing together Ambulance Victoria, Victoria Police, the Emergency Services Telecommunications Authority and their industrial partners, importantly, to draft new protocols to enable the transition from police to paramedics as first responders to mental health crises. This is both complex and critical work, and it is a requirement under the royal commission. Today is day two since we received the commission’s final report. It is day two of announcing the next steps to implement every single one of the recommendations that were made by the royal commission. We made a promise to the people of Victoria that we would fix a broken system, and that is exactly what we will do. Six priority sites were identified yesterday, and we will get on with that job immediately. The important work around 000 call-outs and getting our paramedics to respond—we will do that as well. SMALL BUSINESS SUPPORT Mr WALSH (Murray Plains) (11:10): My question is to the Minister for Industry Support and Recovery. Jaci Hicken runs a cooking school at Mirboo North. She is one of the 300 Victorian businesses who were last month asked to repay grants they had previously been given from the Licensed Hospitality Venue Fund, in Jaci’s case $20 000. After throwing these businesses a lifeline, why is the government now demanding repayment and potentially putting them into bankruptcy? Mr PAKULA (Keysborough—Minister for Industry Support and Recovery, Minister for Trade, Minister for Business Precincts, Minister for Tourism, Sport and Major Events, Minister for Racing) (11:10): I thank the Leader of The Nationals for the question. It is a curious question from a coalition that likes to portray itself as being the parties of fiscal rectitude in this place. The fact is that there were a small number of businesses—I think some 293—that were unfortunately paid twice, double paid, and in relation to those businesses the department has an obligation to seek to recoup those funds that have been paid improperly. In any circumstance where either a business has been paid in error or has been double paid I would have thought that it was a matter of agreement that it is both appropriate and prudent for the department to seek to recoup any moneys paid in error or doubled. Mr WALSH (Murray Plains) (11:11): Just last week, out of the blue, Jaci had $10 000 deposited in her account for a business support grant she was told in May last year—10 months ago—that your government said she was not eligible for. Jaci still has not been told why she was not eligible for the first grant nor why she is now eligible for the second grant. How can struggling small business owners like Jaci be expected to abide by grant criteria when the government does not even know what those criteria are themselves? Mr PAKULA (Keysborough—Minister for Industry Support and Recovery, Minister for Trade, Minister for Business Precincts, Minister for Tourism, Sport and Major Events, Minister for Racing) (11:12): I completely reject the basis of the question from the Leader of The Nationals. The fact is the government has supported— Mr Walsh: On a point of order, Speaker, on relevance, the minister is effectively saying Jaci is a liar. The SPEAKER: Order! The Leader of the Nationals will resume his seat. There is no point of order. Mr PAKULA: All right. I will continue and say I am not prepared to be verballed by the Leader of The Nationals. What I am rejecting is the colour that you put on it. The fact is well over 100 000 businesses have been supported and, as has already been raised in this place, there have been a small number where there have been some issues, which members of Parliament, including the Leader of the Nationals, have raised with me and with the department and sought to have some issues and some matters reconsidered by the department. Sometimes there have been issues with the application or issues with the assessment of the application. That is exactly what we have done, and that is what we have been asked to do. That is what is appropriate. But if there are some specific examples that the Leader of The Nationals wants me to look at, I am happy to do so.

QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE AND MINISTERS STATEMENTS Thursday, 4 March 2021 Legislative Assembly 885

MINISTERS STATEMENTS: EMERGENCY SERVICES WORKERS Mr PEARSON (Essendon—Assistant Treasurer, Minister for Regulatory Reform, Minister for Government Services, Minister for Creative Industries) (11:14): I rise to update the house on the critical work that our government is doing in response to the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System. This morning I joined the Premier, the Minister for Mental Health, the Parliamentary Secretary for Police and Emergency Services and Ms Sheena Watt from the other place to launch our $6 million centre of excellence for emergency services workers. This is about providing better mental health support services for our emergency services workers and volunteers, including those who have retired. The centre will build a greater understanding of the unique mental health needs of our emergency services workers through evidence-based treatment and groundbreaking research. The centre will be led by the Victorian-based Phoenix Australia and it will be delivered in partnership with a specialist network of clinicians. It will support our police, our ambos, our firefighters, the SES and our life-saving call-takers. I am reminded of the dedication of our police and emergency services workers every single day. This has been an incredibly challenging 12 months for all Victorians, and that has been no different for our police and emergency services workers. We know this service can take its toll. I want to thank you all on behalf of the government for the work you do each and every day keeping Victorians safe. Our government stands beside you and will continue to support you in any way that we can. We know our mental health system is broken, and too often our emergency services workers are the last line of defence—often sadly when it is too late. The Andrews Labor government is getting on with implementing each and every single one of the royal commission’s recommendations because that is what Victorians expect and that is what we will deliver. BREAST SCREENING Ms KEALY (Lowan) (11:15): My question is to the Minister for Health. In the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee last week the minister’s secretary admitted that the government’s lockdown last year led to the suspension of vital health care, including the cancellation of cancer-screening services. As a result, 49 000 Victorians did not undergo vital breast screening. He also said that there had been funding provided for an additional 20 000 breast screens to make up for the 49 000 that were cancelled. What about the 29 000 other women who missed out on screening last year? Mr FOLEY (Albert Park—Minister for Health, Minister for Ambulance Services, Minister for Equality) (11:16): Can I thank the honourable member for her question. Of course, as we have addressed a number of times in this place, the whole issue of deferred care through a whole range of areas—whether it be elective surgery, whether it be presentations as the honourable member has pointed out around cancer diagnosis, indeed even presentations to GPs and all sorts of engagements right across the country, let alone here in Victoria—was a major issue in how all of us under the public health orders sought to do our bit in regard to limiting movement and making sure that we got on top of that second wave, one of the only jurisdictions in the world to do so. In regard to the number of legitimate issues about how we then catch up on the response to deferred care, there are significant issues there that the honourable member, in this case through cancer and breast cancer in particular, has highlighted. In regard to cancer diagnosis during the whole COVID-19 lockdown, I do point out that as part of the most recent budget, with the $33 million over four years allocated to the Victorian Comprehensive Cancer Centre alliance, of which breast cancer is— Ms Kealy: On a point of order, Speaker, while the minister addressed early in his response the impact of delays of diagnosis and screening on women in particular, he has not referred to the 29 000 women who missed out on screening last year and how this will be caught up. He has not responded to that, and I ask you to bring the minister back to the question.

QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE AND MINISTERS STATEMENTS 886 Legislative Assembly Thursday, 4 March 2021

The SPEAKER: I thank the member for her point of order, but the minister is being relevant to the question as it was asked. Mr FOLEY: Thank you, Speaker. For the information of the house, the Victorian Comprehensive Cancer Centre alliance involves many cancer specialist organisations, such as the breast screen cancer organisations, and as part of that much wider response 10 Victorian health services have been provided with additional funding to support the activities of many organisations, such as this organisation that the honourable member points to, to deal with that. In regard to participation in all of the national cancer-screening programs, not just breast cancer, they were all lower right across the nation in 2020. That is why we are funding the Victorian Cancer Registry— Ms Kealy: On a point of order, Speaker, again I ask you to draw the minister back to the question. We are not asking about the 20 000 positions that have been funded. I am asking about the 29 000 women who found a lump in their breast. They want to get their breast screened. What is the minister doing to make sure that that can happen? 29 000 women! The SPEAKER: I thank the member for raising that point of order. The minister is being relevant to the question. Mr FOLEY: As I was highlighting, the 10 Victorian health services that have been provided additional funding to do the very screening that the honourable member refers to are a significant part of that response to come back to responding to that deferred care. I want to thank all those hardworking professionals at BreastScreen Victoria and those health services for ensuring that they are getting these programs back up and running and delivering them out in the communities, out in the health services where they are indeed needed. In addition to providing additional funding, the Victorian government is also working very closely with a whole range of other more community-based services through BreastScreen Victoria to make sure that we boost cancer-screening participation in the populations most disproportionately negatively affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, and all of these arrangements will catch up for the deferred care model. Ms KEALY (Lowan) (11:20): The clinical leadership group of senior doctors provides expert advice to the minister on these and other matters. Based on this group’s advice, how many Victorian women are at an increased risk of developing breast cancer as a result of not getting a screening? Mr FOLEY (Albert Park—Minister for Health, Minister for Ambulance Services, Minister for Equality) (11:21): Can I thank the honourable member for her supplementary question. I meet regularly with many of the participants in the Victorian Comprehensive Cancer Centre alliance and I get my advice from a range of clinical and leadership groups, one of which the honourable member has pointed to. I would refer the honourable member to my substantive answer to her first question regarding the situation whereby this government is committed through the processes that our alliance partners— Ms Kealy: On a point of order, Speaker, again on a matter of relevance, my question is directly: how many women are at an increased risk of getting breast cancer because he will not fund the 29 000 breast screenings that people missed out on last year? The SPEAKER: Order! Member for Lowan! That is not an appropriate way to raise a point of order. The minister is being relevant to the question. Mr FOLEY: In terms of the wider Victorian Comprehensive Cancer Centre alliance arrangements that are in place in the state, amongst the leading responses globally, let alone in Australia, we know that the challenges from deferred care from the arrangement— Members interjecting. The SPEAKER: Order! The member for Eltham and the member for Lowan!

QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE AND MINISTERS STATEMENTS Thursday, 4 March 2021 Legislative Assembly 887

Mr M O’Brien: On a point of order, Speaker, the minister admitted that he has received advice from the clinical leadership group, but he has not answered the member for Lowan’s question: what is that advice in relation to the number of women who are now at increased risk of contracting breast cancer because screening is not available? Please bring him back to the question in 10 seconds. 29 000 women deserve an answer. The SPEAKER: Order! The minister is being relevant to the question that has been asked. Mr FOLEY: As part of the government’s response to the deferred care, particularly through all the alliance partners of the Victorian Comprehensive Cancer Centre, including BreastScreen deferrals, we will get on top of this. MINISTERS STATEMENTS: RURAL AND REGIONAL MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES Ms THOMAS (Macedon—Minister for Agriculture, Minister for Regional Development) (11:23): I am honoured to rise today to inform the house how our government’s action to implement the recommendations from the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System will deliver better outcomes for rural and regional Victorians. We know that suicide and self-harm are more prevalent in rural and regional Victoria and that people living in these communities face additional challenges when accessing services. That is why the centre of gravity for mental health care needs to shift from the noise and lights of our emergency departments to where regional Victorians live, work, learn and play—in their own communities. We are committed to implementing every single recommendation from the royal commission, and we are not wasting a moment getting on with it. It is why we are fast-tracking the delivery of six mental health priority sites across the state, including in Benalla, the Latrobe Valley and Greater Geelong. These mental health and wellbeing services will provide a front door for anyone in the community to access the personalised mental health support that they need. We will also deliver mental health services for regional Victoria that focus on the needs of small and geographically isolated communities, including through the delivery of new digital services. This will make sure that every Victorian has access to quality care, no matter their postcode. We know from our nine regional partnerships that mental health is one of the biggest issues facing country Victorians, and I want to thank the commission for ensuring that the voices of rural and regional Victorians were heard throughout this process. This included Bernard Galbally, the CEO of Live4Life, which of course started in my own electorate and which was featured in the report. Bernard had this to say following the release of the report: ‘This is a historic moment. We have got a real chance to enact effective and lasting change, and I am glad the royal commission has really taken on and looked into the unique needs of rural and regional communities. We wholeheartedly support all the recommendations in this report’. MILDURA ELECTORATE DRUG AND ALCOHOL SERVICES Ms CUPPER (Mildura) (11:25): My question is to the Minister for Health. Infrastructure Victoria’s Victoria’s Draft 30-year Infrastructure Strategy recommended that a residential alcohol and drug rehab centre be built in the Mallee. The report outlined that the rate of drug-related deaths in rural and regional Victoria has increased every year since 2012. Other research found that Mildura and Bendigo have roughly the same number of people addicted to drugs and alcohol, but Mildura has less than half the population. We are isolated. Our nearest rehab centre is more than 4 hours away, with limited public transport. Mothers who need treatment will refuse it because of the long separation from their kids, and this entrenches the problem and increases the chance of their drug problem becoming intergenerational. Can the minister outline the measures the Victorian government is taking to address the dire lack of drug and alcohol rehab services in north-west Victoria? Mr FOLEY (Albert Park—Minister for Health, Minister for Ambulance Services, Minister for Equality) (11:26): Can I thank the Independent member for Mildura for her question and for her very strong advocacy for her community, particularly in a space that she knows so well through her own professional experience, let alone her role as a fierce advocate for her community. The need for a range

QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE AND MINISTERS STATEMENTS 888 Legislative Assembly Thursday, 4 March 2021 of rehabilitation services for alcohol and drugs in regional Victoria is very, very significant, particularly in our north-west part of the state, which as the honourable member has pointed to is significantly isolated from the rest of Victoria. When this government was elected in 2014 there were 208 residential rehabilitation beds in the state. That number had been increased by two over the course of the previous four years. This government is well down the path—in fact past the 430 mark—on its way to doubling that number to 492 by the end of this year. The majority of those new beds, I am pleased to say, have been in regional and rural Victoria—as the honourable member for East Gippsland would declare to, as the honourable member for Morwell would declare to and as the honourable member for Ovens Valley would point to, as well as the member for Corio and the two honourable members who represent the beautiful communities of Ballarat. This government is doubling our residential rehabilitation beds, but it is not just stopping at the important issue of residential rehabilitation—because of course the whole issue of rehabilitation is not just the clinical issue of residential rehabilitation. It is also the important area of community support, which is why this government is very, very pleased to be supporting such fine organisations as the Salvation Army, the Mallee District Aboriginal Services, Sunraysia Community Health Services and other organisations through a more comprehensive coming together of services, such as integration through the Orange Door services in that part of Victoria in Mildura operating now. The Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System pointed out just two days ago the significant role that is to be played by mental health services and alcohol and drug services, particularly when it comes to our Indigenous community, who make up, sadly, particularly in the honourable member’s electorate, a disproportionate number of beds and demands in that community. We know that the honourable member is a fierce advocate for her community on this issue. We look forward to working with her on that matter and particularly delivering and improving bed-based services, community services and the wraparound whole-of-life services that are so important in alcohol and other drugs support. Ms CUPPER (Mildura) (11:29): My supplementary question is also for the Minister for Health. Will the government fund a 30-bed residential drug and alcohol rehab service in Mildura to address the glaring gap in services in the far north-west? Mr FOLEY (Albert Park—Minister for Health, Minister for Ambulance Services, Minister for Equality) (11:29): When this government committed to more than doubling our residential rehabilitation facilities right across Victoria, which are disproportionately in regional and rural Victoria, we knew that this demand would, sadly, not cease. That is why we are determined to get to that figure of 492 in the very near future. I have asked my department to begin the process of therefore forward-assessing as to where the next range of demands will be in this important space—for instance, not just issues in regional and rural Victoria, as the honourable member has pointed out; there are also significant issues in metropolitan Melbourne. And there are also significant issues in, can I say, as the health complaints commissioner has pointed to in the recent reports, the unregulated private operators. I look forward to working with the honourable member for Mildura to address any significant issues— (Time expired) MINISTERS STATEMENTS: ROYAL COMMISSION INTO VICTORIA’S MENTAL HEALTH SYSTEM Ms SPENCE (Yuroke—Minister for Multicultural Affairs, Minister for Community Sport, Minister for Youth) (11:30): Today I rise to highlight the important recognition of culturally and linguistically diverse Victorians in the final report of the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System. For multicultural communities the royal commission has confirmed what many people have known for a very long time—that our mental health system is not appropriately accessible or culturally responsive for people from migrant and refugee backgrounds, resulting in fewer members of our multicultural communities accessing these critical services.

QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE AND MINISTERS STATEMENTS Thursday, 4 March 2021 Legislative Assembly 889

Accessing and using the mental health system can be an alienating experience for many people from migrant and refugee backgrounds, with the end result that many receive suboptimal mental health care. The final report recommends an integrated system with community at its heart, a system that promotes inclusion and addresses inequality. This means ensuring mental health services are available and accessible for all Victorians, regardless of language, cultural background or religion. Of particular note, the royal commission recommends the development of digital technologies that support the delivery of language services. This will help to overcome language barriers to accessing critical services and better support our most vulnerable communities, including newly arrived migrants. Priority is also given in the final report to lived experience as a core principle that the system is working at its best. This means putting all Victorians, including our diverse communities, at the centre of mental health service design and delivery. The royal commission found that the current mental health system does not deliver safe, responsive or inclusive care for many people from diverse communities. The recommendations in this report, all of which this government has committed to implementing, will change that to ensure better outcomes for all Victorians, including our multicultural communities. GOVERNMENT PERFORMANCE Ms RYAN (Euroa) (11:33): My question is to the Premier. Figures provided to the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee (PAEC) revealed that almost $800 000 of taxpayers money has been spent to buy the Premier’s 992 000 Facebook followers. Does the Department of Premier and Cabinet or the Premier’s private office (PPO) control the Premier’s Facebook— Members interjecting. The SPEAKER: Order! I need to be able to hear the member’s question. Can the member start again please. Ms RYAN: Certainly, Speaker. Figures provided to PAEC revealed that almost $800 000 of taxpayers money has been spent to buy the Premier’s 992 000 Facebook followers. Does the Department of Premier and Cabinet or the Premier’s private office control the Premier’s Facebook account? Mr ANDREWS (Mulgrave—Premier) (11:34): I thought I might have missed out today, but no, I do have an opportunity. I will just say to the member for Euroa that I will never apologise to her or anyone on that side of the house for, for instance, sending messages to communities while they are being ravaged by fire, telling them when to evacuate and how to evacuate. I will never apologise to the likes of the member for Euroa for sending out advertising to people in language—further to the very eloquent comments just made by my honourable friend the Minister for Multicultural Affairs— sending out messages in language to communities to get tested if you have got COVID symptoms— Ms Ryan: On a point of order, Speaker, on relevance, I think the Premier might be wandering a little. It was a very clear question: who controls his Facebook account? Members interjecting. The SPEAKER: Order, the Minister for Multicultural Affairs! The Premier is being relevant to the question. Mr ANDREWS: If I am asked about Facebook advertising, I am going to tell the member for Euroa all about Facebook advertising. We make no apology, whether it be supporting the smallest country newspaper, which we have done in record terms—and I tell you what: I never ask them to send me the invoice before the election. You want to talk about advertising? Do not rely on everybody being quite as vacant as you. Members interjecting. The SPEAKER: Order! The Premier will resume his seat. The member for Lowan and the Minister for Health! On a point of order, member for Warrandyte?

QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE AND MINISTERS STATEMENTS 890 Legislative Assembly Thursday, 4 March 2021

Mr R Smith: I am sorry to interrupt you when you are on a roll, mate, but the question was— Members interjecting. The SPEAKER: Order! The member for Warrandyte will resume his seat. If the member for Warrandyte wants to raise a point of order, he will do so through the Chair. Mr R Smith: On a point of order, Speaker, the question was very, very basic. Notwithstanding that all the messages the Premier is referring to are functions of government, not his personal Facebook page, the question was very simple: who controls it, DPC or the PPO? The SPEAKER: The Premier is being relevant to the question that has been asked. Mr ANDREWS: The member for Warrandyte just described me as ‘mate’. Well, can I say, after the job you did as marginal seats director, you are my friend and you always will be. I love you. I hope you get that job again. Members interjecting. Mr M O’Brien: On a point of order, Speaker, you make it very clear that members must speak through the Chair. The Premier consistently refuses to do that. He never gets called out. We are sick of this. Either apply the rules fairly or do not apply them at all. Members interjecting. The SPEAKER: Order! The member for Mount Waverley can leave the chamber for the period of 1 hour. Member for Mount Waverley withdrew from chamber. The SPEAKER: Order! I have been listening very carefully to the Premier’s remarks, and he is directing them through the Chair. Mr M O’Brien: He did not. Mr ANDREWS: I will make the point: I am pretty fond of you too, actually. Members interjecting. The SPEAKER: Order! The Manager of Opposition Business will resume his seat. After a ruling, the Premier then directs a comment directly to a member opposite. I ask the Premier to direct his comments through the Chair. Mr ANDREWS: Of course, Speaker. Sorry, I was carried away, given the opportunity to send them home happy. I have been asked about advertising. I make no apology for advertising on very, very important matters. The fact that nearly a million people engage with that platform is not something I will apologise for either. Members interjecting. Mr ANDREWS: Well, no. You see, this is what you do when only about 100 000 are on your Facebook page. You desperately look for ways to convince yourself that you are not desperately unpopular. Mr R Smith: On a point of order, Speaker, it should not be a difficult question to answer. If he does not know, if the Premier does not know who controls his account, the PPO or DPC, then he should say ‘I don’t know’. Otherwise he should answer the question. The SPEAKER: Order! The member for Warrandyte should resume his seat. There is no point of order.

QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE AND MINISTERS STATEMENTS Thursday, 4 March 2021 Legislative Assembly 891

Mr ANDREWS: Those opposite are seeking to conflate advertising with apparently positive coverage and the attraction of likes or friends. I will just say to those opposite: we spend on behalf of taxpayers an infinitely larger amount of money through, say, the Herald Sun—not necessarily my greatest fans and supporters. Mr R Smith: On a point of order, Speaker, I am going to keep raising this. The question is: who controls your Facebook account? Is it you? Is it the DPC? The SPEAKER: Order! That is not a point of order. The member for Warrandyte will resume his seat. Mr ANDREWS: I am asked about advertising; I am answering about advertising. I am proud to engage with the community, whether it be through record support for the smallest country newspaper—no strings attached, I might add—or advertising through News Limited newspapers, Fairfax newspapers, advertising on TV, any number of platforms. Ms Staley: On a point of order, Speaker, on relevance, the Premier seems to have misheard the question because he repeatedly refers to the fact that he has been asked about advertising. He was not asked about advertising, he was asked about the expenditure on his Facebook page and whether that page is controlled by him or his office or the DPC. The question does not relate to advertising. It does not say ‘advertising’. The SPEAKER: Order! I heard the question, and the Premier is being relevant to the question. The Premier has concluded that answer. Ms RYAN (Euroa) (11:40): The Department of Premier and Cabinet admitted to PAEC that it funds the Premier’s Facebook page. Can the Premier guarantee that no data collected from this Facebook page is shared with the Australian Labor Party? Mr ANDREWS (Mulgrave—Premier) (11:41): The member for Euroa asked me a question in relation to the functions of government, for which I am accountable, and the functions of a political party. The answer is of course not. No. This is a Department of Premier and Cabinet, Victorian government, Premier of Victoria page—although the difference is I put my name to my Facebook page; others have got this kind of wonderful title ‘Victorian Liberal Leader’, as if they might need to change every now and then, as if they might need the utility that comes from anonymity. Yes, well, I will not be lectured by people who wanted to place lots of ads come election time and wanted the bills sent to the taxpayer before the election campaign. Mr M O’Brien: On a point of order, Speaker, question time is not an opportunity for this Premier to attack the opposition, particularly not a Premier who has presided over corruption of red shirts, corruption of orange shirts, corruption left, right— Members interjecting. The SPEAKER: Order! The Leader of the Opposition will resume his seat. There is no point of order. The Premier to come back to answering the question. Mr ANDREWS: If only volume— Members interjecting. The SPEAKER: Order! I ask the Premier to resume his seat. Order! When the house comes to order. Mr R Smith: On a point of order, Speaker, I did note that the Premier continued to rant while you were telling him to come to order and sit down for some time, and I note that there has been no mention from you to pull him into line like you have pulled others into line. And I ask that you apply the rules fairly and that you bring him to order so that the Premier does sit down and give respect to the Chair when it is asked for.

QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE AND MINISTERS STATEMENTS 892 Legislative Assembly Thursday, 4 March 2021

The SPEAKER: Order! There is no point of order. Mr ANDREWS: As I said, we will not be taking lectures on matters of advertising—or matters of ranting, member for Warrandyte, just to be clear. The day I get a lecture from you on ranting will be— Mr M O’Brien: On a point of order, Speaker, once again the Premier defies your ruling. Once again the Premier shows no respect to this chamber, refuses to speak through the Chair. At what point is this Premier going to be brought into line? The SPEAKER: Order! There is no point of order. Members interjecting. The SPEAKER: Order! The Premier has concluded his answer. Mr M O’Brien: On a further point of order, Speaker, when a member defies the rules of this place, is there no point of order? The SPEAKER: Order! There should be no interjections from members, and the Premier should not take up interjections across the table and refer to members directly. MINISTERS STATEMENTS: INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY Ms WILLIAMS (Dandenong—Minister for Prevention of Family Violence, Minister for Women, Minister for Aboriginal Affairs) (11:44): I rise today to update the house on this government’s commitment to ending gendered violence in Victoria. This Monday will mark International Women’s Day, and after the events of the last fortnight I cannot understate the importance of this day. It is a day for us all to remember what we are fighting for: a safer, more equal Victoria for every woman in this state. The biggest threat to the health of Victorian women—indeed all women across our country—is gendered violence. Here in Victoria we spend over $30 million a year on sexual assault services alone. But we should not have to spend a cent, because sexual assault, abuse and harassment are entirely preventable—and not by telling women what we should do to avoid being assaulted. It is not the responsibility of victims. I call on everyone in this chamber to stand with me and call out all forms of disrespect and violence against women this International Women’s Day. In particular, I call on every single man in this chamber, and indeed across our communities, in every forum, to stand up and call it out, to stand up and take responsibility, not just for their own actions but for the systems they have benefited from and supported for decades—the systems that silence victims, the systems that encourage violence, the systems that have operated to ensure that if you are male enough, privileged enough, rich enough and powerful enough, the rules do not apply to you. I want to say to all victim- survivors out there and in here: there is support available to you, especially for so many of you who I know have really struggled this week. This International Women’s Day, and every single day, we fight for you. Mr Walsh: On a point of order, Speaker, we had the point of order this morning from the Manager of Opposition Business about the lack of respect from the other side of the house, and we had a very passionate plea from the manager of government business for the house to actually work better together. Can I ask you to please counsel the Premier about his attitude in this house? The tone is set from the top, and the Premier’s performance today was absolutely appalling, and your performance, Speaker, on not taking him to task I would like the opportunity to speak with you in your office about, because I think it was out of line. The SPEAKER: Order! I will not accept reflections on the Chair, Leader of The Nationals. I am happy to have discussions at any point in time about the operation of the chamber with any member, including party leaders.

CONSTITUENCY QUESTIONS Thursday, 4 March 2021 Legislative Assembly 893

Constituency questions EILDON ELECTORATE Ms McLEISH (Eildon) (11:47): (5709) My question is for the Minister for Roads and Road Safety. Will the minister finally make available the appropriate funds to install 40-kilometres-an-hour electronic speed limit signs outside Wesburn Primary School so students, parents and staff can cross the road safely? Since 2016 I have been calling for the urgent instalment of lights on the Warburton Highway outside Wesburn Primary School, yet it has fallen on deaf ears. There is a $6.5 million Pedestrian and Safer Schools regional fund currently underway, with the aim of improving poor visibility and speed compliance outside schools. The state is contributing $1.3 million to the program, and I have no doubt that they will be determining and prioritising the locations. So the minister must make sure that Wesburn Primary School is prioritised. Traffic flow is heavy, fog regularly covers the road and obscures drivers’ vision. It is a dangerous highway. Electronic speed limit signs are a necessity in this location. NORTHCOTE ELECTORATE Ms THEOPHANOUS (Northcote) (11:48): (5710) My question is to the Minister for Health about the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine in Victoria. I ask the minister: how is the Victorian government supporting the rollout of the commonwealth’s vaccine program in Victoria, and how will this impact my electorate of Northcote? The Northcote electorate is proudly home to many health and frontline workers as well as many aged-care staff and residents who have been heavily impacted by the pandemic. I want to take this opportunity to thank all our frontline aged-care and disability workers who have faced this challenge with compassion, strength and dedication. I am pleased that those in our community who are at high risk are part of stage 1 of the vaccine rollout. I understand the Victorian government is in discussion with the commonwealth about the number of additional vaccines Victoria may receive, and this could see Victoria deliver even more vaccinations in the first phase than anticipated. This is encouraging news, and I know my community would welcome any further information about what we are doing to help ensure the vaccine rollout is implemented safely and swiftly. GIPPSLAND SOUTH ELECTORATE Mr D O’BRIEN (Gippsland South) (11:49): (5711) My question is to the Minister for Industry Support and Recovery, and it follows on the question that the Leader of The Nationals asked about Jaci Hicken from Mirboo North in my electorate during question time. As the Leader of The Nationals indicated, Jaci was one of nearly 300 people asked to repay $20 000 in a grant apparently wrongly provided to them. Subsequently Jaci was provided with a $10 000 grant that she was told back in May last year that she was not eligible for. The question I want to ask the minister is: will you give a guarantee that Jaci will not be asked to repay that second grant, as she has been asked to do for the first grant. I add to that: on the first grant she has not been told why that grant was paid in error; she has simply been told there was a mistake made. She is very nervous of course that a second grant that she was told previously that she was not eligible for has now been paid to her, and she wants clarity that she will not be asked to repay that second grant as well of $10 000. THOMASTOWN ELECTORATE Ms HALFPENNY (Thomastown) (11:50): (5712) My question is to the Minister for Workplace Safety in the other place. Minister, the electorate of Thomastown is home to the Northern Hospital and houses an acute inpatient unit as well as the newly established hospital outreach post-suicidal engagement service to help people who are struggling with their mental health. But it is not only patients who need greater support. The final report of the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System has highlighted that mental health workers like those who work at the Northern Hospital and other services across the electorate need greater mental health and wellbeing support inside their workplaces. My question to the minister is: where will constituents in the electorate find guidance and information on how to establish and maintain mentally healthy workplaces?

CONSTITUENCY QUESTIONS 894 Legislative Assembly Thursday, 4 March 2021

BRIGHTON ELECTORATE Mr NEWBURY (Brighton) (11:50): (5713) My constituency question is to the Minister for Planning, and I ask: can the minister inform me whether the government has reviewed whether residential aged-care facilities are misusing the wider scope they have afforded to them under the Victorian planning laws? Residential aged-care facilities have broader latitude in terms of how they can build or redevelop under planning law. This additional scope has been afforded where those facilities are ‘essential services, not a lifestyle choice’. Japara Elanora aged-care home has been nestled into Brighton Beach for decades. They offer a wide variety of private and shared homes for around 140 residents. Local residents are supportive of the home modernising but were alarmed to read a final advertised plan by Elanora to build 245 apartments, including three-bedroom luxury apartments with beach views. As Amanda has written on behalf of 80 local residents, if the proposal has ‘chosen retirement lifestyles’, they should not be included in the allowances. I look forward to the minister’s response. PASCOE VALE ELECTORATE Ms BLANDTHORN (Pascoe Vale) (11:51): (5714) My question is for the Minister for Education, and the question I ask is: what CO2 emissions are expected to be abated and what cost savings are projected for Pascoe Vale schools who were recently successful in the Andrews Labor government Greener Government School Buildings program. I was very pleased to advise Coburg High School, Glenroy College, Coburg North Primary School and Oak Park Primary School that they had all been successful under this important program. Under this initiative these schools will be supported to make their energy systems more sustainable and more environmentally friendly. All around my electorate I see school communities working diligently to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and waste. Such efforts at Coburg North Primary School are distinguished and were recently recognised with their Student Action Team of the Year ResourceSmart Schools award last year. Local students speak to me regularly about the need for strong action on climate change, and I am sure that local students, alongside their hardworking teachers and their broader school communities, will be very excited to know that their schools will be contributing to our government’s goal to reach zero net emissions by 2050, and I am keen to find out what energy and cost savings there are. BRUNSWICK ELECTORATE Dr READ (Brunswick) (11:52): (5715) My constituency question for the Minister for Creative Industries is: will the government provide ongoing financial support for Brunswick’s artists and creatives to ensure that they can thrive within my constituency? With the Sydney Road festival postponed and the Brunswick Music Festival reworked for social distancing, we are clearly not out of the woods yet. Live music is a big part of Brunswick’s identity and we are excited to finally get a taste of it again, starting tomorrow at the Brunswick Music Festival, but so many of our valued artists and musicians have been struggling during this pandemic. Brunswick has one of the best pub music scenes in the world and, dare I say, more people are involved in the creative arts here than anywhere else in the country. To protect Brunswick’s creative culture long into the future the government needs to support the people who work within it as we build back from the pandemic. NARRE WARREN SOUTH ELECTORATE Mr MAAS (Narre Warren South) (11:53): (5716) My question is for the Minister for Industry Support and Recovery and concerns small businesses and the recent circuit-breaker lockdown. Minister, how will the recently announced circuit-breaker action business support package assist small businesses in my electorate of Narre Warren South? COVID-19 has impacted so many in our community emotionally, physically and financially, but we must recognise the impact on small businesses and provide appropriate support where possible. I would appreciate any further information that the minister can provide on support for small businesses in my electorate of Narre Warren South after the five-day circuit-breaker lockdown. I look forward to sharing the minister’s response with my community.

BILLS Thursday, 4 March 2021 Legislative Assembly 895

EVELYN ELECTORATE Ms VALLENCE (Evelyn) (11:54): (5717) My question is to the Minister for Veterans in relation to local Anzac Day services in the Evelyn electorate. On behalf of members of both the Lilydale RSL and the Mount Evelyn RSL and the many residents who have contacted me wanting to pay their respects at local Anzac Day services, can you confirm if RSL sub-branches still need a permit to proceed? And what specific COVID requirements do they need to fulfil, or will this be handled by RSL Victoria? It was absolutely wrong and shameful that earlier on the Andrews Labor government and its dysfunctional health department was not going to permit Anzac Day marches. To think Labor had approved massive crowds at the tennis, the AFL, music festivals and Moomba. It was a disgrace and made no sense to not permit Anzac Day. Thank goodness there was a public outcry, that veterans’ voices have been heard and that Labor was embarrassed into overturning this bad decision. Holding Anzac services locally is important for the wellbeing of RSL members and residents, to pay their respects to service men and women and especially commemorate those who made the ultimate sacrifice in protecting our country and freedoms. YAN YEAN ELECTORATE Ms GREEN (Yan Yean) (11:55): (5718) My question is to the Minister for Transport Infrastructure. Minister, locals in my community know how vital the completion of an upgrade of Plenty Road is, adding extra lanes right across the corridor between McKimmies Road and Bridge Inn Road. I understand that you also understand that, Speaker, given it runs through your electorate and the electorate of the member for Mill Park. 35 000 vehicles travel along this stretch of road every day, along with cyclists and pedestrians. I understand that we are now on the final stretch, on the home stretch, with this project, which is on schedule for completion this year. Minister, I ask: how is the project team—Major Road Projects Victoria and the contractor—managing the final stage of works as we emerge from the pandemic and in particular ensuring the safety of all at the intersection of Bridge Inn Road and Plenty Road until the roadworks are complete? Bills JUSTICE LEGISLATION AMENDMENT (SYSTEM ENHANCEMENTS AND OTHER MATTERS) BILL 2021 Second reading Debate resumed. Mr D O’BRIEN (Gippsland South) (11:56): I was just saying at the time of the interruption that the Sale County Court is one area that has not been used since 2018. In an attempt to both stimulate the economy and actually provide another courthouse it could be used for catching up some of the backlog. This is something that the government could consider in doing an upgrade. I understand the Sale County Court is not fit for purpose in terms of the security arrangements there at the moment, but that could be done. It is a beautiful old building, and renovating that building would, as I said, create some stimulation for the local economy and also address the issues of capacity constraints within the court system. There are a couple of other amendments I would like to mention too that are dealt with in this legislation. One is the amendment to the Local Government Act 2020 that allows councils to meet remotely and not have to be there in person. That has certainly been welcomed by councils across the state. But I say that that is something that should be used sparingly. By all means councils can probably have some of their in-camera discussions, some of their briefings, via audiovisual links, but I would not like to see councils go to a permanent state where they are actually doing their meetings, particularly their public meetings, via technology. I think there is something to be said for ratepayers, for members of the community, to be able to go along to a council to see people in action—people raising issues, just as occurs here. Indeed I would like to see this building open as well, Speaker, while you are in the chair. I understand that was an issue that was raised at the House Committee, and perhaps

BILLS 896 Legislative Assembly Thursday, 4 March 2021 the House Committee chose not to open the building. But when everything else is open I fail to see why Parliament is not open to the public at the moment, and that should be addressed as soon as possible. Likewise local government, I believe, can take up the opportunity to do some of those meetings, as I said, by virtual meetings, but they should be wherever possible in person. The other amendment that I do want to mention is the change to the Parliamentary Committees Act 2003. This actually came up pre COVID—the option of having meetings via phone or via Zoom or via Microsoft Teams, whichever technology might be available. I was a little bit reluctant at the time because I thought it potentially could be abused by members not actually being present and dialling in from overseas trips and the like. But of course it has been necessitated through COVID, and that has certainly been a welcome thing. I might add from personal perspective, and I am sure for all country MPs and regional MPs, having the ability to dial in to a meeting, particularly those meetings not held in a sitting week, where you otherwise would spend 5 hours in the car perhaps for an hour- long committee meeting, is certainly much more helpful. Being able to do those sorts of meetings via Zoom has been good. Where it has not been good, I think, is the practice of doing some of the committee hearings via Zoom. Now, again, that has been the lesser of two evils. Rather than not having them at all, it was certainly good to have Public Accounts and Estimates Committee hearings. When pretty much everything else was locked down, we were able to do hearings via Zoom. But it was pretty galling, I might say, during the hearings that we had with the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee inquiry into the government’s handling of COVID, back in May last year, that we had the Premier doing a press conference in one of the theatrettes over at Department of Premier and Cabinet with 15, 20, however many journalists there were any day plus all the other hangers-on, and then he would literally walk into his office and do a video link with us for PAEC. It beggared belief when there were 10 members on PAEC and three or four members of staff to suggest that it was not safe for him to do the hearings face to face and yet he could do a media conference face to face. It was just far too convenient for the Premier, and of course every single one of his ministers followed suit. While I do appreciate the opportunity to have meetings to reduce the level of travel for country MPs, I think that the use of video technology for hearings should be kept to a minimum, particularly at this point when the technology is not always that great. I think at those hearings in May—not I think, I know; I can say it with 100 per cent accuracy—100 per cent of ministers dropped out or froze at one point in their hearings, so that was not ideal. While I support the broader measures in this legislation, that is one thing that should be kept to a minimum. Ms HENNESSY (Altona) (12:01): I am really delighted to rise to make a contribution on this bill. But before I do so, may I acknowledge you in your role as the Deputy Speaker, in light of International Women’s Day as well. I am always really delighted for us to make sure that we are celebrating and highlighting women in positions of public profile and all of the glory that you have brought to International Women’s Day today as well. I suppose I have had some experience with some of the great challenges that the justice system endured in the context of COVID. The Minister for Corrections I think made a really fantastic contribution in acknowledging and helping to highlight all of the extraordinary work that those that work in the justice sector undertook in very, very difficult sets of circumstances. That was of course having to respond to the prevention of the spread of corona and also having to do that in a very unpredictable environment, and in certain cases, for example, in the corrections system, it is a very unpredictable environment. I want to also lend my voice to those that have expressed their gratitude and respect to those that each and every single day worked in those environments, perhaps taking risks of their own exposure and dealing with a very changeable and fluid environment sometimes. That includes people that were working on the front line, but it also includes people who were working in administrative support positions. So to those in the Department of Justice and Community Safety, I want to express my

BILLS Thursday, 4 March 2021 Legislative Assembly 897 gratitude and thanks for the extraordinary work that you have performed and will continue to perform in the context of COVID-19. I have often reflected in recent months that some change takes so long to drive. People think it is impossible to do things differently. The quest for innovation is often killed by the establishment of a pilot—the pilot runs out, it is not evaluated properly, it is then not refunded. With lots of great ideas and ways in which we could try and do things differently—to improve access, to improve innovation and to make our systems more efficient—they often fall over after the initial good idea has run out of puff. I think that in reflecting upon the things that COVID-19 has perhaps taught systems and government and community, it is that when we are forced to do things differently, we really can rise to the occasion. There are a lot of really spectacular examples in the justice system where that occurred. The ability to try to get IT rolled out across the system where you had interoperability, where you went from VCAT, for example, dealing with changing rental laws where they only had paper available to them, where they were attempting to connect with clients to deal with some of the most precious but important things—things like keeping a roof over people’s heads—and get a system that could operate in a remote environment with very limited technological innovation available to them speaks volumes on the capability of the human spirit when things are very, very challenging. Many of those interim changes were put in place through the two legislative changes that we have had in this Parliament, and what this piece of legislation does is nail down and make permanent those changes, those things that were good ideas as innovations that now make the system more efficient and more accessible. That is a really important change. I think it actually means that we have started to build systems around the needs of people rather than saying to people, ‘You come and fit in with our impossible systems’. Of course every system, whether it is the health system or the justice system, has a unique set of challenges. One of the challenges for the justice system is not only demand but the fact that you have got to ensure that the dictates of justice are not unnecessarily compromised. So in being able to do things like run remote hearings on the papers you have got to make sure that you have got the right checks and balances there to ensure that justice is not compromised and that there are not any other unfair outcomes in your quest to try and improve access. I know that all of the heads of jurisdiction and all of those on the Courts Council were motivated by those facts and those facts alone in their quest to ensure that they could keep their systems going. There are also some structural changes that continue to exist, however. I remember meeting and talking with some representatives from the Horsham legal aid centre. Again, without 5G and fantastic IT available to them, they just got on with the job. Now, it was not perfect. In fact the receptionist for legal aid in that region was running legal aid for that region on her phone in her kitchen with a computer that she did not know how to use very well. But she serviced and connected all of those people that required legal services, legal aid and legal support; some were in correctional facilities, some were in the community, and she did that from her kitchen table. She would drop out occasionally from her Zoom and Teams meetings with people, but the thing that she was proudest of was the fact that not one person was unrepresented or unsupported in any of their hearings. Again, I would just like to formally place on the record the respect and the appreciation that we should provide to people who have serviced our community in that way. There were also enormous efforts that went with people trying to ensure that they were connecting people up with proper services built around the justice system—again, very challenging at the start—and people solved problems as they went. This is a bill that seeks to pick up the things that worked well and the successes of those changes. It is my view that some of those changes, but for COVID, if we had sent those off to a committee to consider them, would have been admired as opportunities and problems for years and years and years. The sort of talk that we needed to make sure that these things were implemented, picked up and now legislated for in a permanent sense would never have happened. This is important. It is important for everyone, from those who rely upon the civil system around rental laws to those that no longer

BILLS 898 Legislative Assembly Thursday, 4 March 2021 necessarily need to travel physically to courts but are able to attend in an online environment. We are saying that people do not necessarily have to be physically in the same place in order to do things like execute and witness documents. There are all sorts of innovative changes. With all of the horrors that COVID brought, it has delivered a range of innovations. It is important that we pick those innovations up and make sure that we put in place the legislative structures so that we do not go back to old ways that are costly and inefficient and do not actually reduce some of the inequalities between those that live close to services and those that live far away from services. We also need to fund and support those services to rise to these changes as well. A final comment in respect of some of the changes around the powers for WorkSafe Victoria inspectors that I think are a very, very important part of the change that is permanently put in place in this bill. The fact is that we now live in a world where infection, influenza and novel viruses like corona all will now have an occupational health and safety impact. Now, we hope to be able to vaccinate and to deal with the current global pandemic insofar as it applies to us. But we now know these things are very serious, and we cannot necessarily extinguish the possibility that another virus in the future potentially arrives. So in ensuring that we use the powers and the infrastructure that we have got to make sure that people like WorkSafe have the right legal powers to keep our workplaces safe as a really important frontier to reduce and prevent the spread of infection, again, a really important permanent change is being made. I again want to thank, and acknowledge the work of, WorkSafe inspectors who during this period of time have worked not just to keep the public safe but to keep safe the workers who are in the front line of protecting all of us each and every single day. To that organisation, to their staff and to their families and for their ongoing commitment I express my deepest gratitude. I wish this bill a speedy passage through the house. It is sensible and pragmatic—and may there be more of it. Dr READ (Brunswick) (12:12): I will only speak briefly on the Justice Legislation Amendment (System Enhancements and Other Matters) Bill 2021. We may have more to say on this in the other place after talking more with stakeholders. It is a substantial bill, much of it technical, relating to criminal proceedings in the courts as well as the wider justice system, including corrections. The justice system and the courts have been among the areas hardest hit by the pandemic. The last I heard, over 150 000 cases were adjourned or delayed. The majority were criminal cases in the Magistrates Court, the engine room of our justice system, and it was already struggling prior to the pandemic. The Greens have supported many of the temporary and permanent initiatives to try and run the justice system during the pandemic, with streamlined electronic processes and the increasing shift to online hearings, but we now know that these measures have really only barely kept the system afloat. Our primary concern is that these delays in the courts, particularly in criminal cases, may increase the likelihood of unjust outcomes. I understand that the court services and the government have considered all number of new initiatives to help clear the backlog, which is quite appropriate. Many of the administrative changes proposed in the bill make a lot of sense, and we support them. But I think we need to accept that there will be no quick fix. The reality is that we will only be able to clear these cases in a realistic time frame with more resources being allocated, which means more money to run more courts in more places more often. I understand that it is tempting to cut corners—to shave off judicial procedures, checks and balances— in order to achieve quicker results, but we do have to be careful that in seeking to fix a crisis we do not create another one. I am particularly wary of any permanent changes to a system that has been very finely calibrated over many years to deliver effective justice. Too often when such changes are made it appears that they always seem to involve sacrificing people’s rights and protections for the purpose of expediency. Now, we are aware of serious concerns raised by some justice stakeholders and already referenced by some speakers about some of the proposed permanent changes to the Criminal Procedure Act 2009.

BILLS Thursday, 4 March 2021 Legislative Assembly 899

We have also heard concerns about the 12-month extension of prisoner quarantine in the corrections system and the lack of obvious accountability measures to ensure that the system operates in a way that is always compliant with our international human rights obligations. Some of these changes may have been included in the bill without wider consultation with key justice stakeholders, which we think is inappropriate even in times of crisis. Notwithstanding these concerns, the Greens recognise that this is still not a time for partisan politics, and we hope that we will be able to work together to ensure that this bill best meets the challenges the justice system faces from the COVID-19 pandemic. I look forward to continuing to talk to relevant justice stakeholders, the government and all other members to this end as this bill moves through the Parliament. Ms CONNOLLY (Tarneit) (12:15): I too rise to speak on the Justice Legislation Amendment (System Enhancements and Other Matters) Bill 2021. This bill certainly builds upon our government’s efforts to make our justice system more resilient to the challenges posed by COVID. More recently we extended these conditions as part of the COVID omnibus bill, late last year. These measures were put into place to make our courts more COVID safe and to ensure that our justice system could work throughout the pandemic. The pandemic is not over yet—we might be rolling out the vaccines—and this means that the need for these measures is also not over. It also means that we need to extend the legislation to extend these COVID procedures, which are set to lapse on 26 April, for a few more months. But from what we have seen over the last couple of months, these emergency measures have worked, and they have worked quite well throughout the pandemic. It is not just us—our government—saying this; that is what we are hearing from lawyers, from judges and from court officials who are working with these arrangements. Now, changes like allowing virtual court sessions, allowing fitness trials to be decided solely by a judge and electronic signing and remote witnessing of documents are just some of the changes that were brought in as part of our COVID measures. What they have actually done in fact is allow our courts to run more smoothly and act more flexibly. More importantly, what we know is that these initiatives have helped to make our court system much more accessible to so many more Victorians. Not only have these things worked during COVID; they also have the potential to make a justice system so much more efficient in the long term. That is why this bill looks to make a number of these emergency measures a permanent feature of our judicial processes, because Victorians deserve to have greater access to their courts and have their disputes resolved, most importantly, on time. This is why it was so disappointing to learn that while we are getting on with these changes, the federal government has abolished the family court. I note this because our government, the Andrews Labor government, has made incredible strides in tackling domestic and family violence. It is an absolute shame that the commonwealth’s changes will make it harder for these people that we are working so hard to help to get the justice that they deserve. At a time when our courts are facing incredible backlogs, now is not the time to be cutting resources and leaving our judges under-resourced. Back many moons ago, when I was a law graduate, I worked as a judge’s associate in the District Court of Queensland. We would travel around south-east Queensland and we would hear cases, day in and day out, but that still was not enough. So it does not surprise me that even despite these changes, this pandemic has created backlogs in our courts and in our tribunals, in particular VCAT. That is why our government has announced an $80 million justice recovery plan to help speed up the backlog of disputes outside of court, to support Victorians with more remote hearings and to hear more cases through more judicial resources and temporary courts. Now, I would like to take a moment to reflect on the success of virtual courts over the last year. This is a practice that has been employed by several jurisdictions, both in Australia and across the world. I will admit I did find it quite amusing when I saw a video of a lawyer from the US who struggled to work out how to remove a Zoom filter and conducted his proceedings while looking like a cat—absolutely bizarre, but indeed quite amusing. But for the most part, let us be honest, virtual and remote court sessions are something that Victorians have gotten quite used to. This is why this bill will allow remote hearings to remain a part of our court processes even after COVID. This should not be too surprising

BILLS 900 Legislative Assembly Thursday, 4 March 2021 because the technology is already used to some extent for court processes. We use video-linking to hear witness testimonials, for instance. The change to remote hearings is not going to be too much different in this regard, and going forward I imagine it is something we will see a lot more of. A particular benefit of the bill will be reducing travel times—transporting detainees from correctional facilities, youth justice facilities and police precincts to physically appear at courts when it is appropriate to do so. Of course some processes will still have to be physically conducted in court, and they will be. But I think these cases will be able to be heard much more efficiently by giving our courts greater flexibility. That is exactly what we have done in the past year with these COVID measures, and this bill is going to make sure that that is what will continue to happen. Now, another key feature that I am pretty enthusiastic about—it is something that I learned to do during COVID—is electronic signing. These measures have allowed lawyers and witnesses, parties and court officials to sign documents, whether it is a will, a deed or an affidavit, without actually having to be in the same room or in a courthouse. For communities like mine, we are not always within a reasonable driving distance from our major courts, and indeed there are many people in my local community requiring documents to be signed who in fact do not have a drivers licence or a car. Our closest court is the Werribee Magistrates Court. It is still a while off before we get what will be our fabulous, brand new, $273 million justice precinct, which our government funded in last year’s budget. There are a lot of situations in which people need to access a higher court in Melbourne’s CBD. As an example, the probate office, which people access for wills, is designated in the Supreme Court. For outer suburban communities like mine, this will make it easier in situations to get legal documents signed without even having to travel to the Werribee CBD at the very least or having to go all the way in to Melbourne’s CBD, especially if it is just for a signature. That is part of how you make courts more accessible to people, and I am pleased to see that this change will be made a permanent feature of our court processes. This will make a world of difference to how people go about accessing our courts—people in communities like mine as well as outer suburban communities, not to mention regional and rural Victoria, where families will benefit from this change. Another key feature that this bill deals with is our COVID measures relating to child reunification orders. I have to say I was pretty horrified that when we first introduced this measure last year it was subject to a misinformation campaign about our government’s omnibus bill. People were led to believe that these changes meant that our government was going to take children away from conspiracy theorists. I took phone calls and I had emails from concerned people who had heard about it through Facebook. They contacted my office, and they were really frightened, anxious and scared that their children would be taken away from them because they disagreed with us on COVID restrictions. That was the fear campaign that those opposite peddled with the help of their mates in groups like Reignite Democracy Australia. And why is this relevant? Because that is the problem of pandemic politics— simple legislation like this bill gets caught up in a cloud of misinformation. The reality was that that measure had nothing to do with taking kids away from people at all—not at all. It was in fact doing the opposite by keeping families together, giving parents more time to get their acts together so that families could be reunited, keeping vulnerable kids out of the foster care system. As a result of this bill, parents who are doing everything they can to get their kids back in their lives now have an extra six months to prove that they are a fit and proper parent—that is 30 months in total—if they can prove that they have been affected by COVID, because we want families to be reunited. We do not want kids ending up in the foster care system for the rest of their childhood, and that is why we want to help parents as much as we can to get their lives back on track and get their kids back in their lives. This bill takes in a number of successful COVID measures that we know have worked really well in our court system, and it keeps them in place to improve access to our justice system. In doing so they will most certainly help our government reduce the backlogs in court and create a much more efficient justice system that, most importantly, works for more Victorians. That is why I commend the bill to the house.

BILLS Thursday, 4 March 2021 Legislative Assembly 901

Mr KENNEDY (Hawthorn) (12:24): I am proud to be a member of a government whose goal from the outset of the COVID pandemic has been to not only manage the public health response but ensure the efficient operation of Victoria’s justice system. Most in the Assembly would agree that extraordinary times such as these require swift action from the government. Over many years I have encountered that saying ‘The devil is in the detail’ or the other one ‘Don’t get defeated in detail’, and sometimes, I am sure, in working in those particular domains, that must happen. My daughter, along with many others who have graduated from arts/law, did not go on to practise law itself in terms of an office but joined the police force and after quite a few years on the beat is now in prosecution. I am very proud of not just her but the others who do the work day after day in this field, and anything that we can do to get the detail right so that practitioners are not frustrated by the detail is something to be applauded. In April 2020 the government introduced a range of urgent temporary measures to support the justice system’s emergency response to COVID. The aim of the Justice Legislation Amendment (System Enhancements and Other Matters) Bill 2021 is to make some of these reforms, originally considered temporary, permanent. I do not think we should ever shy away from this: when things work, then sometimes it is a good idea to enshrine them in a situation of permanence. The bill is necessary as several of the COVID-19 act’s temporary measures will lapse on 26 April this year. It will also extend certain critical temporary measures due to the ongoing risk of COVID community transmission and in light of the current public health directions. The bill creates an administrative mechanism for the time served scheme where infringement fines also apply. Why is it necessary? By drawing on our experiences during the pandemic these changes will modernise how Victorians conduct legal affairs and business and transform Victorian court processes. As will be seen, some of the changes introduced by the bill are to be permanent and some are for various fixed extension periods. These measures that have been identified as needing extension will be beneficial to the community as it recovers from the pandemic and as government continues to manage the ongoing risk to public health. These include supporting the ongoing enforcement and operation of public health directions and providing the flexibility needed so critical services that accord with public health can be delivered. What will the bill do? As mentioned earlier, the bill makes permanent some measures already enacted in COVID legislation. These include facilitating remote court attendance, enabling matters to be determined without a judge, electronic signing and remote witnessing of documents, allowing fitness investigations under the Crimes (Mental Impairment and Unfitness to be Tried) Act 1997 to be determined by a judge alone, providing flexibility as to the time and location for the Children’s Court to sit, streamlining bail procedures, giving extra administrative powers to registrars to manage court listings, allowing the Magistrates Court to include an electronic monitoring condition on a community correction order and making procedures for integrity agencies more streamlined, including the ability to serve documents, conduct remote examinations, inspect documents electronically and appoint a person to preside in an examination. The bill will amend a number of acts in relation to measures or aspects critical to Victoria’s COVID mitigation which would otherwise lapse in April of this year. In summary this includes extending the COVID response provisions in the Corrections Act 1986 and the Children, Youth and Families Act 2005 for a further 12 months; amending the Local Government Act 2020 to permit virtual meetings to continue for another 12 months; amending the Children, Youth and Families Act to permit the Children’s Court, for a further two years, to extend family reunification orders for six additional months; amending the Children, Youth and Families Act in relation to child protection emergency care applications; and amending the Occupational Health and Safety Act 2004 to provide for WorkSafe operations to take actions necessary in enforcing compliance with health and safety matters which would prevent, reduce or mitigate workplace risk of COVID. Finally, the bill will amend the Parliamentary Committees Act 2003 to provide flexibility in relation to members of committees established under that act to attend and vote remotely for a further period of 12 months.

BILLS 902 Legislative Assembly Thursday, 4 March 2021

In maximising the benefit to the Victorian court system of our COVID experience, careful use has been made of technological capacities to provide for more flexible and efficient court procedures. To this end, the bill renders permanent the originally temporary changes made to the Evidence (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1958. Central to these amendments are provisions permitting more proceedings to be heard remotely. For example, the bill permits an adult in custody to appear via audiovisual link in any Supreme Court or County Court hearing other than a trial. So while courts will retain their discretion to require by order an adult accused to appear in person to ensure an accused understands the proceeding or to speak with their lawyer, in the regular course of a court’s work remote hearings will become normative. There will be a specific authority provided to the courts to require an accused to appear via audiovisual link in exceptional circumstances, which include occasions when a state of emergency or disaster has been declared. The government has been adaptive, as befitting our recent COVID experiences. The bill ensures that the vital process of the courts’ work continues. A more efficient justice system will be one COVID legacy, where the backlog of cases will not be extended. The results will also include a reduced burden on Victoria Police in transporting persons held to appear in court and upon correctional youth justice facilities. What is not impinged upon is the right of all accused to a fair trial. When a court or VCAT considers it appropriate, physical attendance in the court has been reconsidered so that witnesses before VCAT may appear remotely, and the empanelling and summonsing of jurors will be capable of proceeding without requiring attendance at court. The bill deals too with a considerably enhanced capacity for courts to proceed when the court considers it to be in the interests of justice to do so. Clearly there will be savings to the parties and important efficiency gains for the justice system more generally. Maybe people will think twice about saying ‘Oh, it’s all too much trouble’ if something is being done by video link. It is quite a different situation than having to undergo extensive transport arrangements or whatever it might be. More practical measures provided for in the bill include authorising electronic signing of documents and remote witnessing measures, which will not only result in efficiencies within the justice system but be a boon for those in rural or remote communities or those with limited mobility through age, disability or financial considerations. I note that there has been general support from the opposition— apart from the usual argy-bargy, which I am slowly getting used to—and that is good to see. Let us go ahead with this, and I commend the bill to the house Mr STAIKOS (Bentleigh) (12:34): It really is a pleasure to rise to contribute to the debate on the Justice Legislation Amendment (System Enhancements and Other Matters) Bill 2021. I think it is an understatement to say that the last 12 months have really been about adaptation and agility. That has been the way of life over the last 12 months as we have responded to this global pandemic that does not look to be over any time soon. This bill is exactly about adaptation. It is exactly about being agile when it comes to resuming life and when it comes to our justice system and our systems of government continuing to operate effectively while we are also responding to the very real and ongoing threat of this virus. I did listen to the 30-minute contribution of the opposition’s lead speaker, the member for Caulfield. He did, it seemed, express a view that we on the government benches should show some gratitude, should we say, towards the opposition for not opposing this bill and for what I think he called the constructive way in which the opposition has approached this pandemic. Perhaps if I get a little bit of time later in my contribution, I might show my gratitude to the opposition! But I also heard the former Attorney-General, the member for Altona, giving her very eloquent contribution on this bill. Of course the member for Altona reminded us that what we have been trying to do over the last year is to build systems around the needs of people. I acknowledge the member for Altona for the role that she played as Attorney-General in what we are seeing in this bill. In this bill, we are seeing some changes made permanent and some changes continuing for a further 12 months.

BILLS Thursday, 4 March 2021 Legislative Assembly 903

I think in many ways this virus has forced us to embrace technology and to move forward, to modernise systems faster than we otherwise would have, and in that respect it has been a positive out of an otherwise very, very challenging period in our history. I was with the former Attorney-General, just before she resigned back in December, at Moorabbin Magistrates Court, where we met with the Chief Magistrate. It was for the opening of the specialist family violence court. It is true of course that our justice system has been powering along, and as the Chief Magistrate said last year in the midst of all of these changes that have had to be made, ‘Justice has not changed, just the mode of delivery’. But what this pandemic has done is it has meant that our day-to-day lives have changed, and the way we work and the way we interact with each other I think has changed forever. If we just look at our work as members of Parliament, for example, I remember every Monday travelling into town just for one meeting, usually a committee meeting or a briefing. I am someone who tries to spend as little time in town as possible, because I like to be in my electorate serving the good people of Bentleigh. But travelling into town for a committee meeting or a briefing in the middle of the day does chew up a significant proportion of the day when you take into consideration travel time, as well— Ms Kealy: I am 4 hours away. Mr STAIKOS: Yes, I acknowledge that the member for Lowan lives a little bit further from town than Bentleigh. Bentleigh is 13.4 kilometres from the GPO. Nonetheless it is a relative statement, member for Lowan, very relative. Nonetheless these meetings are held on Zoom or Teams now, and it has just increased productivity in my view. We have also discovered that we have been having meetings throughout our careers that did not actually need to be meetings; they could have been phone calls or emails. So this really is changing the way we do things. Telehealth is one instance. I had never had a telehealth appointment prior to the pandemic; I have had two over the last 12 months. During the pandemic I was appointed Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasurer, and I went on a roadshow of meetings with chambers of commerce and traders groups right around the state, all from my study in my home in East Bentleigh. We managed to have some very, very good discussions, which meant that we could contribute to the deliberations around developing the Business Support Fund, which was very well received. With another hat I wear, I chair my local community house, Godfrey Street Community House. In the past, our manager at the community house has tried to schedule committee meetings around parliamentary sitting dates so that I could attend, but of course Consumer Affairs Victoria, which regulates the governance of neighbourhood houses, actually directed community houses to hold their duly constituted committee meetings under their constitution via Zoom, or remotely. We have been doing that. I have actually managed to have those committee meetings from my office in Parliament at times. And all of these changes have been welcome and have made our day-to-day lives a lot easier. Some of the changes that will be made permanent include the amendment of a range of justice acts to permanently permit measures facilitating courts hearing a wide range of matters via audiovisual link or audio link; enabling appropriate decisions to be made without a hearing; modifying arrangements for the filing and serving of documents; providing additional powers for registrars to manage listings and relistings of hearings; enabling electronic signing and remote witnessing of legal documents; allowing fitness investigations to be determined by a judge alone; providing for the Magistrates Court to impose electronic monitoring to monitor restrictive conditions of a community correction order; and providing for the continued effective operation of integrity measures, including allowing the IBAC Commissioner to appoint an appropriately qualified deputy commissioner to preside over IBAC examinations. They are, as I said, permanent changes to legislation. Some temporary changes are also being extended. They were about to lapse next month but will be extended to April 2021. These are: the COVID-19 response provisions in the Corrections Act 1986 and the Children, Youth and Families Act 2005 for a further 12 months; amendments to the Local Government Act 2020 to allow the continuation of virtual meetings for a further 12-month period;

BILLS 904 Legislative Assembly Thursday, 4 March 2021 amendments to the Children, Youth and Families Act 2005 to allow the Children’s Court, for a further two years, to extend family reunification orders by an additional six months; amendments to the Children, Youth and Families Act 2005 to suspend the requirement for bail justice hearings for child protection emergency care applications; amendments to the Occupational Health and Safety Act 2004 to ensure that WorkSafe inspectors can take necessary action to enforce compliance with health and safety duties to prevent, reduce or mitigate workplace exposure to COVID-19; and amendments to the Parliamentary Committees Act 2003 to provide flexibility to members of committees established under the act to attend meetings and vote remotely for a further 12 months. It is because this pandemic is not going to be over anytime soon that we need legislation like this and, might I also say, legislation like what we passed yesterday in this house relating to the state of emergency, which those opposite, I think very shamefully, opposed. We know that this pandemic is not going to be over anytime soon because if you look at the latest figures from across the world, the UK seven-day average of new infections is 7680 per day and in the US it is 65 468 infections per day. And we are seeing new strains of the virus—UK, Brazil and one from Russia which we saw the other day arrive in Queensland. It is not over yet, and it will not be over for some time. We will have to live with a newer set of rules for some time. It is just going to be the way of life for a while yet. That is why I was particularly disappointed yesterday when I saw a tweet from Richard Willingham of the ABC where he quoted the Leader of the Opposition saying:

So we lock down the entire state every time someone gets a sniffle? COVID-19 is not merely a sniffle, and the Leader of the Opposition should be ashamed of himself for— Ms Kealy: On a point of order, I think you have got to know what my point of order is, Deputy Speaker. I understand that there is some leniency in what matters people might raise in their contribution to the bill. However, I think that the member for Bentleigh has deeply strayed from the bill. I ask you to bring him back to it. The DEPUTY SPEAKER: The member for Bentleigh’s time has expired. Mr TAK (Clarinda) (12:44): I am delighted to join my neighbour, the hardworking member for Bentleigh, to add my voice on the Justice Legislation Amendment (System Enhancements and Other Matters) Bill 2021. Throughout the global pandemic we have had to be flexible and creative to ensure that we can continue to deliver essential services for Victorians. The justice system is one such example, and we have heard that the government had to act fast to introduce temporary measures in April 2020 so that the justice system could continue to hear critical matters in 2020 during the COVID-19 global pandemic. This bill is extremely important, as a range of these temporary measures will lapse next month, to ensure access to justice and the efficiency of the operations of the justice system in Victoria. I am glad to support these measures and to support this bill. Access to justice is one of the cornerstones of our society. It is for that reason that I would like to commend the Attorney-General and the government for these amendments. It is testament to the government’s commitment to fairness and justice. This bill is very timely. As I mentioned, many of the temporary measures will lapse on 26 April 2021. Just as we have seen with the critically important amendments to the Public Health and Wellbeing Act 2008 to extend measures to ensure that the government can continue to deliver an appropriate and effective public health response, we also have some really important amendments here to extend temporary measures. Some of these temporary measures have also been very effective and will be made a permanent feature of the justice system. I would just like to run through a few of these, which include facilitating court hearings through a wider range of measures via audiovisual link, AVL, or audiolink; enabling appropriate decisions to be made without a hearing; modifying arrangements for filing and serving documents; providing additional powers for registrars to manage listing and relisting of hearings; enabling electronic signing

BILLS Thursday, 4 March 2021 Legislative Assembly 905 and remote witnessing of legal documents; allowing fitness investigations to be determined by a judge alone; and allowing the Magistrates Court to impose electronic monitoring to monitor restrictive conditions of a community correction order. Most importantly it will also provide for the continued effective operation of integrity measures, including allowing the IBAC Commissioner to appoint an appropriately qualified deputy commissioner to preside over an IBAC examination. Those are all really positive developments that will help to streamline court and other justice processes. A host of acts will be amended. Some of the most significant of these amendments are made by parts 10 to 13 of the bill, which include amendments to the Electronic Transactions (Victoria) Act 2000, the Oaths and Affirmations Act 2018, the Wills Act 1997 and the Powers of Attorney Act 2014, as we have already heard from previous speakers on this side of the chamber. These specific amendments provide for electronic signing and remote witnessing of a range of legal documents, including deeds, wills, powers of attorney, statutory declarations and affidavits. This will significantly modernise how Victorians conduct their legal affairs and business. Prior to the COVID-19 global pandemic a range of legal documents could only be executed with people signing in the physical presence of each other or through an exchange of hard copy documents. Stakeholders have clearly indicated that permanent measures for electronic signing and remote witnessing of legal documents will ensure flexibility, efficiency and accessibility for Victorians in their legal and business affairs. In terms of the electronic signing and remote witnessing measures, they were consulted separately, given this will have a substantial impact on the wider community. Such a consultation paper was provided to 26 stakeholders for comment, with 15 responses, including from the Law Institute of Victoria, the courts and VCAT, the Office of the Public Advocate and Land Use Victoria. There has also been broader consultation on all the amendments, and key justice system stakeholders supported the retention of these temporary measures. I would just like to finish by touching on the amendments to the Evidence (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1958, in particular the reform which gives the court more flexibility to hear matters by audiovisual link and audiolink. Specifically, the bill will extend for 12 months provisions that require an adult accused in custody to appear by AVL for most hearings in the Magistrates Court, unless the court directs their physical appearance is required. First remand hearings will require an adult accused in custody to physically appear before a court unless they consent to appear by AVL. The bill clarifies that an accused adult in custody must attend proceedings with respect to bail and sentencing at the Magistrates Court by AVL and of course in relation to a higher court it requires an adult accused who is in custody to physically attend their jury trial. AVLs will be available for other appearances unless the court directs that the interests of justice require their physical attendance, and the bill confirms that the victim may address the court by AVL or audio link to object to the court making a direction that an adult or child accused appear by AVL. These are positive and innovative reforms that will also help to improve the efficient operations of the courts and the judicial system. These reforms will deliver a range of benefits for the community as we recover from the global COVID-19 pandemic and the government continues to deal with managing ongoing risks to public health. And of course these amendments will ensure access to justice for all Victorians through the pandemic. I would just like to conclude, on access to justice, on another matter that I touched on briefly in a contribution this week, the Springvale Monash Legal Service, one of Victoria’s—and even Australia’s—largest business community legal centres. They also host the first and the largest site for clinical legal education in Australia. Their program has been in operation for more than 40 years and hosts around 100 Monash University law students every year. I would like to say thank you to everyone there for the great work that you do and the valuable services that you provide to our community. On that note I would like to commend all the great work that is being carried out by Springvale Monash Legal Service, and I commend this bill to the house.

BILLS 906 Legislative Assembly Thursday, 4 March 2021

Mr MAAS (Narre Warren South) (12:52): It is a great pleasure to rise, as unexpected as it might be, to speak on the Justice Legislation Amendment (System Enhancements and Other Matters) Bill 2021. It is always great to follow the member for Clarinda, and being in a neighbouring electorate I can also attest to the fantastic work that the Springvale Monash Legal Service does—a fantastic asset to our communities. It is really great that they have been acknowledged for the work that they do in the house today. As I said, it is really great to speak on this bill, and it is absolutely a critical bill to keep our courts and the justice system running through this pandemic. It was last year that we urgently put in place many temporary measures to make sure that the system did not grind to a halt as a result of public health orders. Importantly, the bill itself extends the changes that had to happen during COVID-19 in April 2020 and makes some of them permanent. These measures and regulations are due to lapse on 26 April of this year. We know our justice system does face many, many challenges in recovering from the unprecedented effects of this pandemic, and I know how important and effective and efficient the court system is but also how difficult it can be for substantive reforms to be implemented. If a system as critical as our court system undergoes change, it needs to have the support of the profession and the courts themselves. The temporary measures that were introduced and made permanent were identified by feedback from courts and the legal profession about measures that worked well and make our systems more efficient in the long term. There was a desire to make these features permanent because they promote efficiency, flexibility and the improved use of technology. We also know the effects of this global pandemic are not passing any time soon, which is why some temporary measures are being extended to keep our courts COVID safe. These measures are not being made permanent. The bill has been based on wide consultation—consultations with courts and the wider legal fraternity. We know some measures introduced last year need to continue to keep courts COVID safe and to address those backlogs previously referred to. So in line with this, the bill will embed several measures permanently in legislation, helping to make our justice processes safe and efficient. It will enable courts to keep hearing cases by videoconferencing or phone. Where appropriate it will allow magistrates and judges to make decisions without holding a hearing, making those decisions on the papers, and it will change how documents are filed and served so that this can be done in a COVID- safe way—in essence the continuation of the eDocs portal. It will allow court registrars greater control over the listings of hearings and allow people to electronically sign legal documents and lawyers to witness them remotely. A member interjected. Mr MAAS: That is right. It will also provide courts with flexibility to manage access to their premises to comply with social distancing rules. Based on the advice from experts, the bill also extends some measures that will be required for a while longer to manage COVID-19 risks. These include modifying practices in prisons and youth justice centres, such as limiting in-person visits to quarantining prisoners to keep COVID-19 out of our prisons and allowing courts to provide open justice through a web stream when having the public in court is just not possible. In terms of the Children’s Court, it gives power to extend family reunification orders over the next two years, so families whose efforts to regain custody of their children have been disrupted by the pandemic can continue working towards this goal. The bill has other measures to reduce the burden on the court system as well, and it streamlines the time served scheme for infringement fines and postpones the commencement of summary appeal reforms. So in essence this government has listened to the courts, to the legal fraternity and to others working throughout the justice system. They need and indeed are supportive of these flexible approaches continuing so that they can get on top of COVID-induced backlogs and keep safe. The bill itself has

MOTIONS Thursday, 4 March 2021 Legislative Assembly 907 been very carefully drafted after feedback from stakeholders to make sure that these changes do not negatively affect the elderly, people with a disability or people facing criminal charges. Safeguards are built into the legislation, such as rules around the electronic witnessing of legal documents, to prevent vulnerable Victorians from the risk of abuse. The bill will allow local councils to continue holding virtual meetings for a further 12 months. It will allow parliamentary committees to continue meeting and voting remotely for a further 12 months, and I know as a member of the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee who has several meetings it is a great thing to be able to meet and conduct our votes in that way. In closing I would just like to say that this is a good bill, it is a practical bill and I commend this bill to the house. Sitting suspended 1.00 pm until 2.01 pm. Mr CHEESEMAN (South Barwon) (14:01): I move:

That the debate be adjourned. Motion agreed to and debate adjourned. Ordered that debate be adjourned until later this day. Motions ROYAL COMMISSION INTO VICTORIA’S MENTAL HEALTH SYSTEM Mr MERLINO (Monbulk—Minister for Education, Minister for Mental Health) (14:02): I move:

That this house takes note of the addresses given at the special sitting at the Royal Exhibition Building on 2 March 2021 for the presentation of the final report of the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System. I rise today to talk about Tuesday’s momentous tabling of the final report of the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System and more broadly address the content of that report, some of which we have not yet unpacked. Truly it was a historic day, and one that I will not soon forget. We heard from several wonderful speakers, including the chair of the commission, Penny Armytage, AM; the chair of the expert advisory committee, Professor Patrick McGorry, AO; and two incredible lived experience speakers, Al Gabb and Amelia Morris. I could not think of a better way to ground the vision of this report than through the heartfelt and courageous stories of these two Victorians, these two survivors of our broken system. We are indebted to them for their raw and honest contributions. They laid bare their own frustrating, alienating and traumatic experiences of seeking help in a system that was at best unresponsive and at worst neglectful, because that is what the whole royal commission was all about: shining light into the darkness of our failed mental health system and demanding a brighter future for all Victorians. Mental health impacts us all, whether as individuals, whether under the roofs of our own homes or with our friends, our colleagues, family members. It impacts everyone. One in five people will suffer from a mental health illness in their lives, but it impacts five out of five people. It impacts all of us. That is why it is important that this Parliament does have the opportunity of a take-note motion reflecting on the royal commission and reflecting on the speeches that we heard on Tuesday, because this is an issue that impacts us all. I thought I would take this opportunity today to discuss not only our recent announcements over the last couple of days as we get straight to work on implementing every single recommendation of this landmark report but also, as I said, to speak to some of the areas we have not yet touched on. On Wednesday, the very next day after the tabling of the final report, I was out in Frankston with the Premier to announce six priority regions for the rolling out of up to 60 new local adult services. We are wasting no time in responding to these recommendations. On day one we were out in areas of need to say, ‘We have heard you and we are responding’. This was a really strong message that I had in discussions with the commissioners, and it is reflected in the report as well. There is no need for further

MOTIONS 908 Legislative Assembly Thursday, 4 March 2021 consultation. This is a broken system. We have had the biggest ever royal commission that this state has produced. Now is the time for work and the time for action. As a result, Victorians will be able to get the treatment they need sooner, closer to home and family, through our fast-tracking of the delivery of six mental health priority sites across the state. These six sites will be the first of up to 60 across Victoria, providing a front door for anyone in the community to access mental health support, including a range of therapies and expanded wellbeing treatment. We sought advice from experts in the Department of Health, and they advised us that these six regions were amongst those with the most evident urgent need. Those locations are Benalla, which has the highest per capita level of suicide over the last decade, 2011–20, as well as one of the highest per capita levels of suicide attempts presenting to emergency departments; Brimbank, which has one of the highest levels of very high psychological distress, a measure of both anxiety and depression, recorded across Victoria; Frankston, which has one of the highest per capita rates of suicide attempts presenting at emergency departments over the last decade and one of the highest per capita rates of suicide over that period as well; Greater Geelong, which consistently has had higher than state averages for self-harm presentations per capita in all recent years; the Latrobe Valley, which has one of the highest rates of mental health presentations to emergency departments, including for self-harm and suicide attempts; and Whittlesea, which has one of the highest levels of community mental health contacts per capita as well as significant evidence surrounding ongoing mental health issues related to the Black Saturday bushfires. The new services will work to a ‘How can we help?’ model, helping people seamlessly access the right support for them, close to home, across a transformed mental health and wellbeing system. Earlier today, as I mentioned during question time, I was out at an ambulance station in North Melbourne with the Premier, the acting Minister for Police and Emergency Services and the Parliamentary Secretary for Police and Emergency Services to announce next steps in another important recommendation, recommendation 10 of the final report. It recognises that fundamentally mental health is a health issue and should be treated that way. Some of our most vulnerable Victorians, those whose mental illness may be quite severe, may sometimes find themselves in need of urgent crisis assistance, and when that happens the person best trained to treat a health crisis is a paramedic. It is why today we announced a special working group, commencing immediately and chaired by the Parliamentary Secretary for Police and Emergency services, to draft new protocols and an implementation plan to see this reform completed. So two days in, two announcements made. There is real momentum behind this reform agenda, and this government will not waste a day in getting it done. I would like to also spotlight a few of the lesser known recommendations, ones that may not have jumped out upon first reading of the report, but which are no less valuable and groundbreaking than some of the big-ticket items we have discussed so far this week. The first one is a statewide trauma service. Trauma is something that sits at the centre of much of the mental illness we see in our communities. From the ongoing trauma experienced by those impacted by the Black Saturday bushfires over a decade ago to the more recent examples from the Black Summer fires or the Bourke Street attack, trauma is an insidious and complex issue. The truth is that there is a lot that we do not yet know in how to treat and heal trauma, and we have a long way to go in seeing trauma-informed practices embedded in the mental health system. That is why I am glad to see that the royal commission tackled this issue head-on and recommended the creation of a statewide service dedicated to trauma-informed care and supporting those who are living in the aftermath of traumatic events and experiences, in recommendation 23. Much like our announcement this morning, providing $6 million for the centre of excellence for emergency services workers, there is so much more that we need to do to provide the right expertise and training to mental health workers in dealing with trauma in all its forms. I think we can all agree that an ideal mental health system should help us treat people early in the community instead of too late in hospital. This is really what the royal commission final report boils down to. Those 3000 pages boil down to that one idea, that one vision: treatment, care and support early in the community before it is too late in the emergency department of a hospital. Part of this new

MOTIONS Thursday, 4 March 2021 Legislative Assembly 909 approach is recognising that not all bed-based services must or should operate in hospital environments. The final report recommends that we need to rework facilities and trial new models of care in continuing care units and secure extended care units to provide long-term residents with a more modern approach to their care and support. We will also be expanding access to youth prevention and recovery care centres, PARCs, establishing at least one Y-PARC in each of the eight regions recommended in the report. That means eight of these life-changing facilities statewide. These residential services provide essential step-up, step-down care, enabling people with moderate to severe mental illness to be supported back into their homes and communities when they are safe and ready. In terms of big challenges in small time frames, the royal commission has really set the bar high when it comes to our mental health legislative agenda. Recommendation 42 calls for the creation of a fresh new act which will shepherd mental health reform into a new chapter, placing the rights and dignity of the consumer at the heart of how our system operates. There will be levers to reduce and one day eliminate seclusion and use of restraints, and new safeguards to ensure that compulsory treatment is only ever used as an absolute last resort if no other care is suitable. But importantly we are setting our sights above merely regulating these complex and technical aspects of care through the new act. We will draft a new bill which elevates mental health and wellbeing as a communal responsibility across government and the wider community. This is a massive piece of work. There are a whole lot of challenging time lines that the royal commission has set. The complete rewriting of the Mental Health Act 2014 we need to do by the middle of next year, so it is a massive task, transforming and really taking the act out of the Dark Ages. If you go through the act as it is at the moment, it is all about restraint and seclusion; it is all about compulsory care. We need the mental health and wellbeing act to reflect the findings and recommendations of the royal commission, so that is a massive, massive task in front of all of us—for me as minister and for every single member of this place on both sides of the chamber. We have got a massive task to get that act done and through the Parliament by the middle of next year. What we have heard throughout the course of the royal commission and what has shone through clearly in the final report is the crucial role that family and carers play in the support of people living with mental illness. I can remember reading the interim report, and there was a quote talking about the fact that mental illness may impact one person in the household but in reality every member in that household is impacted. Our mental health system—indeed much of our broader health system— functions on a bedrock of unpaid, unrecognised labour provided by parents, carers, partners, siblings and friends of someone who is facing health challenges. As was said on Tuesday, for every member of a family of five who faces mental illness, there are four others in that family who feel the impact of that illness alongside them. Recommendation 31 of the final report calls for eight new family and carer-led centres across the state. These centres will provide information and support to families, and they will work with them to identify their needs and connect them to supports. Importantly they will facilitate access to short-term respite services, sometimes the only way for a family in strife to keep its head above water and make space to care for the needs of all of its family members. I honestly believe that these spaces will be life-changing for the thousands of Victorian families who support a loved one living with a mental illness. Another phenomenal recommendation of the report builds on the work already underway in partnership with the Victorian Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation to strengthen the social and emotional wellbeing of Aboriginal Victorians. Recommendation 33 calls on the government to fund the establishment of two co-designed healing centres as recommended by leaders in our Aboriginal community through their groundbreaking Balit Durn Durn report. I want to thank on the record Victorian Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation CEO Jill Gallagher, who said it best when she said on Tuesday, and I quote:

For too long Aboriginal people have fallen through the cracks of a fragmented and culturally unsafe mental health system.

MOTIONS 910 Legislative Assembly Thursday, 4 March 2021

This recommendation, and indeed the interim report recommendation on Aboriginal social and emotional wellbeing, flips the script on how we provide culturally appropriate care instead of just offering mainstream services to Aboriginal communities and expecting them to adapt. We will work with these communities to give them the support and the services they actually need and want. It is not rocket science, but it has certainly taken us a long, long time to get here. I would like to conclude with a quote from Ms Julie Dempsey, a respected and hardworking mental health consumer consultant who had the following to say about the report’s release, and I quote:

The release of the Royal Commission’s final report brought a flood of tears to my eyes. It is with great relief that after decades of experience living and working in a mental health system, which has not only failed to meet basic needs, but has exacerbated harms for consumers, we have an official and indisputable acknowledgement of a broken and neglected system … Just as I said on Tuesday during our historic joint sitting, knowing we can change lives, knowing that we will save lives—there is nothing more worthy than that. We have already hit the ground running. We have got so much work to do, so much investment to make, not just in this coming budget in May but in future budgets and beyond the forward estimates. We have so much work to do to fix the system and deliver on a promise that was made but never, ever delivered following deinstitutionalisation in the 1990s. The promise was care and support in the community where you live, and for more than three decades that has been a promise that was never, ever delivered. That is our responsibility as parliamentarians, as the government and as the broader community. It is our responsibility to deliver on every single recommendation of this most significant royal commission. I commend the motion to the house. I have had a few opportunities to share my views, but it is absolutely important that every single member of this place has the opportunity to speak on the royal commission and reflect on the events of this week. I commend the motion of the house. Ms KEALY (Lowan) (14:17): It has been a long time coming, but it is so, so pleasing to hear the government say that they are going to do something to fix Victoria’s broken mental health system. I think so many Victorians have been waiting for this for so, so very long. I believe that certainly in my time as a parliamentarian my experience has been that the situation has got enormously worse. There have been enormous harms done. There have been lives lost because the government has failed to act on so many reports and recommendations that have been tabled in this place—that have been government-own departmental plans, that have been recommendations from the mental health workforce and sector and that have been the voices of people who have been left behind, who have fallen through not the cracks but the gaping chasms that exist in Victoria’s public mental health system. But we have only heard lip-service. We have heard about announcements, which is repackaging of money. There have been photo opportunities. There have been media releases. There has never actually been that sustainable and lasting change that is required that would actually change the lives of people—how they cope with their mental illness when they are having mental ill health, how they stay well in the community, how they can fulfil their role as a family member, how they can continue their job and keep a roof over their family’s head or their own head, how they can look to get support through professional means rather than just getting a prescription or self-medicating with drugs and alcohol and going down a horrific cycle of addiction and drug abuse or alcohol abuse and the further harms that that causes to individuals and their families. And for some who end up homeless, the ones who end up in prison, the ones who end up completely disassociated from their families and friends, this makes them vulnerable and puts them at risk of harm and of causing harm to others. They are the people that we need to keep front and centre of mind when we talk about mental health in Victoria, because while it is positive that there is now a blueprint for how we can fix Victoria’s public mental health system, it takes more than just a document of 3000 pages to implement that and make it happen. As I said on the tabling of the report on Tuesday, it is far more than just words or photo opportunities, the pomp and circumstance of having a special sitting of the Legislative Assembly

MOTIONS Thursday, 4 March 2021 Legislative Assembly 911 in the Royal Exhibition Building or throwing on some scones that will actually make a difference to people’s lives. We need to see change, but we needed to see this change a long time ago. The Premier has been in place and talking about a commitment to mental health for seven years now. I looked back over the reports that have been developed by the government and plans that have been developed by the government, and they simply have never been implemented. So it is with a degree of scepticism that I consider the words of the Minister for Mental Health. I take him at his word, and of course it is my job as Shadow Minister for Mental Health to hold him to account for that. But gee, there is some scepticism and trepidation in the community that this will not actually be translated from the intent of the royal commission into a public mental health system that will truly make a difference to the lives of Victorians on an everyday basis in maintaining their mental wellness but also make sure that the system is there when they need it and that there will not be a gradual progression towards only being able to get help when they are in acute crisis, and even then having a 50 per cent chance that they will not be able to get the care that they need. I would like to thank the people that were involved in the tabling of the report on Tuesday: firstly, the commissioners, who have done an enormous amount of work to compile a comprehensive framework on how public mental health services should look in Victoria. They have done an amazing job, along with their staff, who must also be recognised. They have been on the front line of hearing just how bad Victoria’s public mental health system has become throughout the last couple of years, and they should be incredibly proud of where they are now. They certainly have had to carry a heavy burden over the past two years of hearing intensely confrontational stories, but they are real stories and they are stories of people who have been harmed and traumatised through Victoria’s public mental health system. I would also like to thank the advisory committee, because they also did an exceptional job. It was great to see representation of people with lived experience on that committee, because it was an initial fear of people who had tackled Victoria’s public mental health system that they would not have a voice. So that was a really important element. It was appreciated by everybody who has been involved in this or has been involved in Victoria’s public mental health system—thank you for your work. I would also like to thank the thousands of contributors to the royal commission. It takes a lot of courage to get to the point of saying, ‘You know what? Something’s not right and I need some help’. They then got to the point of confronting the failure of the system to give them that help, failure to make them feel safe, failure to provide the care that we should be providing Victorians when they are not well. Whether it is a physical or a mental illness, it does not matter; we should provide that support. These people have been harmed through their experience, but they showed courage in their willingness to share that story with the commissioners in a very public way. They need to be commended, because they are front and centre of how we got to this point of the 3000 pages of the royal commission’s final report. I would also like to pay my respects to the workforce, because gee, they have worked hard. The people who work in mental health that I have spoken to, not just in my time as a parliamentarian but in my previous life working in the health sector, have been doing their darnedest to do their very, very best and provide as much support as they can, but they have been working in a highly constrained system which simply does not have the workforce there to support the sheer demand for services. We have let those people down by not listening to them and providing a better structure for them. We should have listened a lot earlier. But I do thank the sector for voicing how the public mental health system could better support them to deliver quality mental health services in Victoria. I did want to make special mention of Amelia and Al, who showed enormous bravery getting on the stage at the tabling of the report. Amelia I have met before—she actually did some intern work with my colleague the member for Euroa a few years ago when the member for Euroa and I shared an office. I think that Amelia sharing her story in such a raw way really gave an amazing insight into the challenges of not being able to get the help you need when you need it. I also commend Al. It was interesting to speak with him after the event. He was able to give a really great insight into what it feels

MOTIONS 912 Legislative Assembly Thursday, 4 March 2021 like to be in a position where you drive 45 minutes to get some public mental health support only to be discharged within a short period of time and sent home with no supports. That just resonated with me so strongly because when I was CEO of the Edenhope hospital there were so many times that I heard of people who had taken to harming themselves and fortunately there had been an ambulance called. They were taken to Ballarat and the ambulance would be in Horsham by the time they were discharged and got back home. That is how short their time in a secure environment was when they were at the point of wanting to take their own lives. That is a horrific system to be in, and I raised that issue when I was CEO of the hospital. I was a fierce advocate that this is unacceptable, and this is back to 2011, 2012. We had some serious scenarios about this that I raised with the government at the time when the Premier was the Minister for Health. It was back in 2010, I think it was— A member interjected. Ms KEALY: 2010 it must have been, yes. I will correct the record—2010. I remember writing to the government at the time and just raising that this is simply not good enough. We should not have people who are in acute mental crisis who are then forced to drive home by themselves or find someone else to pick them up and who do not get the support that they need. It is simply not good enough. I wanted to refer back to the recommendations and reports that I spoke to earlier. I have done a search through the parliamentary library of all of the reports that have been tabled in Parliament over the past seven years and the recommendations within those. Over the past seven years there have actually been 50 reports tabled in parliaments at a state and federal level that have referred to improvements that are required in Victoria’s public mental health system. These include hundreds of recommendations. I think that two of the reports which are particularly significant are the Auditor-General’s reports of 2019. That year there were successive reports, the Access to Mental Health Services report of March 2019 and Child and Youth Mental Health, which was tabled in June 2019. Both of these reports provide a scathing overview of Victoria’s public mental health system. There were recommendations in these, and in fact during the last Public Accounts and Estimates Committee session a couple of weeks ago questions were asked of the secretary around whether the recommendations that were provided by the Victorian Auditor-General’s Office on child and youth mental health had been implemented. There are 20 recommendations in there, and the response was, ‘No, none of the recommendations have been implemented’. Now, this report was scathing. There were children as young as 13 that were being admitted into adult mental health beds. There were children who were not getting the support they needed. They get the same sort of environment of support that I referred to earlier around being refused services, or when they sought help it was rejected. I was speaking to a young woman, Casey, just last week who lives in the Portland area, who has been trying to get support from Headspace for the last seven years, and she is simply unable to access that. She has been her own advocate, fighting to get some services, and she has been rejected every time. Her case is either too complex for admission to support through Headspace or she has been too young to engage in adult support services through Warrnambool. This is not a unique story; we hear it time and time again. But this is not just a moment in time; it has been happening for a really, really long time. I do not understand why these recommendations were not adopted by the government, and I think it is a question that everyone is asking. Furthermore, how can we trust the government when they say they are going to implement these recommendations from the royal commission when they have rejected so many recommendations in the past or have not implemented them appropriately? These are not just recommendations from the Auditor-General’s office; we can also compare it to other royal commissions—the Royal Commission into Family Violence, for example. It is seen as a checklist of 227 recommendations—working through those on a numeric system rather than on the outputs of how we are better supporting women and children to not fall victim to domestic violence.

MOTIONS Thursday, 4 March 2021 Legislative Assembly 913

But what we are seeing with the statistics five years on from that royal commission is that the rates of family violence are increasing. There is more harm being done. The rates of charges are dropping. We are actually seeing across the board that there are more problems in that sector than there ever have been before and more and more reports of people not being able to get the support they need. I implore the government to please make sure that this report is implemented properly, because we cannot afford to have people having their lives needlessly harmed simply because they cannot get the support they need when they need it. One of the comments that was made in the chamber yesterday—and we often hear it in this place— was, ‘Well, you were in government and you didn’t do anything’. I just want to get on the record in fact what the coalition did when it was in government. This was a short period of time, and that is often a thing that is thrown in our face. I think it was gloated yesterday by the member for Oakleigh that Labor has been in government for 19 of the past 23 years, and of course for the past seven years they have also been in government. This is a significant amount of time, and this is where we have to look at why this happened and what led to the situation we have got in Victoria’s public mental health system. But over the four years that we were in government we did an enormous amount of work, and I just want to list it so it is on the record. The Honourable Mary Wooldridge, who was a passionate supporter of a reformed mental health system, did an enormous amount of work in this space. As the minister referred to earlier, there is a lot of work to be done to rewrite the Public Health and Wellbeing Act, and Ms Wooldridge made an exceptional effort to review the Mental Health Act at the time, in 2014, which the Premier spoke to when he was the Shadow Minister for Health. It is interesting that in his contribution he did refer to how important it is to talk about the outcomes rather than the inputs. I wish he had the same attitude towards mental health today. The coalition launched Services Connect, and I will quote Ms Wooldridge’s contribution in Hansard at the time, and I am happy to table it:

Services Connect is at the heart of the reforms we are driving—a capacity for one case manager, one key worker, one plan and one client record to support clients and families with their full range of complex needs across areas such as child protection, disability, housing, homelessness, family violence, family services, mental health and alcohol and drugs. All of these services work together to support families with their range of complex needs so they can get their lives back on track. More than 750 Victorian families have already benefited from Services Connect, and this budget extends that approach. It also helps us to build the IT system needed to have a single client view so we know what services and support a family is receiving and how we need to work most effectively with them. This was commended by the sector at the time because it was what they were asking for. In fact there are a lot of quotes that are available publicly that I am more than happy to table at another time. This was a massive project, but of course as soon as this government was elected they undid it. They scrapped Services Connect. The reason that I want to emphasise Services Connect is that when I had my briefing with the royal commissioners late on Tuesday afternoon about the contents of the royal commission’s report I actually raised it with them—that there are elements of this report that sound hauntingly similar to the Services Connect model—and they all agreed and said, ‘Yes. We’ve been looking at that, and we want to look at that as a model to take forward’. Again, I look at the government’s actions when it comes to what they have done to improve mental health for Victorians over the past seven years and I struggle to find anything apart from media releases, photo opportunities and headlines, and repackaging of money rather than new money to the sector. We have not seen that; we just have not seen that. As a result, the outcomes are getting worse for so many Victorians, and I will go into some statistics soon in my contribution. The coalition did a lot of work around rewriting the Mental Health Act, as I referred to, and they established Australia’s first Mental Health Complaints Commissioner and the Mental Health Tribunal. They invested in 450 new and replacement beds, including a new 54-bed acute mental health facility in Werribee, a new psychiatric assessment and planning unit at Sunshine, 70 beds at Dandenong and new prevention and recovery centres in Heidelberg, Fitzroy, Mildura, Warrnambool and Frankston. They reformed the way community mental health services are delivered to ensure a recovery focus

MOTIONS 914 Legislative Assembly Thursday, 4 March 2021 with individualised supports and undertook the largest ever targeted investment to improve the safety of women in mental health facilities, including 63 projects to build female-only wards, bathrooms and lounges, and locks on doors and bathrooms. They initiated and funded the Healthy Equal Youth (HEY) project, supporting the positive mental health and wellbeing of the LGBTIQ+ young people. They built three regional mother-and-baby units for women experiencing postnatal depression in Ballarat, Bendigo and the Latrobe Valley, refurbished the mother-baby unit at Monash Health and delivered Victoria’s first women-only park in Springvale. They invested $15 million in police, Ambulance Victoria and emergency departments to provide a coordinated response for people with complex needs suffering a mental health crisis. They worked with the Mental Illness Fellowship of Australia to establish Haven; Home, Safe, which supported people with a mental illness to access and maintain private rental tenancies. They introduced safe wards to reduce the use of restrictive interventions in mental health facilities. They funded the introduction of family-based therapy at the Royal Children’s Hospital for children with eating disorders and developed and funded an eating disorder strategy. They rolled out the mental health first aid course throughout Victoria so that community organisations, particularly in regional Victoria, could take the lead on identifying and addressing early-stage mental illness. They funded five leading- edge research initiatives, translating knowledge into practice through the $10 million Mental Illness Research Fund, and funded 27 emergency departments to better identify and support patients affected by ice, alcohol and other drugs. And these all made a real difference. We saw some significant drops in some of the KPIs and the outcomes of people with mental health. We had a drop in the number of presentations to emergency departments. We had drops and lower rates of suicide mortality in the state. These made good outcomes for people and for everyday Victorians. But as I said, the first thing that Labor did was undo a lot of that, which is just confounding. This is a reflection, this royal commission, of the depths of the despair of people who have not been able to get a public mental health system, and the government needs to take a level of responsibility for that. Failure to do so really just shows that it is just paying lip-service to the people who need help most. It makes everybody somewhat sceptical and have a level of trepidation that what the government says it will do it will not deliver on, because the government’s words do not match its actions over the past seven years when it comes to public mental health. Our people need assurance if they are at that point where they are finally speaking up, asking for help—and that is a really hard thing to do, to get to that point where you think, ‘I really need help’. We can do it when we find a lump in our breast. We can do it when we have a shortness of breath. We can do it when we have a fainting spell or something else that is physical. If we break a leg, we know what to do and what the conditions are. But we do not well understand when to have that insight of, ‘I’m not that well. I need help, and I need care’. It is often friends and family who say, ‘Hm, something’s not quite right’. While things like RU OK? Day are great to ask if you are okay, it does not always translate to people understanding when they are not. So when you get to a horrifically low point of not being okay, you want those supports and services to be around you. You want to make sure that you can get into that program. I hear that a lot of the things in the royal commission will support that—having safe spaces in communities; being able to not have your entry point be an emergency department in front of so many other people who are watching how you act and feeling more pressure and putting more pressure on your mental health; and having loved ones around you when you are dragging them to a GP who you have never seen before as you go through this emotionally raw position where you have to say how you have lost hope or that you cannot think straight or you cannot get this fixated thought out of your mind, whatever that might be, or that you are hearing voices. That is hard work. They need us to make sure that they have got the right supports around them then and there, not just send them back home and say, ‘Oh, you’ve got an appointment in six months time’. Or to be dragged along and have your child or a parent with you while you are really unwell and scared with the bright lights of the emergency department (ED), and you are not just there for hours but you

MOTIONS Thursday, 4 March 2021 Legislative Assembly 915 are there for days and days waiting for an appropriate bed, having a psychotic episode. I mean, I have had a parent and a child report to me about their terrifying experience of being in that environment where your child or your parent is having a psychotic episode in the hospital corridor—because that is where they have been parked because there is nothing else available—and you are worrying for their safety and worrying for the safety of the people around them and being just so scared and wanting to do all you can to care for your loved one and there is nothing there for anybody. In fact it is getting worse and worse. We saw that through some statistics reported just recently around emergency mental health ED presentations, where 46 per cent of people who presented to an emergency department who needed to be admitted to a psychiatric bed were waiting more than 8 hours, which is the government-set KPI. Even more disappointing around that is how bad it is in some hospitals—I mean, Melbourne Health. If you turn up to Melbourne Health needing a psychiatric bed, so in acute crisis, 82 per cent of the time you are going to be waiting more than 8 hours—that is 82 per cent of people who present. At Northern Health it is 74 per cent, and these are not small numbers—last year alone it was over 1000 people who presented to that hospital and waited for more than 8 hours, and that is not a reflection of the staff there. That is absolutely not a reflection of the workforce. That is a system which is broken. It is a system which is not looking after people to maintain their wellness in the community. It is a system where we do not have those supports in place at the next stage—the missing middle which is referred to—to get that care in place before you are in absolute acute crisis. But then when you get to acute crisis there is still no support available. It is horrific. At Monash Health they have got terrible stats as well: 69 per cent of people waited more than 8 hours in the emergency department for a psychiatric bed—1285 people last year. They are horrific stats. It was actually about 6000 people in Victoria who waited more than 8 hours for a psychiatric bed, waiting in the ED, which is a harmful, traumatic and completely inappropriate place for people to wait. I would also like to refer to the cuts around community mental health by this government. There have actually been massive cuts over the past seven years to community mental health, which has resulted in fewer and fewer people being admitted. This is completely unfair on people who want to stay well in the community. We simply must have delivery of those community mental health supports, and I trust the minister—I know I should not, but he said that he will have more of a focus on community mental health. I will hold you to account for that, Minister, because we cannot just have this ambulance at the bottom of the cliff, which may not even be there for people when they are in acute crisis. The number of specialised mental health unit beds has been cut. There used to be when we were in government 47.5 beds per 100 000 people in Victoria. There are now only 44.6 beds per 100 000 people in Victoria. The problems around forensic mental health have run deep. We have heard of so many issues around what is happening at Forensicare, and a lot of that is in relation to the limitations on their infrastructure. So I certainly call for the government to implement the recommendation around 107 additional beds for Forensicare, for Thomas Embling Hospital in particular. I think that is very important, because the staff there are suffering from the impacts of an overrun system and a facility that does not support the needs. The number of occupational violence incidents reported at Forensicare went from 77 up to 251 last year. That is putting the staff at incredible risk. The number of occupational violence incidents reported for 100 equivalent full-time staff went from 17 up to nearly 37 incidents. The WorkCover premiums as a result have gone through the roof. We have gone from almost $40 million in WorkCover wages in 2014–15 up to $85 million last year. Again, the premiums have gone from $582 000 to $1.7 million simply because of the number of incidents at Forensicare over the past years. Also the performance of WorkCover days paid has increased by about 100 days from 2014–15 to 2019–20. These are devastating stats, but let us look beyond stats, because that is something I always talk about. We must look at the people at the end of all of this. It is something that I spoke to on Tuesday—that this royal commission report is not about the fanfare or the pomp and circumstance of having a special tabling of a royal commission report at the Royal Exhibition Building. It is not about the media releases. It is not about the numbers—even the numbers I have just gone through. It is not about that.

MOTIONS 916 Legislative Assembly Thursday, 4 March 2021

It is not about the photo opportunities or how many mentions you can get through a media monitor. This is about the outcomes. It is about the people who sat in that audience with an enormous amount of trepidation over what they were going to hear. It is about making sure that we have the consumers’ voices heard and that we provide consumer choice—that we stop having the first and the only option for so many people being medication. There is a great saying that I picked up on the Victorian Mental Illness Awareness Council website recently, which was ‘Let’s have the option of meditation rather than medication’—of seeking a system where people can look after their wellness in the community rather than having that automatic response of medication to help them. We need care and support out there. What we really need, though, is these recommendations implemented, and that is what I call for from this government. We cannot have more reports that result in inaction by the government. We cannot have a report that gathers dust. We need to make sure that these 65 recommendations are taken on. There are tight time frames, but we must work towards it because Victorians when they go through mental health challenges must have a system around them. It is the obligation of government to ensure that mental health is front and centre when it comes to health care. It cannot be the poor cousin. It must be a core component of the healthcare services that we deliver in Victoria. So I implore the government: implement these recommendations but put people first when it comes to seeking mental health support. Mr DIMOPOULOS (Oakleigh) (14:48): It is a real honour to speak on this take-note motion on such an important occasion. I could not be prouder of this motion and of this government’s work. We need to encourage people to seek help and we need to make sure that help is available when it is sought. Families in desperate need should not have to wait even a moment longer for help. Help must be locally based and accessible, with qualified staff to support people and their families. We must remove the stigma. I say that because they are the exact words I said in my inaugural speech—and much, much more—in February 2015. We have done a lot since then, but nothing beats what we did— and what the community did—over the last couple of years, which landed two days ago. I am so honoured and proud to be part of this government. I did not have any visibility of this then. You can imagine, in February 2015 we were all just elected—you, Acting Speaker Suleyman; me; and many other good people in this government—on the back of the aspirations of the Victorian community. We knew that we would make a whole bunch of other investments, but we did not know that four years later we would announce a royal commission and that six years later that commission report would be released and that I would be privileged and honoured to be serving in the role the Premier has asked me to serve, which is Parliamentary Secretary for Mental Health, and working with the extraordinary Minister for Mental Health. I did not know that then, but I am so proud of it. When the commission’s terms of reference were set it was never about: does the system need to be reformed? It was about how we were going to do it. We knew the system was broken and needed to be reformed. Not only that—and the Premier made this clear—but we told the commission from day one that we would accept all the recommendations, even before we knew what they were. That was powerful in many ways—powerful because it showed our commitment but also powerful because although I have never been a royal commissioner I could imagine if you are drafting a new system, you are writing a new service system, to know the government you are writing it for is accepting every part of what you are putting forward makes every part far more impactful and powerful. You do not have to worry about, ‘They’ll accept these recommendations, not the others’. They are all interrelated. We really gave them a powerful pen when we gave them that commitment. We knew at that point that the estimated cost of poor mental health to Victoria, in 2018–19 figures, was $14.2 billion. That goes to the very heart of the point the Premier has made multiple times: if you think that the levy that the opposite side is squibbing on is expensive, it is but a fraction, the Premier said, of what we are already spending now, and we do not recognise it. We think, ‘Oh, there’s no expense’, so the other side are unfortunately comparing the levy with what they think is a zero base of expenditure. It is not a zero: $14.2 billion, it was quantified, just for Victoria in 2018–19. The

MOTIONS Thursday, 4 March 2021 Legislative Assembly 917

Australian Productivity Commission quantified it I think between $30 billion and $50 billion nationally. That is the platform of comparison. The government remains committed to implementing all the recommendations, every single one. We trust the expertise of the royal commission report and the thousands of Victorians who participated in writing the report, over 12 500. We are not going to second-guess them on the levy or on any aspect of it. Governments have failed the system for years. Political parties have failed the system for years. It is the wrong time for them to say, ‘We know better’, on any element of the recommendations, so we are accepting all of them. I want to just acknowledge the royal commission itself, led by the chair, Penny Armytage, supported by commissioners Dr Alex Cockram, Professor Allan Fels, AO, and Professor Bernadette McSherry. Most of all I would like to acknowledge those with lived experience who contributed so honestly and honourably to the commission’s work. I want to also acknowledge Amelia Morris and Al Gabb, who spoke to us at the sitting at the Royal Exhibition Building. I want to acknowledge the 3267 submissions; 61 community consultations; 1650 people who attended those consultations at 21 locations across regional Victoria and metro Melbourne; 99 witnesses; 30 community witnesses; 19 days of public hearings; around 3000 respondents to a community survey; 100 focus group forums and round tables; 150 witness statements, including 40 with lived experience; 3000 respondents to the workforce survey; and eight formal panel hearings. This is nothing to be sniffed at. This is an extraordinary piece of work. But I want to acknowledge the leadership of the Premier, the Deputy Premier, the current Minister for Health and the former Minister for Health, an outstanding individual. The delivery of a report is one thing. Commissioning a royal commission has been used by governments in the past as a way of delaying reform or selectively implementing some of its recommendations, but not this government, not this report. We have done the exact opposite. We said we would accept all the recommendations before we even saw them. And that is why the member for Lowan’s criticisms belie the truth, which is that this government has invested enormously in mental health— Ms Kealy: But the statistics didn’t move. That was my point. It’s not the inputs, it’s the outputs— Mr DIMOPOULOS: The member for Lowan says, ‘It’s not the inputs, it’s the outputs’. If that is the case, she also talked about effectively gutting community mental health funding. Yes, outputs matter, but I think that is the very point we are making. We invested at least $1.9 billion from the 2017–18 budget to this current year’s budget— Ms Kealy interjected. Mr DIMOPOULOS: Just wait. $1.9 billion we invested. That shows a huge level of commitment. In fact we invested in the last budget more than the Liberal Party invested in its entire term between 2010 and 2014, in one budget, so my point is— Ms Kealy interjected. Ms D’Ambrosio: On a point of order, Acting Speaker, I think a little bit of courtesy should be extended to the honourable member. We certainly on this side heard those opposite in silence, and it would be respectful for that to be reciprocated. Ms Kealy: On the point of order, Acting Speaker—I am not sure it was a point of order—comments were being directed towards me which misrepresented what I was saying. Yes, I was interjecting, and I am happy to stop interjecting. But I would seek that I be appropriately represented in any comments that are being repeated in this place. The ACTING SPEAKER (Ms Suleyman): Thank you, member for Lowan. Just as a courtesy I remind all members to limit their interjections. This is an important matter.

MOTIONS 918 Legislative Assembly Thursday, 4 March 2021

Mr DIMOPOULOS: I understand the difference between outcomes and investment and dollars, but my point is you usually achieve one with the support of the other. What we were doing was throwing a lot of money into mental health, which really gives the Victorian community a sense of our prioritisation of that public policy area. The problem is we realised soon enough, with the expert advice that we received, it was not having the intended outputs or outcomes, as the member for Lowan said. Of course what do you do when you know something is not working? You change it. And how do you change it? With the highest level of inquiry possible, a royal commission. But that should not be seen as an argument to say we have not invested or we have not done enough. We have done an extraordinary amount. We realised that it was not working and therefore we put in place a royal commission. It has delivered its report. I just remind the house: we invested more, before this royal commission, in one budget than the entire term of the Liberal Party when it was last in office. That is pretty incredible in terms of a signature of care. I wish I had more time, because this is an extraordinarily important report. I just want to say that anyone who thinks that the mental health system has only become worse in the last six years is absolutely playing politics. A family member of mine had some of his worst treatment in the system between the ages of 20 and 27, and beyond. And who was in power for him when he was 20 to 27? It was the Liberal Party in Victoria under Jeff Kennett between 1992 and 1999. If those opposite want to play politics, they absolutely miss the point. Why you have a royal commission is because you raise it above politics. They could not do that. There was not a ray of sunshine through the Liberal years, over the last 30 or 40 years, in terms of the mental health service system. That is why this royal commission, this government’s commitment to implement every single one of the royal commission’s recommendations, is so powerful. We only wish that the entire Parliament was on board with that work of the Victorian community—thousands of people—and the royal commission. It is an excellent report, rewriting the entire service system to make profound change. So I invite those opposite to stop playing politics and actually embrace this expert work. Ms BRITNELL (South-West Coast) (14:58): I rise to make some comments on the take-note motion on the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System report. I do so acknowledging the importance of the 65 recommendations in the hope that this time the system will be fixed. As a health professional I have actually been on this journey for the last 30 years, and I want to take some time to share with you what it felt like as a health practitioner. I am going to begin by sharing a story with you, and I urge you to consider the people who have fallen through the cracks. I have in mind a friend, a health professional who worked with me as an Aboriginal health worker, who begged me to help her help her son, to help her find the treatment he needed as a very acute schizophrenic. I share with you that I could not help her and I could not help her son. He was found dead on the side of a road, in the hot sun, three days after he had died, and that family have struggled ever since. That man had a mother, who died last year, a friend of mine. To this minute I can never forget the begging for how we could help him to get into a service. His sister and his brothers suffer today as a result of that horrific story. Now, 30 years ago when I started my training I had a placement in an institution, and it was very confronting. The previous member for my electorate, Dr Denis Napthine, proudly was involved, as the community services minister, in deinstitutionalising the system. This is why I wanted to share this with you, because it was the right thing to do. As I said, when I was at Brierly institution in Warrnambool— during the many weeks that we were stationed there—it was very confronting, and it did need to be fixed and it is better to have community services. But the challenge was that we actually lost government. We actually had a plan to deinstitutionalise the system, and that occurred. But what happened was that when we lost government the Labor government did not continue with the plan of implementation. That was in the early 2000s, and I was practising in community health. That was the time—and I talked to you about it—when this gentleman’s mother begged me for help, and to this day I struggle with the fact that I could not help. I am not mental health trained. I was a registered nurse, and my job

MOTIONS Thursday, 4 March 2021 Legislative Assembly 919 was to help him access the system, and we could not find anything for him. His is just one of many, many stories. But in 2006 the deficit was so great—and by God, there are so many people who can attest to this, including the doctors I would talk to who were trying to get someone acutely suicidal some help. They were throwing their hands up and saying, ‘There’s just nothing. There are not enough resources’, and this is out in the regions, so multiply the situation that we see today, because it was horrendously hard to get a bed. In 2006 the government recognised the deficit and actually appointed for the very first time a minister for mental health. If that was not recognition that there was a problem, I do not know what was. What happened? Well, we have seen for 18 years of the last 22 a Labor government, and we sit here saying, ‘It’s time to do something’. No, it has been time to do something all along. In 2010–14 we were in government. I have got two pages here of the work that Mary Wooldridge did. She was a passionate advocate for getting an improvement in the health system. She worked very hard, and in a very short time—four years—she did so much. She rewrote the 30-year-old Mental Health Act to put people with a mental illness and their families at the centre of decision-making and invested in 450 new and replacement beds to meet demand, including delivering the largest ever boost for mental health services. This included the prevention and recovery care centre that the Liberals funded in Warrnambool. Let us remember that. Anyone that tries to say that we did not do anything—we had four years, and that is what we did. In 18 out of the last 22 years, I am sorry, I personally as a health professional experienced on so many occasions the deficit and the help needed that I could not get for the families I was working with or the patients and the clients who needed help. So I speak on behalf of many health practitioners who have just thrown up their hands and said, ‘What are we going to do? We can’t continue like this’. I have sat in this place for over five years now, and I have written to the minister on so many occasions for people who have fallen through the cracks. There were in fact 14 000 people wanting to speak to the minister. So when the minister says that the royal commission is the answer, well, we have got a lot now, but in February 2019 it was established; in November that year there were nine recommendations. Why didn’t we start? Why did we use the royal commission as an excuse to do nothing? In 2016 this government set a target for the suicide prevention framework that in 10 years they aimed to halve the suicide rate. That was quite a few years ago. We are quite a long way down the track of that 10-year strategy, and the suicide rate has increased. Where does it look like you have done anything? You can say that you have put some money in, but you have got to look at what is needed, and it is so far off the mark. Workforce readiness—I have participated in two inquiries in the last five years, and both of them identified workforce requirements, particularly in the regions. So the workforce readiness recommendation, recommendation 7 of the interim report in November 2019, talks about it. In 2016 a mental health workforce strategy was developed by this government. Access to mental health professionals is worse. That was 2016—now in 2021 it is worse. I do not understand the rationale. Now I say to you: have a think about what we are getting—the outcomes, as the member for Lowan discussed. Not long ago, in July the year before last, I remember having this experience, and I share this with you because this is the challenge we have got. I was walking to the Parliament past Parliament station, where people at 8 o’clock in the morning just spew into the street from the underground station. People are trying to get past; it is just wall-to-wall people. This young girl, about 30 she was, had absolutely matted, filthy hair. Her cracked heels were bleeding, ingrained with black dirt. She had a nightdress on, a very see-through nightdress. It was July. She had nothing on her feet and she was screaming at the top of her lungs. She was screaming. She was having an episode, she was in a health crisis. I just did not know what to do. It was my first experience, I think, in the city; it was probably actually a bit longer back than that. I just thought, ‘How is it that we are walking past?’. As a nurse, if that person had collapsed and had a cardiac arrest, I would have jumped into action, assessed the airways, breathing and circulation, started a few breaths and started compressions. I would have barked out a few orders. An ambulance would have arrived.

MOTIONS 920 Legislative Assembly Thursday, 4 March 2021

What are we doing wrong? It is those sorts of situations. During the pandemic I saw this government go, ‘Oh, yes, let’s sweep up all the homeless’. They are homeless, often there are mental health issues and sometimes there are dual complexities with alcohol and drugs—it does not matter which comes first—but the system has broken down so badly that we do not see that girl as a sister, a daughter. And the family cannot help, just like the mother who had no ability to help her son who I worked with and so many more. She probably did not have the wherewithal to make the decisions she needed to make. We have not empowered the system to really help people that need it. We are leaving them absolutely desperate and the families unempowered, and that is totally unacceptable. So I endorse the recommendations. I told the story of how we started this in the 1990s and how Denis Napthine, my predecessor, should be proud of the fact that he deinstitutionalised the system, how Labor have been in government for 18 of the last 22 years and have failed dismally, how we in the four years we were in government did so much and how now the focus has to be on that girl that I mentioned, her family and how we service them. Mr EDBROOKE (Frankston) (15:08): Can I begin by thanking all of those involved in the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System, especially those who bravely came forward and shared and relived their pain and their trauma to make sure that we got this right, that we had the blueprint we needed to build a mental health system that they deserve and that people in the future deserve. Mental health issues occur across every single space in our community—on every road, on every street, during every peak and trough and through every day—and my family is no different. This morning I received a phone call from my sister, which I do almost every day; today was no different. She was sobbing on the phone. She has suffered mental health issues for a long, long time. The difference was that on this occasion she was actually sobbing because she was happy. Finally—from what she had seen on the news, not from what I have told her or anything like that—she was happy because she could see a government actually acting on what she had experienced. And we failed her— we did fail her. This state failed her. I was proud to tell her about some of the things we are doing and what we have even done over the first two days since that release. I have got to say, I skipped into Parliament today. It is the first time I have heard my sister cry happily in years. I have been that 000 caller asking for help and getting nothing. I have been the caller. I have been told the only response is a police response. I have been the son who found the suicide note from the father who had disappeared for five days. We thought he was dead, only to have him returned to us after an hour in hospital. We have not been doing this right. We know that. We do not need to be told by the opposition and others repeatedly what has been going wrong. We know what is going wrong; that is why we had a royal commission. We had that valuable lived experience from people who know what is going wrong. Now we have got to move into the future. Now we have got to do the hard yards— the absolute hard work—and make these changes. What I am hearing in this debate is a little bit sad to me. I am hearing lots of facts but also lots of excuses. I do not understand for the life of me why the opposition are not standing up and saying, ‘We give bipartisan support to the recommendations of this royal commission’. One in five people will suffer from mental health issues in their constituencies, and everyone is affected when one in five people suffer mental health issues. Where is the bipartisan support? You might as well not even be standing here if you are not going to work and put these recommendations into action with us. Look, I was pleased the other day that the royal commission recommendations— Ms Kealy: On a point of order, Acting Speaker, again I think the member is misrepresenting our position. Given this is a record that will be there for all time, I ask that the member, if he is reflecting on our position, actually take the comments that we have made that have shown that we are very, very supportive of the findings of the royal commission and that we want to make sure that all Victorians can have access to the mental health services that they need. To state otherwise is incredibly wrong

MOTIONS Thursday, 4 March 2021 Legislative Assembly 921 and is misleading the public. So I ask you, Acting Speaker, to please counsel the member that his comments should be accurate and represent the truth. The ACTING SPEAKER (Ms Richards): There is no point of order. Mr EDBROOKE: Whatever. It is what you are not saying that speaks the loudest to everybody. As Parliamentary Secretary for Police and Emergency Services and equally as a former emergency services worker who has friends and colleagues suffering at this moment, I was delighted in particular to see recommendations 8 and 10. We know that one out of five people will suffer a mental illness, but according to Beyond Blue up to 11 per cent of the emergency services workforce is experiencing PTSD—as in the mental health issue. That is compared to 4 per cent in your average community across Australia. Recommendation 8 is based around supporting both people with mental health issues and the emergency services workers who support them. It outlines that:

… each Adult or Older Adult Area Mental Health and Wellbeing Service— will deliver—

… a centrally coordinated 24-hours-a-day telephone/telehealth crisis response service accessible to both service providers and to members of the community of all ages that provides: crisis assessment and immediate support; mobilisation of a crisis outreach team or emergency service response where necessary; and referral for follow-up by mental health and wellbeing services and/or other appropriate services. Again, another proud moment—the day after the royal commission recommendations were released in our community we were out there in Frankston talking about the 50 mental health sites, with the first six prioritised and of course one of them being in Frankston. Sadly we were prioritised because we do have a high suicide rate in Frankston, but I am very, very proud to be ensuring that we are helping people to try and bring that rate down. The second main recommendation that caught my eye was recommendation 10, which is ‘Supporting responses from emergency services to mental health crises’. This recommendation goes to support our emergency services personnel to do what they need to do. It outlines that:

… wherever possible, emergency services’ responses to people experiencing time-critical mental health crises are led by health professionals rather than police. This will ensure that people who are suffering do not suffer even more with the trauma and terror that is involved with that experience. As the CEO of Ambulance Victoria said this morning, we do not send police to a cardiac arrest, so why are we sending them to a mental health injury or a mental health episode unless they are specifically required? It makes so much sense. We announced this morning— another proud moment, the second day after the royal commission recommendations had been put out—that a special working group will be established in the coming weeks with Victoria Police, Ambulance Victoria, the Emergency Services Telecommunications Authority and their industrial reps to work through how this change will be implemented. I am very excited to be the chair of that working group. I worked with these stakeholders in a very collegiate manner on the provisional WorkCover payments to help people with mental health injuries, and I found that they were as passionate and committed to helping their workforce as anyone you would ever see. I cannot wait to bring this to fruition and have a look at the plan about how we are going to run this out. That is also not to mention another announcement today, which was the $6 million centre of excellence for emergency workers and volunteers, which will be delivered by the Victorian-based organisation Phoenix Australia, who have got a great reputation, and they support the Australian National Centre of Excellence in Posttraumatic Mental Health. It boasts expertise in education and training as well as an internationally recognised research program. So what an amazing 48 hours after the recommendations of this royal commission were released. I ask: have you ever, ever seen a royal commission or an inquiry released to the public and so much happen to implement that within

MOTIONS 922 Legislative Assembly Thursday, 4 March 2021

48 hours? I cannot remember anything ever that has been this important to get out in that time frame, and it has been done. I am quite proud, and I think the leaders of this government, the royal commissioners and everyone who made their voices heard loud and clear have done an amazing job— just an amazing job. Overall, we had the first royal commission into mental health here in Victoria and the nation. We have the opportunity to provide the best mental health framework for people in Victoria and indeed in the nation. That moment is right here, right now, and it is not going to be taken advantage of by talking rubbish about the past and by talking about what he said, what she said, what we should have done or by arguing. There will always be arguments over ‘We did it better’ or ‘You did it worse’—whatever. It is the future that counts, and we need everyone on board for this. We do not want to miss this historic moment. We have got this momentum behind us. It is time to make the changes and do the hard work that is required to get this done, because the people that have not made it to this day deserve no less and their families deserve no less. I always think about my family and what is happening there, but also I do not know how many suicides I attended as a firey. I always seemed to be the person who got the hugs, which at times was difficult. But I always think that this is the kind of work where putting the nose to the grindstone is honouring those people and their families and everything they have had to go through. We need to improve this. This is our moment. We cannot lose it. We must get on with it, and this is what this government is doing. You can see that we have not missed a moment in the last 48 hours. The message from my community in Frankston is that they have had their say. We did all the forums. They want this to go ahead. Dr READ (Brunswick) (15:18): During my medical career I heard from many patients and also from friends struggling with depression or, less commonly, the voices in their heads. Mental illness is often a frightening and isolating experience, and it was no doubt made more difficult for my patients when I often failed to provide or find the best support for them. Since the mid-1990s it has been difficult to find help from the public mental health system. The phone numbers have been hard to find, and when you call you can wait a long time to get someone willing to accept a referral. If it is frustrating for health workers, imagine how it must feel for the person they are trying to help. The state mental health system was unique in my experience in being unable to reply to letters from doctors. This may seem trivial, but it is an essential part of communicating and coordinating a person’s medical care. Poor communication is a symptom of a system under stress. None of this should reflect on the quality or effort of the staff. They simply are not given the time or the resources that they need to do their job. Over the past 25 years public mental health services have contracted in Victoria, as funding has not kept pace with demand. This is a defensive shrinking, where hospital mental health services and community clinics have had to stop taking on categories of patients that they previously would have seen. The gap between what one service provides and another will accept widens, and the mentally ill fall into it. The Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System report describes a system driven by crisis and one where people whose conditions may be too serious for GPs fail to raise enough red flags to be seen as serious enough for the beleaguered public system. And if they cannot afford the out-of- pocket cost of seeing a private psychiatrist, they are stuck in what the royal commission calls the ‘missing middle’. By 2018 Victoria was spending less per capita on mental health than any other state—it was being starved of funding—so this government declared the system to be broken and called a royal commission. I am sure the government did not intend to diminish the work of the staff in the system by saying the system was broken and required a royal commission to diagnose the problem. Equally I doubt anyone was surprised at the royal commission’s diagnosis of starvation. I wondered why we needed a royal commission back in 2018 when it was announced when what was really needed was funding. But on Tuesday I think Professor Patrick McGorry at least provided part

MOTIONS Thursday, 4 March 2021 Legislative Assembly 923 of the answer by saying that the royal commission created the ‘authorising environment’ for the new mental health system recommended by the royal commission. The recommendations of the royal commission will require a substantial and sustained increase in investment if they are to be implemented fully, and the government says they will be. The Greens welcome this commitment not just to caring but also to spending serious money on mental health, because that is what our economy is for, after all—for looking after all people. There is no question that the royal commission has carried out the most complete and exhaustive review, and while it is too big to digest in a few days, I am heartened by what I have seen so far. There are a few recommendations that I would like to highlight. First is the use of workforces with personal experience of mental illness. I am pleased that people navigating the mental health system will be able to do it with the support of workers who know just how frightening it can feel, indeed how unsafe it can actually be. People admitted to psychiatric wards are at risk of psychological trauma from the experience, and they are at risk of sexual assault. Involving people with personal experience of mental illness in the training and the delivery of care should help to make services safer for patients as well as for staff, as will the royal commission’s recommendations aimed at improving trauma-informed care and improving sexual safety. I have always been nervous about that, particularly when referring women patients for admission. Recommendations to minimise the use of compulsory treatment and end the use of restraint and seclusion should also reassure us that the system will become safer. The second area I would like to highlight is the commitment to funding for mental health services for First Nations people run by First Nations people. This is important because with mental health, as with broader health issues, the gap between First Nations people and the rest of us is, to put it bleakly, wide. First Nations people are more than twice as likely as other Australians to be hospitalised for self-harm or to suicide. These cannot be the life prospects that we hand to young First Nations people. The third thing I would like to highlight is the commitment to youth mental health. Most mental health conditions surface when people are young, and mental health is a big issue in many young people’s lives—either that or in their friends’. The royal commission should make it easier for young people to obtain mental health care and help that is tailored to them. But keeping people healthy is about much more than just the medical system. Mental illness makes it harder to keep paying the rent and increases the chances of people being made homeless. More than a third of adults and teenagers seeking help from specialist homelessness services in 2017–18 reported a diagnosed mental illness. Homelessness exacerbates mental health conditions as well as dramatically increasing the chances of being arrested. We do not just need mental health services to deal with this, we need more housing, and by that I do not just mean community housing. Community housing is a great thing, but it largely helps people who are on low incomes but who can keep paying the rent and be a reliable tenant. That covers some people with mental illness. For those who cannot, we need a safety net like public housing, not the streets. The royal commission recommends 500 medium-term places for young people and 2000 units planned for people living with mental illness—a good start, but that will barely touch the sides of the 100 000 people on the public housing waiting list. Victoria’s Labor government is building more community housing, but the commitment to public housing is yet to be demonstrated. A significant part of our mental health system is not where you would expect to find it. It sits within our prison system. Australian Institute of Health and Welfare data shows that 40 per cent of prisoners have had a mental illness diagnosis, and that is probably an underestimate. Prisoners are more than 10 times as likely to be diagnosed with psychosis than are the rest of the population, according to a New South Wales study. So if we are serious about reforming our mental health system, we must reform at least parts of our criminal justice system. We are imprisoning people at around double the rate that we did 20 years ago, which equates to many thousands more people with mental illness being imprisoned every year in Victoria. Our current justice system is in many ways more insidious and backward than a half a century

MOTIONS 924 Legislative Assembly Thursday, 4 March 2021 ago when Victoria’s Lunacy Act 1890 was at least enlightened enough to take vulnerable people out of workhouses and prison cells and put them into specialised therapeutic environments for treatment. But the reality is that in the last 20 years we have been rapidly reinstitutionalising people with mental illness, not in asylums but in our prison system. Sometimes prisoners are not imprisoned for committing a criminal offence, as the Ombudsman recently reported, but are held in prison and often in solitary confinement simply because we have no adequate non-custodial facilities for people with complex behaviours. Why are we using our prison system as accommodation for people with complex needs? It is because Victoria’s populist politicians have over time sought support by solving imaginary law and order problems rather than addressing the very real problems of people with complex mental illness and behavioural issues in our society. We have a system where mentally ill people who commit minor offences are remanded in prison because of the way our new bail laws treat repeated nuisance offences. You do not get specialised care on remand, you do not get rehabilitation on remand and there is a good chance you may be assaulted. On release after a few weeks you will need to reapply for support payments and start over again with any medical or addiction treatment, and you may struggle—you will struggle—to find housing. Still we wonder why people with mental illness are over-represented as repeat minor offenders. The government has created a system where for many people with mental illness the first time they get a bed will be when police remand them in custody, and from this point many of these people will have ongoing engagement with our prison and criminal justice systems. The good news is that the royal commission recommends that the use of police be minimised in responding to psychiatric emergencies and that the assessment and referral court services be expanded to meet demand. The report recommends at least 100 new beds for the Thomas Embling forensic psychiatry hospital. All this and other forensic psychiatry reforms and additional services inside and outside prison will be a great help, but if we are serious, we also need to reform those bail laws. The royal commission may have created the authorising environment for the reforms, but it does not guarantee a well-funded and compassionate system for the long term. Nothing can do that. Our health system has a fundamental gap which widens whenever there is any contraction in funding. This is the gap that sits between the federally subsidised private care known as Medicare and the state- run public system, which is mostly our public hospitals. For 30 years Victorian governments have been urging their public hospitals and clinics to shift an ever-growing proportion of their expenses onto Medicare. Federal governments have often failed to increase Medicare rebates to match the expectations of doctors, and patients have paid the increasing difference. Psychiatrists often leave the Victorian mental health system because it is so poorly resourced and, unlike nurses, they have the option of working in private practice. As public funding shrinks from both state and federal governments, the rising out-of-pocket costs deter patients from seeking care, so the gap between the Medicare-funded private sector and the state public sector will remain. I hope it closes as the public mental health system starts to grow again, but it will also be affected by the level of federal funding to Medicare. It is not yet clear to me how much of the promised growth in Victoria’s mental health system is reliant on Medicare-funded private services, but this may also be important in determining the success or otherwise of the new system. One day a federal government should examine how to permanently close that gap. Nevertheless, the promised state funding for mental health services is essential and it is welcome. It will make a difference to people’s lives right across the state. But let us not stop there. Let us also build the public housing we need and treat mental illness as more a health issue than a law and order one so people struggling with mental illness do not find themselves facing homelessness or jail and so our society becomes fairer for all of us. Ms SETTLE (Buninyong) (15:29): It is an absolute delight to speak, and I am very glad to see you in the Chair, Acting Speaker Richards. I am truly, truly honoured to speak today on this take-note motion. When I decided that I wanted to serve in Parliament, I really wanted to be there and achieve things for my electorate, my lovely regional electorate of Buninyong. But I will be honest: I also

MOTIONS Thursday, 4 March 2021 Legislative Assembly 925 wanted to be part of what was an extraordinary government, the 58th Andrews Labor government. I was watching as they brought through these amazing reforms, and I thought, ‘I really want to be part of that’. And so today to be able to stand here and talk about a truly generational change that is being made by this government makes me incredibly proud. In my inaugural speech I spoke about the difficulties that I had faced in trying to get mental health services for my loved one at a very difficult time in our lives. It is something that has meant an enormous amount to me, and I know that it means an enormous amount to the people in the regions, so I am very, very proud to stand here and speak about this take-note motion. The Tuesday sitting was a historic occasion for a joint sitting—and being in the Royal Exhibition Building, truly historic—but the other truly historic element to this royal commission is the consultation that was taken on board. I do think I heard someone mention that it was one of the largest, in terms of submissions, royal commissions ever. And for me, that is incredibly important. This royal commission went out and spoke to the people that had lived experience, the people who worked in this field, and they got the answers directly from those people. I think that it was amazing, amazing work that they did, reading the 3267 submissions, conducting 19 days of hearings with 99 witnesses and holding 61 community consultations with 1650 attendees. As the member for Buninyong, I was delighted, along with my colleague the member for Wendouree, to host a mental health forum with the previous Minister for Mental Health. We invited along some of the absolutely extraordinary service providers in both of our electorates—providers like Ballarat Health Services, Ballarat Community Health, Wellways and the Western Victorian Primary Health Network. They came together and they spoke directly to the then minister about what they saw needed fixing. And I think it is an incredibly significant thing that this royal commission has spoken to the people that most need to have their voices heard. I was particularly delighted on Tuesday that one of the people that is featured in one of the stories featured in the royal commission is a guy called Rick Corney. Rick and I worked together at Ballarat Community Health before I came into this place. Rick started there when I was there, and he was the first peer support worker in mental health. He was so full of ideas and engagement, and the one thing that Rick really, really believes in is going out and asking the people that need the services. So together we organised an event—and at that stage we were looking at NDIS funding—but what Rick said is, ‘We’ve got to ask the people who these programs are there to service. We’ve got to ask them’. And so Rick organised this extraordinary event. I was only in my role in marketing it. It was just gorgeous to see Rick and how far he has come, seeing him there at the royal commission. I am incredibly, incredibly proud of him. Of course other people have acknowledged the lived-experience speakers on the day, and I went and introduced myself to Al Gabb at the end. Al, in his very moving story, spoke about going to the Ballarat Base Hospital and being left to go out into the night on his own, despite the fact that he was really in a suicidal state. Even for me, the fact that a regional voice is there on that stage—you know, these big voices within the royal commission—is an incredibly, incredibly important part of this for me as a member of a big regional electorate. We welcomed the interim report from the royal commission in November and there has already been a lot of progress with those recommendations. I know that in Ballarat in the 2018–19 budget the HOPE program, the Hospital Outreach Post-suicidal Engagement program, was funded—and that is an extraordinary program. It has borne some really great initiatives. The Ballarat suicide prevention trials started up, and there was a range of different initiatives within that. One of them was through Wellways. They did a piece of work around getting into the clubs and community organisations, because they found that that was a really great form of outreach. When I was reading Rick’s submission to the royal commission, I was really struck that he talked a lot about the fact that it was his local club, his local sports club, that saved his life. So we have been getting on and delivering and funding these important things from the absolute get-go.

MOTIONS 926 Legislative Assembly Thursday, 4 March 2021

The final report sets out a bold vision that will serve as a blueprint for delivering the biggest social reform in a generation. There are many wonderful, wonderful elements to it, and many of my colleagues have discussed those elements, so today I think I will focus on what this report means for regional Victoria. It recommends establishing regional mental health governance boards, ensuring that procurement and governance of mental health services are delivered by people who will keep this government and successive governments to account in decades to come. The final report made it clear that the experience of poor mental health and wellbeing is different in regional and rural areas. I have to say in my own experience in 2001 when we sought mental health support, my husband and I had to meet with a counsellor in a park for an hour once a month in a town that was half an hour away. That is not good enough. We needed help and we had to sit in a public park because that was the only place to be. I know what it is to seek help in regional Victoria, so the recommendations which this government is committed to are incredibly important to us in the regions. Recommendation 39 calls for more resources to enable mental health and wellbeing services in regional Victoria to support small or geographically isolated rural communities. Because I lived in Ararat it was not fair I had to sit in the park. It also calls for innovative new trials of digital service delivery, and I think this one is a really extraordinary one. During the COVID lockdown I spoke to many of the service providers in my area to make sure that they were okay and everyone was okay. It was interesting because one of the providers, WRISC, said that actually they had found that they had a greater take-up of people attending their services. For these people that are in distress, to have to go in face-to-face can be quite difficult, and in fact having that digital connectivity meant that more people attended. It was easier for them to get to that session. Recommendation 40 also calls for new incentives to support attraction and retention of the mental health and wellbeing workforce in rural and regional areas. This is incredibly important. We know that we have to have the best practitioners in Ballarat. We know that our region deserves the best practitioners, and these incentives will make sure that we can retain what is already an extraordinary workforce. As I say, I have had a lot to do with the service providers in Ballarat, which service the greater region for me, and they are just some of the most amazing and committed people. I am incredibly proud that this government has committed to every recommendation. I thank the Premier, the Deputy Premier and the former Minister for Health for their amazing work. I hope that we all support this. I know there has been a bit of talk from the other side. As the member for South- West Coast likes to remind us, they have been in opposition for 18 of the last 22 years. I can only guess that they are just so used to being in opposition that they only know how to oppose, which is a great shame because this royal commission is going to be life-changing—absolutely life-changing—for me, for everybody in my electorate and for people in regional Victoria. I thank the royal commission for their hard work. I thank everybody who committed and put time and effort into this, and particularly those with lived experience. Mr D O’BRIEN (Gippsland South) (15:39): I am pleased to stand to speak on the take-note motion, on the speeches that were given on Tuesday on the tabling of the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System report. I actually want to start on a positive. I want to start on the fact that this government deserves credit for this royal commission. I go back to prior to the last election, and this actually stuck with me: I remember watching the debate between the two leaders at the time, and when they were both asked to say something positive about each other’s policies or personality, it was the calling of the royal commission into mental health that the member for Bulleen, as the then Leader of the Opposition, actually said was a good thing, and I wholeheartedly agree, and I do give credit to the government for focusing on this issue, which is an issue close to all of our hearts, I am sure, and particularly one that as MPs we all, I think, see firsthand—the issues with mental health in the community. Whether you are walking around the electorate or whether you are in your office, you know as an MP that people with mental health problems are going to find you. It does happen. Probably on that point

MOTIONS Thursday, 4 March 2021 Legislative Assembly 927 more particularly I give a shout-out to our staff, the electorate officers, who are the ones who are often dealing with people with mental health issues. We see perhaps an increased proportion of the community than is representative of those with mental health issues, but there is no question that it has become more of a problem. I would also like to at this point acknowledge the work of our first responders, the police, the ambulance officers, the staff in emergency departments around the country—nurses, doctors—the many others, the social workers and those who deal with the consequences perhaps of mental ill health and the consequences of our failure as a community to deal with it. This is certainly not an area that I am an expert in, but the speeches on Tuesday were instructive, and particularly listening to Pat McGorry talking about the promise there was two or three decades ago when the 19th-century asylums were closed down and people with mental health issues returned to the community—there was great promise, but we actually ultimately failed on that. That was good learning. So as I said, I absolutely give credit. I backed this mental health royal commission all the way through, and the credit is due to the government for doing it. Now the hard part starts. It is well and good to identify the problems; identifying the solutions and actually delivering them properly is the next thing. As the member for Lowan said in her opening comments, the royal commission did not start the highlighting of the issues with mental health in our community; they have been around for a long time. The member for Lowan talked about 50 different reports and audits and recommendations being made over the last few years that touch on the mental health sector and in particular a number from the Victorian Auditor-General’s Office (VAGO) that have addressed issues of concern in the mental health sector. Some of them have been acted on—I acknowledge the government has put money into this issue in the last few years—but not all. I certainly was concerned over the last couple of years while the royal commission was underway that there was a bit too much of an approach of ‘Let’s wait and see what the outcomes are and then we’ll address them’, when the problems were known and there have been many warnings over the last couple of years—indeed over the last decade or more—as to what those problems are. I will perhaps just make a small comment to that effect. This is a reflection on the government but it is a reflection on the bureaucracy too. We had this issue come up in the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee outcomes hearings last week. I asked the Secretary of the Department of Health about one of the VAGO reports that was in relation to the availability of youth mental health services. I said, ‘That VAGO audit was handed down in 2018; what’s happened since? What’s the government actually done to address the issues of access for young people to get mental health beds and mental health support?’. The answer, if I can summarise, was: ‘We’ve established a new unit in the department and we’ve got a royal commission’. I said, ‘That’s great, Secretary. That’s a very bureaucratic answer: “We’ve established a committee and we’ve established an inquiry”. We actually need to see the outcomes on the ground’. And again, I am sure the government is committed to delivering those outcomes, but we had an example today even in question time of a related but not directly related issue—that of drug and alcohol treatment—and one that is close to my own heart. We made commitments at the last election in rural areas, including in the Latrobe Valley in Gippsland, for drug and alcohol facilities for rural people, and the government made one at the 2018 election. They made a commitment for a 20-bed youth rehab facility in the Latrobe Valley. Now, after the 2018 budget—the government got re-elected of course—an upper house member, Ms Shing, announced a site for this facility in March 2019. She came back again with a media release in September 2019 and announced an organisation to run the facility, but as we stand here now—on, what is it, 4 March today—there has still not been a single sod turned. And I raised this with the secretary of the department last week— Ms Ryan interjected.

MOTIONS 928 Legislative Assembly Thursday, 4 March 2021

Mr D O’BRIEN: Well, that is right. Maybe they are waiting for the member to find the time in the diary to actually do the sod turning. In contrast is the Hope Restart Centre in Bairnsdale. Again, credit to the government, the government has committed to funding the recurrent costs of that facility. The federal government, particularly through Darren Chester, who was very passionate about this project in Bairnsdale, provided some of the capital funding and the community got together and a great group of people in the Hope Restart program raised a lot of funds for that facility. It was committed to and the funding was provided at about the same time as this youth rehab facility in Traralgon, and it has been up and running for certainly at least six months. So it has been built and is providing services and yet this other facility in Traralgon—three years on now and we still have not seen a sod turned. So it is all well and good to make the announcements, to have the line items in the budget, but we actually need to see action on these things. That will be the test, I guess, for this government. As I said, one of those VAGO reports was about youth. I have had a couple of heartrending stories come from my electorate about young people, but in particular a 16-year-old girl I remember from a couple of years ago with serious mental health issues. Her family was at its wit’s end, and one of the issues they had was there are two youth beds in the Flynn unit at Latrobe Regional Hospital in Traralgon. They were desperately trying to get her out of there because she was almost literally wandering around with a whole group of adults also with mental health issues as a very vulnerable 16- year-old girl. We eventually got her into a facility in Dandenong, but that really highlighted to me the issues there because she was in the adult population and not able to get the support she needed. So I really do hope that the government puts not just its money where its mouth is, because it is not just about money. It is not just about giving them money; it is about actually delivering the services and getting the outcomes for people who need it. The member for Buninyong talked about rural and regional areas, and absolutely I want to also add my weight and my thanks to the contributions that Amelia Morris and Al Gabb made on Tuesday. It took a lot of courage not only to put their stories to the royal commission but then to stand up on what was technically the floor of Parliament in the Royal Exhibition Building and speak their stories. It was moving and it took great courage. I really want to pay my respects to them and note that they are both also people from regional areas and there are really significant issues in our regions in making sure that we do provide those services. Thank you to them. Also thank you to the commissioners, to Penny Armytage, to Professor Allan Fels, to Dr Alex Cockram and to Professor Bernadette McSherry, and also to the expert panel, the consultative committee led by Pat McGorry. As I said earlier, I am certainly no expert in this but going back to my experience on the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee last year in looking at the response to COVID, Pat McGorry was one of the most fascinating witnesses we had. His insight into the issues in mental health, the issues that the COVID pandemic and the lockdowns and the like have had on people were fascinating. We were limited to half an hour, but I could have listened to him all day, the experience he has got. And likewise his commentary on Tuesday was great in providing that insight. I am certainly pleased that the royal commission has happened, and I now look forward to the action to actually deliver for all Victorians because mental health of course touches all of us directly or indirectly. I welcome the royal commission’s final report. We will debate and look at how that is implemented and the mechanisms for that, but the question now is for the government to deliver where it matters and make sure that we actually do help Victorians with mental health issues. Mr FOWLES (Burwood) (15:49): It is indeed a very great honour to speak on this take-note motion on the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System. This final report has laid bare the shocking failures of the systems that are currently in place and the very real human impact of those failures created by decades of unresponsive policy-making. These represent policy failures of governments of both stripes, but I thank the member for Gippsland South for his balanced contribution today. I only wish that there had been more like it from those opposite.

MOTIONS Thursday, 4 March 2021 Legislative Assembly 929

As a government, as a society we stand on the cusp of immense and positive change. We would not be here, however, if it was not for decades of advocacy, and I thank the Victorians who have spoken out. They have brought us to this place, though sadly not all of them have been able to join us on the journey. Mental ill health affects all of us. If it is not us, it is someone we love or a work colleague, family or friend. Across fields and backgrounds the stigma of mental health issues is as prevalent as ever too. Those who speak up still face immense shame and torrents of abuse. I have experienced abuse in this chamber, sadly, referencing my very public experience of mental illness, and I think it is a great shame. I want to thank those leaders from the political realm like Geoff Gallop and Andrew Robb who have spoken publicly of their experience of mental illness, particularly as they are former politicians. I raise that experience because words matter, destigmatisation matters and now more than ever before our collective action on this issue matters. I would like to acknowledge the thousands and thousands of Victorians who contributed to this royal commission process. Thank you to them for sharing their personal experiences and the experiences of their loved ones. Their voices have been immensely powerful. This government sees you and hears you and we know that this failing system cannot continue. Our mental health system has left so many people behind, retraumatised, shattered or in too many cases, sadly, dead. The current system is so broken that it can barely be called a system. A patchwork of failure might be a better descriptor. This government, however, has had the political courage to acknowledge it, own it and do something about it, courage that was sadly lacking on Tuesday when the Leader of the Opposition sought not to unite but to divide, not to heal but to hurt, not to support but to tear down. By attempting to score cheap political points about infrastructure projects he squibbed it. He missed the moment. He said, and I quote:

I do not believe that funding mental health should be stigmatised by a special levy or a new tax. ‘Stigmatised by a special levy or a new tax’—this is no off-the-cuff comment. It was a considered dog whistle, a signal of what some amongst those offices actually believe. Their pretence of fiscal conservatism disguises what some—not all, but many—Liberals feel about those suffering mental ill health: that they are in some way self-indulgent or weak, that they are unable to manage their own affairs or that they deploy claims of mental ill health merely to disguise other problems. My experiences with mental illness play a relatively small role in shaping my perspective of the challenge we face. I am one of the lucky ones in our community; I have been able to access the supports that I need. However, so many in our community have not been so fortunate. One of the key structural flaws I wanted to speak to today is the missing middle. Last year in a members statement I described that as the chasm between primary intervention and acute care. This is an issue that has been identified very, very clearly in this royal commission report. This is a situation where somebody’s mental ill health, that challenge, is considered too severe for primary care or simply cannot be addressed by primary care in, say, fortnightly or three-weekly psychological appointments but is nowhere near severe enough to access hospital-based care. It results in people in our community who fall into that chasm, that missing middle, not getting the care that they need, the care that they deserve. I can speak to numerous examples. A friend of mine fell into this category, very much at the severe end of the spectrum—suicidal ideation, difficult to locate. He had been removed in a communication sense from his family, had been working remotely and was difficult to find, and they had very, very real concerns. And there just was not a service. Because the threat of self-harm was not necessarily imminent, there just was not a service offering that could be brought into the equation to support him with his illness. As we speak, a dear friend of mine is trying to navigate the Victorian mental health system whilst in hotel quarantine in Adelaide. It is enormously challenging. Even for those who have the resources, it is enormously challenging. There is no doubt that the system is letting and has let people down, and this has to end. I am so proud to be part of a government that has committed to the change we need, not just a patchwork of change, some extra funding here or a new body there. It is that commitment to a complete revolution of our mental health system to support the wellbeing of all Victorians. I think, finally, we

MOTIONS 930 Legislative Assembly Thursday, 4 March 2021 are moving to a point where we do assess wellbeing through a lens that does not begin and end at the bodily organs, that we do assess wellbeing through both physical and mental health. They are equally important, and as a result of the implementation of these recommendations I hope that the systems to support the wellbeing of Victorians, the health of Victorians, will soon reflect that reality. I am sure that these reforms will deliver a world-leading mental health system guided by the needs of the individuals and the communities that that system serves. It will address the hole in the middle with a new five-stream model such that a person seeking support can move between those streams based upon the level of support they require at any given time. Significant thought, I am pleased to say, in reviewing this report has gone into designing a model that addresses the lack of responsiveness in the existing system. It is not enough to land in the right care matrix, if you like, for an individual patient, you need to be able to have a system that responds to changes in their diagnosis and the severity of their illness. There are also some other important recommendations that I want to touch on, including around housing for people living with mental illness. The royal commission has quite sensibly picked up other aspects of government policy and has made some recommendations around the type of housing that needs to be delivered as part of the Big Housing Build; that is recommendation 25 in this royal commission report. For those following along at home, I encourage you to read that. There is some really sensible, progressive, thoughtful work that has gone into recognising the absolute and fundamental importance of the safety and security that having a place to call home plays in people’s mental health. A lot of work lies ahead to build a system which is sufficiently responsive. It is going to take years of effort. It is going to take significant change. But the Andrews government has committed to making it happen and to delivering that systemic change because we know that Victorians deserve no less. The hard work starts now. We have heard those experiences from thousands of Victorians, in many cases harrowing accounts of what is going wrong and what we need to do now. But these 65 recommendations will guide the government to establish the systems we need, and it is so important that we have committed to implementing every single one. It is a great opportunity, one would have thought, for absolute bipartisanship, to commit to implementing every single one of those recommendations. Already the government is stepping up. Since the report was released on Tuesday we have committed to fast-tracking the rollout of the first six mental health priority sites, including down in my friend the member for Frankston’s patch. Thanks to this initiative community members will be able to have streamlined access to the services they need. It is just one aspect—just one—of a systemic change that this government is proud to be getting on and delivering. The Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System has undoubtedly revealed some difficult truths about the state of play. Revealing these, understanding the measures we need to take, is but one aspect of the change. The real work begins in the weeks, months and years ahead. I am so proud to be part of a government that has initiated this conversation, that has recognised its importance and that knows how hard the grind is going to be to get this done but a government that absolutely is in it for the long haul. Mr BATTIN (Gembrook) (15:59): ‘There is No 3G in Heaven’. These are notes from a report that came out on ABC Four Corners after eight families in the Gembrook area—in Casey and Cardinia— had lost the lives of their children, and many of them came out and spoke during the course of that program. There were comments from one of the mums, Dee McIntyre, and she spoke on behalf of many others who also repeated the comments. And the familiar response was not only had they lost a child, there was a reluctance to speak out afterwards. They were vulnerable to a sense of guilt and shame. They had a fear of speaking publicly about suicide, because they feared it would only increase the numbers. However, the social media impact during that time was huge, and young people had made the decision in my community to speak up. They had made the decision that it was time to start talking publicly about what had happened and how they were impacted. They had decided to start to speak to

MOTIONS Thursday, 4 March 2021 Legislative Assembly 931 others in the community and raise the issues with the adults in that area—with the organisations, with the schools—because they thought and understood it was time that their voice was heard. We have had a disturbing number of people in the Casey-Cardinia area who took their lives by train, and at the time it was effectively covered up. We spoke to and heard from many people, including Patrick McGorry, who came down and spoke about the people who would not speak about it and how therefore the issue was covered up and pushed aside. On 5 June 2012 Paige McIntyre took her life, and it was that changing moment locally. According to her mum, Paige was bubbly, polite, pretty, gorgeous and kind-hearted, and every person who has a child would think exactly the same of their child, and the pain she felt—when you looked into her eyes on this program and when we saw her locally—you could never describe. As a child Paige was quiet and sensitive, helpful and artistic—all the things you wanted to hear—but things changed. When she went through to high school things changed in Paige’s life, and—like many of us do—it was put down to, ‘They’re just a teenager. They’re spending more time in their room. They’re being more active on social media’. And these are things that we can look at now and that Dee would tell you all that you have to be very, very aware of. On 21 January 2012 Paige wrote on Facebook:

Trust me I know how it feels to cry in the shower so no one can hear you, and waiting for everyone to fall asleep so you can fall apart and for everything to hurt so bad you just want to end it all. I know exactly how it feels. Her friends offered her support at the time and her mother was unaware of the comments—and then Paige started self-harming. Dee found Paige had looked at a website that gave instructions on how you could self-harm—instructions on a website! Paige said to her parents in March, in a statement, that she did not want to be here anymore, and that was what led her to going for the first time to Stepping Stones, which many in this chamber and our community would know is a youth program for people with mental health issues. It is a residential-run program. This is one person’s story, one family’s pain, and a moment that in my current role as a member of Parliament highlighted that we do not do enough and we need more done. It was the time that the entire community said, ‘We’ve seen it. We’ve seen enough’. And since then the suicide rates have not declined. The suicide rates in Victoria are still increasing. We still see young people presenting daily to our mental health system. We still see presentations from so many in our community who, each and every day, are looking for further support. And on many occasions it is support they are simply not getting. They try their hardest to get that support, and during that time they find that they are getting knocked back continuously. At Casey Hospital alone, nearly 80 per cent of people that presented in the last 12 months with acute mental health issues had to wait more than 8 hours. People with acute mental health issues having to wait more than 8 hours is simply not good enough. I note the member for Frankston said we cannot just talk about the past, and I understand that. We cannot just talk about the past; we have to talk about the future, but we have to acknowledge that these are the problems that are there. These are the problems that are facing people with mental ill health and living with mental health issues, and we want to make sure that that change is delivered so that for those people coming in when they need support, the families that need that support, it is there for them when they need it, at the time they need it and where they need it. I do join the member for Gippsland South, who said before, ‘We did need this royal commission’, and I say to the government, ‘Well done’. You delivered a royal commission that has opened up the eyes I hope of a lot more people out there. But I do say to the government we do have to go back and do better in all of these communities, and I do not just speak about mine. Obviously I am passionate about Casey and Cardinia, and I know there are other members in here who are very passionate about what has happened down in our community. I think at the time when we had these major issues we did not have the members of Parliament who are here now, but I know that we have seen what has happened through many parts of our community and I know we have seen what changes we want to see come through within that system.

MOTIONS 932 Legislative Assembly Thursday, 4 March 2021

At the time when all this happened we did start some of the community-led programs. There was funding put towards community-led programs. One of the things that has been identified is funding, but there must be outcomes from that funding as well. However, we have seen cuts in funding to the community delivery of these programs, which are putting more and more pressure on the growth corridors. We are seeing more and more people being pushed away, and they cannot get the services that they require. They cannot get in and see someone when they need it the most. I know the government will come down to my electorate soon and officially open the Berwick College health and wellbeing centre, and it is fair to say I probably will not get an invite from the government. But I will say in a bipartisan manner: that is one of the best things that will happen in youth mental health in our education system here in Victoria, and I hope and I pray and I want every government from today and in the future to commit to looking at how that program operates, looking at how this centre operates and finding ways to make it better. It is not going to be perfect, but find ways to make it better and see how we can deliver mental health services like this in schools across the state. I am a realist. I know we are not going to have a health and wellbeing centre in every school across Victoria. That is just not going to happen. But what we can do is find the elements of programs like this so we can go back to young people and say to them, ‘We’re committed to delivering these services in the school where you are. We’re committed to the high percentage of young people who take their lives in the year after leaving school, when they lose that connection, they lose that engagement. We’re committed to making sure the services are there so you can go back and get referred through, guided through, assisted through to the next level of service you need’. I think it is paramount. It is our responsibility—not just government’s, opposition’s as well—to make sure that these voices are heard, to make sure that these young people are not forgotten and, in the words of so many families and these eight families that spoke out on Four Corners, that we do not see another Four Corners program where they talk about their child who fell through the gaps, because we simply cannot afford it. I came into this Parliament in November 2010 when I was elected. It has been just over a decade. In that time I have made one commitment in my area, and that is—I am very passionate about it— working with young people and making sure they can get the best out of themselves. Mental health is one of the big issues in our area, and I will continue to do that. That commitment will not leave me. It will stay with me until the day I leave this place, whether that is by choice or by the choice of my electorate. I will fight for them every step of the way when it comes to mental health. To the government I say: each and every day I will follow up on this royal commission to make sure you deliver the services in not just your own electorates but the whole of Victoria, to make sure the growth corridors of Casey and Cardinia are never forgotten when you are putting in services. I join with the member for Bass and the member for Cranbourne in saying that whatever it takes, we need to make sure that our young people are not forgotten, and I will make that commitment here and now that with all of us together we can deliver those services for our communities. Mr J BULL (Sunbury) (16:10): It is a privilege to be in this great chamber this afternoon to contribute to this motion, to rise to have the opportunity to speak on this historic report from the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System. This report is both historic and profound because it lays out the plan, it lays out the pathway for the reform of a broken and disjointed system, with the aim to save lives and improve lives. There are moments for every government where you stop and you reflect and you ask, ‘Can we do more? Are we doing enough? Can we be better?’. At that point in time, if the answer to those questions leaves you wanting to know more, then you need to work harder to find those answers. We in this chamber, across all sides, have a unique obligation to all Victorians, no matter where they live, to provide the very best services, to give our local communities the very best opportunities in their lives. This is a groundbreaking report, and it rewrites the mental health system and rebuilds the mental health framework from the ground up. This government has always been a big-picture government—big ideas, big reform. But improving the collective mental health of the entire Victorian community is indeed a

MOTIONS Thursday, 4 March 2021 Legislative Assembly 933 monumental—a massive—challenge, if not the biggest challenge the state in many ways has ever faced. But as was said on Tuesday at the Royal Exhibition Building by the Premier, important work is never easy. Can I take this opportunity, as others have, to acknowledge the leadership, the passion, the determination of the Premier for seeing this through, supported incredibly well, of course, by the Deputy Premier and Minister for Mental Health, and the former mental health minister, as well as parliamentary secretaries and the entire team that have worked incredibly hard to bring this report through. I do, as others have done, want to take the opportunity to acknowledge the work of the commissioners— the chair Penny Armytage, Allan Fels, Alex Cockram, Bernadette McSherry and, of course, very well supported by the expert advisory committee chaired by Pat McGorry, who we also heard from on Tuesday. I want to acknowledge, as others have done, the workforce—the men and the women who have worked within the mental health system for many, many years and have absolutely worked their hardest to support those who need it the most. It is certainly not a reflection on the workforce; it is a reflection on the system, and that is exactly what is contained in this report. The biggest thanks, the biggest acknowledgement, needs to go to the courageous, the brave, the incredible Victorians who spoke up, who shared their lived experience—those like Al and Amelia and the thousands more who took part in delivering this landmark report. These reforms, these recommendations, are yours, and have only been made possible by the courage that you have all shown. The report comprises 3195 pages, 12 500 contributions and 65 additional recommendations, all of which will be accepted and implemented by this government. This report sets out a bold vision that will serve as our blueprint for delivering the biggest social reform in a generation. We know that Victoria’s mental health system will be rebuilt from the ground up. We know that it is so fundamentally important to get that early intervention, to be able to identify issues early and to be able to get treatment within your local community. This system, we know, is fundamentally broken. The report also provides for the rewriting of the Mental Health Act 2014. It will mean the establishment of 13 infant, child and youth area mental health and wellbeing services. On top of this, there will be 50 to 60 adult and older adult mental health and wellbeing services across the state. There is a recommendation that we fund evidence-informed initiatives in schools to support better mental health and wellbeing. There are recommendations around a dedicated youth prevention and recovery centre—I am racing through these, and I will explain why very shortly—and a mental health system that we will build, which will not leave children and young children behind. Yesterday of course, as you will be aware, Deputy Speaker, the Premier and the Minister for Mental Health announced that six services are being fast-tracked for delivery within the local government areas of Geelong, Whittlesea, Benalla, Frankston, Brimbank and Latrobe. The reason for wanting to canvass those quite quickly is to be able to have the opportunity, as the Parliamentary Secretary for Youth, to speak a little bit about those recommendations that were contained in the report that particularly go to young people in this state. As I have spoken about in this house before, I am absolutely delighted to be the parliamentary secretary within the Andrews Labor government for young people in this state and absolutely delighted to be supporting our outstanding Minister for Youth in this state. One thing that has been very clear to me, one thing that I have seen as we have embarked on a lengthy and broad consultation process for our youth strategy, which is a youth strategy that is going to make a fundamental difference to young people in this state—we have undertaken a very extensive process of community consultation—is that youth mental health is a significant issue within our community. This report absolutely highlights that. But more importantly than that, within the report are those solutions, are those recommendations, which go to exactly what we are hearing on the ground. This is fundamentally important to make sure that we are supporting young people within our community that face a whole range of challenges, but challenges that are not insurmountable and challenges that we can work with our young people within the Victorian community to make sure they feel as supported as they possibly can be.

MOTIONS 934 Legislative Assembly Thursday, 4 March 2021

In the time that I have got remaining I am going to try and speak differently to those recommendations. I just want to reference recommendation 9, which focuses on developing safe spaces and crisis respite facilities, including four facilities across the state designed with and for young people. These spaces will change how young people interact with the mental health system, and they will mean that fewer people will see the inside of acute mental health facilities or at least will avoid them if it is their first interaction with the mental health system. Recommendation 17 goes to supporting social and emotional wellbeing in schools, including funding evidence-based initiatives, developing a digital platform containing a validated list of these initiatives and providing funding to support schools to implement those that are most appropriate for them, with priority given to schools in rural and regional areas. I know that is something that is particularly important. This government has already provided just over $50 million over four years and $31 million ongoing to deliver mental health practitioners in secondary schools. I know that a number of members have spoken about these, and we know how important they are. The mental health in primary schools pilot is a partnership that is being undertaken with the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute and will also be continued and expanded to 26 schools in 2021—another very important initiative. Recommendation 18 focuses on supporting the mental health and wellbeing of prospective and new parents by expanding community and perinatal mental health teams—another very important recommendation that goes to making sure that we are supporting young people within our community to be the very best version of themselves. This is incredibly important, and it is something that is a key theme that has been identified right throughout the report. Recommendation 19 focuses on establishing a responsive and integrated infant, child and youth mental health and wellbeing system—another critical recommendation that is contained in the report, as is recommendation 20, which focuses on supporting the mental health and wellbeing of young people, including a dedicated service stream for young people to appropriately adapt and deliver community mental health and wellbeing services for this cohort and provide them with short-term and ongoing treatment, care and support. There are literally pages and pages of notes that I have here. I am certainly conscious of the time that is remaining, so I am not going to be able to cover all of the recommendations that relate to young people. But I will say this in the final 20 seconds that I have got remaining: it is so very important that we are doing everything we can to support young people within this state to be their very best, to be able to get those opportunities through school, through work and within their local community to be able to live a fantastic life. I am very pleased to have the opportunity to commend this to the house. Ms RICHARDS (Cranbourne) (16:20): I am very pleased to be able to follow on from the member for Sunbury and the incredible contribution that he has made not just in providing his insights now but in his work as a parliamentary secretary as well. What a team it is that comes together into this chamber this afternoon! I am also so very proud to follow on from the member for Burwood. I would like to acknowledge as well that the tone and tenor of the debate this afternoon has been something that maybe makes our hearts sing. I would like to also thank the member for Gembrook for the way that, as I saw it, he was making sure that we do recognise the communities that we share—and I note the members for Bass and Clarinda are here—and the great interests of civic trust, care and compassion for particularly our young people, that we acknowledge that we can be so much more effective when we work together and bring about change when we look to what the possibilities are and what the future holds. I do need to absolutely recognise that incredible feeling of pride when it was announced in a humble men’s shed in 2018 that this government would take on a task that seemed to me to be so incredibly complex and so large by staring down what we acknowledge and the Premier has frequently acknowledged is a broken system and respond to it with the most powerful of tools, which is to shine a bright light onto the system and undertake the heavy, detailed policy work involved in a royal commission. It did remind me, though, of that time when the Premier, as then Leader of the Opposition, made the same commitment to undertaking a royal commission into family violence, that

MOTIONS Thursday, 4 March 2021 Legislative Assembly 935 moment that so many of us remember, thinking that this was going to be a change and a watershed moment. Of course people like me, who perhaps reflect the optimist in us all, knew that this could be done. When I look back and reflect on the change that we have undertaken in response to the Royal Commission into Family Violence and that acknowledgement that we would respond to all of those recommendations, I think that we ought to be measured by what we have done in the past and know and be reassured that we will take this new and important reform that was presented to us in that incredible sitting on Tuesday of this week and undertake to implement every single one of the 65 recommendations of the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System. So I do thank the Premier of the state for making sure that he does not waste a moment, that when given the levers of government he takes on the reform. I would like to also thank and pass on my appreciation to the current Minister for Health for what has always been a focus on equity, equality and fairness, and I hope to have the opportunity to speak about the role he undertook in Cranbourne not long after announcing this royal commission. I would also like to thank the minister at the table, the Minister for Planning, for acknowledging as well that intersection between mental health and homelessness, the incredible work that is going to make such a difference to our community when people are given a home to live in. The minister knows that in Cranbourne homelessness and housing is an issue of such incredible importance. I do have to express again my appreciation that, when given the gift of government, we do face up to these hard choices and decisions. And of course finally as a part of these acknowledgements, the Minister for Mental Health—how incredible to have the Deputy Premier take on this role and the role of education, elevate the two and link the two. I think that has been done well by those across the chamber actually today, and I acknowledge the member for Brunswick as well for his contribution. I do want to take the opportunity to thank Al and Amelia and link them perhaps to the people in Cranbourne whom I was honoured to hear from. The current Minister for Health in his previous capacity joined me in Cranbourne, and we held a forum on mental health and acknowledged the incredible ill health that we have across our community. It was chaired by Hannah Sellars, who many know, which gives me the opportunity to acknowledge her as a retired nurse, a Cranbourne local and the previous assistant secretary of the Australian Nursing & Midwifery Federation. Of course the role that nurses play, nurses who look after physical health and mental health, is absolutely at the forefront of many of the lessons that I have learned as I traverse my role as a member of Parliament but also the way that the nurses in our community respond with compassion and great heart to the pain and suffering that they see. I would also like to thank: from the Health and Community Services Union, Paul Healey, who has also been generous in his wise counsel; Leon Wiegard from the ASU, who came along to the forum in Cranbourne; Danny Hill from our hardworking friends in service to the community, representing the paramedics; and our GPs. I would like to take a moment to acknowledge Anthony Tassone, who is a very important member of the Cranbourne community—he has pharmacies in Cranbourne—and to recognise that it is not just his role in the Pharmacy Guild of Australia but his role as a community pharmacist that gave us the opportunity to hear his really heartfelt, courageous and generous contribution in a Cranbourne context about the importance of SafeScript but also the role that pharmacists play in making sure that people get the care that they need. We were represented in Cranbourne, as we always are, by our diverse faith and diaspora communities at the forum we held. I like to remind people that one of the many great things about Cranbourne is that people speak in a way that is plain speaking and clear. There is great clarity in the way that people communicate. I saw and was on the receiving end of incredible clarity in the performance appraisal I perhaps received from many in the community about what was needed. I would like to— Mr Wynne: You had a performance appraisal two years ago. Ms RICHARDS: I had a performance appraisal the day that we held the forum, and that was incredibly generous. I would like to acknowledge the Cranbourne drug and alcohol support group, a

BILLS 936 Legislative Assembly Thursday, 4 March 2021 group that I visited when I was a candidate and a group that gave me the sort of insight and generosity that parents, partners and children of people who are drug affected and live with addiction can only share in a way that needs to stop us all in our tracks. Their experience of the system was heart wrenching. I think people have spoken about their hearts breaking at their experiences in their own families and the generosity of those contributions, but I was certainly compelled to acknowledge them in my inaugural speech because it was such an important and moving moment. We had representatives from Sikh Sewaks Australia and Buddhist faith community leaders at the forum and Rida Khan from Wellsprings for Women, who speaks many languages. Many of them spoke about the additional burden of stigma that our culturally and linguistically diverse communities experience and the trauma from some of their experiences as refugees and asylum seekers. I am so pleased that we have looked at all of these incredibly complex problems and absolutely have acknowledged that we will be getting on with responding to them. I thank the Cranbourne community, and I commend the motion. Mr CHEESEMAN (South Barwon) (16:30): I move:

That the debate be now adjourned. Motion agreed to and debate adjourned. Ordered that debate be adjourned until later this day. Bills DRUGS, POISONS AND CONTROLLED SUBSTANCES AMENDMENT BILL 2020 Second reading Debate resumed on motion of Mr FOLEY: That this bill be now read a second time. Ms ADDISON (Wendouree) (16:30): It is an honour to be able to speak this afternoon on the Drugs, Poisons and Controlled Substances Amendment Bill 2020. I thank the Minister for Health, his ministerial office and the department for the work that they have done to bring this important legislation before this house, which will save lives. I was in the house and I was very pleased to hear both of our parliamentary secretaries for health, the member for Ivanhoe as well as the member for Melton, talk about this legislation and why it is important to them. I would like to reflect on the contribution of the member for Melton in his former life as a very important paramedic. He spoke with real insight and provided such an important part of the story in terms of our paramedics who find people regularly when they are working on shifts who have overdosed and need to do all they can to save these people. It was very interesting to hear about his lived experience of being on a shift and sometimes actually reviving the same person multiple times. If you just think of our paramedics, they are faced with so many challenging situations on every shift. I have only the utmost admiration for our paramedics and our ambos in Victoria. We have such an incredible group of people who work so hard as paramedics, so I would really like to thank them. I would also like to thank our nurses, our doctors and our clinicians who work in our emergency departments and who also provide care to people who have overdosed—this is very challenging—as well as those in our community health services. This legislation will allow access to essential and life-saving harm-reduction products, including the supply of syringes and medication, including naloxone. It will come into operation on a day or days to be proclaimed or 4 August 2021 if not proclaimed before that date. At the heart of this bill are measures that are focused on life-saving harm minimisation arising from the misuse of drugs of dependence. This approaches the issue of opioid addiction as a health concern and through a lens of care and compassion.

BILLS Thursday, 4 March 2021 Legislative Assembly 937

This bill will widen the authorisation under the Drugs, Poisons and Controlled Substances Act 1981 in relation to the supply of hypodermic needles and syringes. The safer distribution of and access to syringes will reduce the spread of bloodborne diseases such as HIV, hepatitis B and hepatitis C. I am very grateful to the member for Brunswick for his explanation about how Australia compares to other parts of the world in terms of how our needle exchanges have meant that we have had less spread of these diseases. It is always good to have the member for Brunswick able to really provide us that insight, so thank you to him as well. This bill will also allow for the supply, possession and administration of naloxone or other schedule 2 or schedule 3 poisons for the treatment of opioid overdoses and for other purposes. This will bring Victoria into line with other Australian jurisdictions by allowing health workers in registered needle and syringe programs to directly dispense naloxone to clients who are at risk of or who may witness an opioid overdose. Our government is also committed to developing options to increase the role of peers in naloxone programs, with the aim to further allow peers to deliver valuable health interventions. This means that someone who has had an overdose will have a greater chance of survival if one of their peers who is with them is able to act instantly, which is very important. This bill does not create any new offences, but it does create a new exemption to a range of drug offences under the act for a person who sells or supplies hypodermic needles or syringes obtained from a Victorian needle safety program. I would really like to be clear to the community that the proposed amendments to the Drugs, Poisons and Controlled Substances Act 1981 are not to encourage intravenous drug use but to reduce harm and save lives. When introducing new legislation it is very important that we engage with relevant stakeholders, and in regard to this bill the Victorian alcohol and drug service providers have strongly agitated for change to improve access to naloxone and sterile injecting equipment. I also would like to take this opportunity to thank all our alcohol and drug services workers for the job that they do day after day. So with this high level of stakeholder engagement regarding this issue, I am very proud to be part of a government that listens to the community and responds appropriately. In recent years there has been growing recognition by various governments and community that a greater balance between traditional law enforcement and health-based responses will have a broader positive effect on health and safety of communities. Going back to 2015, the Victorian Parliament’s Law Reform, Road and Community Safety Committee was tasked with the very important job of inquiring into the effectiveness of laws and procedures relating to illicit and synthetic drugs and prescription medicine. Its recommendations included that the Victorian government develop a new drug strategy based on the four pillars of prevention, law enforcement, treatment and harm reduction. In August 2018 the Victorian government published its response to the inquiry, and the response included a new commitment to Victoria’s needle safety program to remove the outdated restrictions on peer distribution of sterile injecting equipment. The Andrews Labor government has provided record support to Victoria’s alcohol and drug treatment sector and made significant reforms to reduce drug-related harm in this state. Harm reduction initiatives that acknowledge the reality of drug and alcohol use and minimise its effect on the community are a critical element of this government’s approach to drug policy in Victoria. This bill will reinforce the progressive and caring ideals that support our most vulnerable Victorians, just like we have done with the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System and the decriminalisation of public drunkenness. The changes we are introducing will mean that it will no longer be an offence for a person to give sterile injecting equipment to someone else. This will legitimise an existing and effective harm-reduction practice and in doing so support the government’s commitment to eliminate the transmission of HIV and eliminate hepatitis B and C as public health concerns by 2030, just nine years away from now. These initiatives are complemented by our government’s delivery of major evidence-based reforms to reduce drug-related harm, including the introduction of real-time prescription monitoring—I was pleased to join the former Minister for Health, the member for Altona, when she came to Ballarat to

MEMBERS 938 Legislative Assembly Thursday, 4 March 2021 do a launch of that event—and Victoria’s first supervised injecting room in North Richmond. The success of the facility in North Richmond in saving lives and engaging people who use drugs with health services has validated the government’s recent announcement to proceed with a second supervised injecting room in the City of Melbourne. Australia wide, opioids have been the leading type of substance present in drug-induced deaths over the last 20 years, with a large proportion of these resulting from unintentional overdoses. In this context the use of naloxone is particularly important. Opioid overdose deaths remain unacceptably high in Australia. In 2017 there were 2162 overdoses nationally. According to coronial data for Victoria 540 people died from an overdose in Victoria in 2018, an increase of 58 per cent from 2010, with rates of fatality involving illicit opioids, including heroin and pharmaceutical drugs, historically high. For perspective, the road toll for last year was 211 people, and in 2018 we lost 580 Victorians to overdose. In Ballarat between 2014 and 2018 in the community that I represent there were 29 unintentional overdoses. Sadly, 29 people are no longer with us—not here for birthdays, celebrations, weddings or important dates. Loved ones lost due to overdose are missed every day, and I know this firsthand from families who have lost people to overdose. I recommend this bill to the house. It is important legislation. Mr WYNNE (Richmond—Minister for Planning, Minister for Housing) (16:40): I move:

That the debate be now adjourned. Motion agreed to and debate adjourned. Ordered that debate be adjourned until later this day. Members MEMBER FOR KEW Personal explanation Mr T SMITH (Kew) (16:41): I seek to make a personal explanation to the house regarding comments made by the Leader of the House this morning, when she said: … outrageous attacks that occur on women, which happened overnight on Twitter by the member for Kew … Firstly, I did not tweet anything last night, and I do not outrageously attack women on Twitter. Bills PLANNING AND ENVIRONMENT AMENDMENT BILL 2021 Second reading Debate resumed on motion of Mr WYNNE: That this bill be now read a second time. and Mr T SMITH’s amendment: That all the words after ‘That’ be omitted and replaced with the words ‘this bill be withdrawn and redrafted to address concerns about the potential tax liability for landowners resulting from the recovery of costs for precinct structure planning whilst still providing for the heritage measures in the bill’. Mr HAMER (Box Hill) (16:42): It is a real pleasure to rise this afternoon to speak on the Planning and Environment Amendment Bill 2021. I particularly want to thank the Minister for Planning for bringing this important bill to the Assembly—the minister being at the table this afternoon. As was explained when this bill was debated earlier this week, this has a substantial range of changes to the Planning and Environment Act 1987, and there are a couple, if I do have time, that I want to specifically focus on. The main context of the debate that we have heard is really in relation to the measures that will deter the unlawful demolition of buildings of local heritage and significance and disincentivise the practice of allowing these buildings to fall into disrepair.

BILLS Thursday, 4 March 2021 Legislative Assembly 939

The heritage values of the Box Hill electorate are very closely held by all of the community. When the rail line was laid down and opened in the 1880s, that was the start of development, particularly in the Surrey Hills and Mont Albert areas, and also the Box Hill township really started to form around that time. Some of those earliest developments, the earliest land developments and the land formation and the streetscapes date back to that 1880 period, as well as some of the houses in the area. These areas are incredibly precious to the community, and certainly any effort to further strengthen and further protect heritage in our area is welcome. One of the particular heritage elements in our area is the Mont Albert railway station, and as part of the Level Crossing Removal Project that station will have to be temporarily relocated as they build the trench for that project. But I am certainly working with the community and with the Minister for Transport Infrastructure to ensure that that building is returned intact to the village, where it has been for more than 100 years. The provisions of this bill are particularly significant and relevant to the central Box Hill area. The central Box Hill area is experiencing huge rates of growth. It is one of the densest development areas outside of the Melbourne CBD. This was stimulated not just through the Victorian government plans about identifying Box Hill as a second city, as an activity district in its own right, but also from Whitehorse council’s own plan. The council’s plan in 2007 identified a large chunk of central Box Hill as an unrestricted height, allowing developers to come in and build to whatever height that they desired. Along Whitehorse Road there is a small stretch of very historic buildings, some of them dating back indeed to the 1880s. In one case, on the corner of Station Street and Whitehorse Road is the old Railway Hotel. The Railway Hotel was in fact built in 1882 by Silas Padgham, extended in 1911 and closed in 1920 when the good burghers of Box Hill voted to no longer serve alcohol or have pubs in the area—a law which we will hopefully be changing over the next few months. But the building has remained. After it was a hotel for many years it was known as Tait’s Corner Stores, and that building has stayed till this very day and is a really important icon in central Box Hill. A few doors down is the former Colonial Gas Association showroom. This was built in 1936 in the Moderne style, and it was there to showcase to all the new residents in the 1930s the wonders of gas. It had showrooms, it had a kitchen which built on the gasworks that were less than a kilometre away. Now for this site in particular, the context of this bill is really important, because in 2017 this site was up for sale. A report in the Sydney Morning Herald at the time said that it had sold for a speculated price of more than $16 million—$16 million—to developers who wanted to no doubt take the opportunity of utilising the general council planning scheme of promoting development in the central Box Hill area for a site, a historic building, a heritage building that had been there since 1936. Now, under the current planning laws, if a developer knocked that building down, demolished that building without a permit, the maximum penalty for that offence would be 1200 penalty units, or less than $200 000—$200 000, for a building that they had paid $16 million for. Mr Wynne: Petty cash. Mr HAMER: Absolutely—petty cash, as the minister says, and that is absolutely right. So this is where the provisions that are being put into this legislation are critically important for the development that is going to be occurring in Box Hill and to ensure that the heritage values that remain in central Box Hill remain throughout whatever future development occurs. Now, there are many other elements of this bill that are really important, but in the interests of time, they were really the critical elements to me of the bill, and I commend the bill to the house. Ms Kealy: On a point of order, Speaker, under standing order 96(3), which is in relation to circulation of amendments that have been agreed upon for the Parliament, the wording is:

Amendments circulated under paragraphs (1) or (2) may only be considered at the completion time under SO 98 or SO 100 if they have been circulated not less than two hours earlier.

BILLS 940 Legislative Assembly Thursday, 4 March 2021

Now, in reference to the Drugs, Poisons and Controlled Substances Amendment Bill 2020, the coalition was briefed on this bill, and during the briefing we raised concerns about an element of the bill that would not allow adults to provide syringes to children. Our feedback from the minister’s office—and I am happy to table this document if you would like—actually says:

The bill does not apply age limits to the subsequent supply (commonly referred to as ‘peer distribution’) of sterile injecting equipment obtained from a Needle and Syringe Program. An amendment will be made to the Bill to address the issue raised during the briefing. Now, the issue that I have is that I was the lead speaker for this debate and I made my contribution with the assumption that this amendment would be circulated, which agreed on the coalition’s questions and our position that was put forward in the bill briefing. That amendment has not been circulated to the house—the amendment we sought that would form part of the debate. Because we have not now got it and it was meant to form our position on the bill, we have actually been misled by the minister’s department as to what the final product would look like and therefore what our position would be on the bill. I therefore ask you to counsel the minister and to ask him to provide a personal explanation to the house as to whether there will be this amendment made in the upper house. Otherwise it puts into question the whole process around bill briefings, and you have to wonder what you can trust when you are getting this information from the government. If there is agreement that misleads us in forming our position on a bill, then I really am concerned about the fundamentals of democracy in this place— when we are promised an amendment because they agree with our position and then they do not circulate that amendment within the guillotine time frame. The SPEAKER: Order! I have taken some advice, and I have heard enough on the point of order. The circulation of amendments is not a matter for the Chair, and I have checked with the Clerk and there has been no amendment circulated. The matter is closed. Ms BLANDTHORN (Pascoe Vale) (16:51): I am pleased to speak on this bill. Victoria is obviously experiencing an era of sustained population growth, urban development and capital investment. The number of people in our community is growing, as is their demand for infrastructure and services. Rising to the challenge of this growth while maintaining our quality of life—indeed a quality of life that is envied around the globe—will require not only high-quality regulation but regulation that is coordinated across the various agencies. It is only then that we will be able to achieve the outcomes that our community deserves. Of course this challenge is also an opportunity for our generation, which is reflected in Infrastructure Victoria’s draft 30-year infrastructure plan, which calls for an integrated, holistic approach to growth where planning, economic policy and infrastructure investment are all aligned. Infrastructure Victoria recommends:

… better integrating Victoria’s land use and infrastructure planning, so they work together to guide housing and commercial construction to the most appropriate locations and provide the right infrastructure at the right time. Indeed this is particularly important in my community where birthrates are among some of the highest in the state, where our childcare centres and kindergartens are bursting at the seams and where we are rapidly having to build new facilities in our schools so that we can keep up with the demand. We have recently announced funding for a whole new Glenroy West Primary School because the statistics tell us that there will be within five years the need for a whole new school there. My community feels the growth in population in our local services. We feel it on our roads and we feel it in our education services. And this bill responds directly both to this challenge but also to this opportunity—an opportunity for a Victoria that is emerging from the pandemic—by strengthening a number of key elements of planning regulation in Victoria. These include strengthened local heritage protections to ensure that actions such as the illegal demolition of the Corkman hotel in 2016 do not happen again. The measures contained in this bill will ensure that developers will no longer profit from unlawfully demolishing heritage buildings. Measures in the bill will provide greater flexibility for

BILLS Thursday, 4 March 2021 Legislative Assembly 941 industry planning permits by extending the permit expiry for periods of inactivity from two years to 10 years. Importantly this will facilitate greater local supply of critical materials for our record- breaking pipeline of infrastructure works. The bill will also enhance notification, publication and inspection provisions in the Planning and Environment Act 1987. Specifically the new provisions will provide for the continuation of temporary measures put in place to address the operational impacts of the pandemic and provide greater transparency by ensuring improved and timely access to information for proponents by providing that a planning authority must make available a panel report within 10 days of receiving it. These amendments, which will materially improve governance arrangements, were recommended by the commissioner for better regulation. The bill also includes amendments to enable planning panels to conduct hearings in person or by audiovisual link, making hearings more cost-effective, efficient and indeed more accessible, especially hearings with submitters from regional Victoria. These amendments take advantage of new technology both to improve the efficiency and also to improve the cost-effectiveness of hearings. There are amendments to address the risk of compensation related to the operation of the planning compensation scheme for land that is reserved for a public purpose and improved and fairer funding arrangements for the Victorian Planning Authority. The breadth of this bill is obviously huge, and with the time that is left available my focus will be hopefully on two key elements, perhaps only on one, the first being heritage protection. Indeed we all remember the demolition of the historic Corkman Irish Pub. As a number of members in this place have also detailed, this was a pub that I was very familiar with in my uni days and indeed in my time as president of the Melbourne University Student Union. The member for Evelyn and I do not just sit on the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee together; we sat in the executive office of the Melbourne University Student Union at a time when I seem to recall we actually considered as a student union buying the Corkman Irish Pub. Mr Wynne: Did you have a couple of ales there? Ms BLANDTHORN: We certainly had a couple of ales. This was a brick hotel obviously built in the 1880s, and it was an important part of this state’s history. When it was destroyed the entire community shared in a sense of outrage, not least of all alumni of the University of Melbourne. A state with a history as rich and as proud as Victoria’s should not have to put up with the illegal demolition of heritage buildings such as the Corkman hotel. What was doubly frustrating is the notion that a developer would commit such an outrageous act but also then profit from it. I am proud that this government and the Minister for Planning in particular have been absolutely clear that such acts will not be tolerated. At the time the Corkman was demolished the minister’s response was swift, taking legal action to seek enforcement against the developers and introducing new planning controls. Indeed he ensured that the developers were accountable. In the years since, actions taken by the minister and regulatory agencies have resulted in hefty fines and criminal sanctions. In January 2017 the EPA issued over $31 000 in infringement fines, which was followed by a judgement against the developers to the tune of $540 000 in the Magistrates Court in September 2018. In October 2018 the Minister for Planning introduced permanent planning controls for the site of this important heritage building— A member interjected. Ms BLANDTHORN: He has been very busy, that bloke, ensuring future development applications on this site will require his scrutiny and approval. In February the following year the Magistrates Court issued a record fine of $1.325 million to the developers, who pleaded guilty to the planning and to the building offences. In May 2019 VCAT orders were issued to the developers to clean up the site and rebuild the external facade of the Corkman unless an alternative proposal was approved by the minister.

BILLS 942 Legislative Assembly Thursday, 4 March 2021

In December 2020 the president of VCAT found the company and its two directors had deliberately failed to comply with the terms of a May 2019 VCAT order requiring them to clear the site in Carlton and build a temporary park. On 16 December 2020 the owners responsible for the illegal demolition of the Corkman were sentenced to one month in prison and ordered to pay $250 000 in legal costs and $150 000 in fines. All of these actions were fully justified, and now it is time for this Parliament to strengthen regulatory arrangements through legislation. This bill contains important improvements to heritage protections in the Planning and Environment Act. The new provisions will prevent people from benefiting from the unlawful demolition of heritage buildings such as the Corkman or from allowing heritage buildings to fall into disrepair. The provisions will set out that a planning scheme may regulate or prohibit the development of land on which a heritage building has been lawfully demolished. In the case of an incident such as the developers who wilfully demolished the Corkman, these new provisions ensure that the planning system can require rogue developers to rebuild a heritage building if they have unlawfully demolished it. These provisions will also seek to prohibit the sale or the development of a site for a period of up to 10 years if the owner of the land has been convicted of a relevant offence. These are significantly enhanced provisions, and they are indeed appropriate. The second aspect of this bill I wish to explore in the remaining 30 seconds is the greater funding certainty for the Victorian Planning Authority. In recent years the VPA’s remit has increased to include planning for Victoria’s diverse regional cities, urban renewal areas and new suburbs in Melbourne. It is important that funding arrangements are amended so the VPA’s funding is sufficient to underpin its responsibilities. Melbourne’s population is booming, and as I mentioned at the beginning of these remarks, Melbourne’s population over recent decades has put great pressure on our services and on our society. To put it in context— (Time expired) The SPEAKER (17:00): Order! The time set down for the consideration of items on the government business program has arrived, and I am required to interrupt business. The house is considering the Planning and Environment Amendment Bill 2021. The minister has moved that the bill be now read a second time. The member for Kew has moved a reasoned amendment to this motion. He has proposed to omit all the words after ‘That’ and replace them with the words that appear on the notice paper. The question is:

That the words proposed to be omitted stand part of the question. Therefore those supporting the reasoned amendment by the member for Kew should vote no. House divided on question:

Ayes, 53 Addison, Ms Foley, Mr Pallas, Mr Allan, Ms Fregon, Mr Pearson, Mr Blandthorn, Ms Green, Ms Read, Dr Brayne, Mr Halfpenny, Ms Richards, Ms Bull, Mr J Hall, Ms Sandell, Ms Carbines, Mr Halse, Mr Scott, Mr Carroll, Mr Hamer, Mr Settle, Ms Cheeseman, Mr Hennessy, Ms Sheed, Ms Connolly, Ms Hibbins, Mr Spence, Ms Couzens, Ms Horne, Ms Staikos, Mr Crugnale, Ms Hutchins, Ms Suleyman, Ms Cupper, Ms Kennedy, Mr Tak, Mr D’Ambrosio, Ms Kilkenny, Ms Theophanous, Ms Dimopoulos, Mr Maas, Mr Thomas, Ms Donnellan, Mr McGhie, Mr Ward, Ms Edbrooke, Mr McGuire, Mr Williams, Ms Edwards, Ms Merlino, Mr Wynne, Mr Eren, Mr Pakula, Mr

BILLS Thursday, 4 March 2021 Legislative Assembly 943

Noes, 25 Angus, Mr McLeish, Ms Smith, Mr T Battin, Mr Morris, Mr Southwick, Mr Blackwood, Mr Newbury, Mr Staley, Ms Britnell, Ms O’Brien, Mr D Tilley, Mr Burgess, Mr O’Brien, Mr M Vallence, Ms Guy, Mr Riordan, Mr Wakeling, Mr Hodgett, Mr Rowswell, Mr Walsh, Mr Kealy, Ms Ryan, Ms Wells, Mr McCurdy, Mr Question agreed to. Motion agreed to. Read second time. Third reading Motion agreed to. Read third time. The SPEAKER: The bill will now be sent to the Legislative Council and their agreement requested. JUSTICE LEGISLATION AMENDMENT (SYSTEM ENHANCEMENTS AND OTHER MATTERS) BILL 2021 Second reading Debate resumed on motion of Ms HORNE: That this bill be now read a second time. Motion agreed to. Read second time. Third reading Motion agreed to. Read third time. The SPEAKER: The bill will now be sent to the Legislative Council and their agreement requested. DRUGS, POISONS AND CONTROLLED SUBSTANCES AMENDMENT BILL 2020 Second reading Debate resumed on motion of Mr FOLEY: That this bill be now read a second time. Motion agreed to. Read second time. Third reading Motion agreed to. Read third time. The SPEAKER: The bill will now be sent to the Legislative Council and their agreement requested. Business interrupted under resolution of house of 2 March.

ADJOURNMENT 944 Legislative Assembly Thursday, 4 March 2021

Adjournment The SPEAKER: The question is:

That the house now adjourns. TREVASKIS ROAD CLOSURE Mr WALSH (Murray Plains) (17:11): (5719) My adjournment matter tonight is to the Minister for Roads and Road Safety, and it concerns the decision by Regional Roads Victoria to close Trevaskis Road at the intersection with Hawdon Road, or the Mooroopna-Wyuna Road as it is more commonly known in the area. I ask the minister to immediately step in to stop the ill-conceived and stupid closure of this road by Regional Roads Victoria. Apart from the fact that there has been a total failure of process in making the decision, it is also a very busy road that not only locals use. Anyone that lives east of the Goulburn River that does not want to cross at Shepparton uses McCoys Bridge on the Murray Valley Highway and goes down Trevaskis Road to Kyabram, Tatura, Murchison and even onto Melbourne. Minister, Regional Roads Victoria has not conducted consultation on the closure of Trevaskis Road, as they say they have. It is my understanding they only spoke to one local landholder in the vicinity of the closure and that is all—not the many people that actually use this road. This closure, Minister, is actually being done by stealth. The first that local landholders Craig Baldwin and Tony Mercuri knew about this—they are regular users of this road—was when they received a letter in their roadside delivery mailbox from Regional Roads Victoria, who did not even have the courtesy to actually post the letter they just dropped it in there. The letter was factually wrong in that it said Trevaskis Road was going to close at the intersection with the Murray Valley Highway, not the intersection with Hawdon Road, which created total confusion in the area. No-one has any confidence that VicRoads or Regional Roads Victoria actually know what they are doing with the closure of this road. The Mercuri family are one of the large tomato growers in the area and they use Trevaskis Road to freight their tomatoes back to the packing shed east of Kyabram, regularly using that road every day carting those tomatoes. This is their most direct route, which is now going to be closed to them, and they will have to travel significantly further. That is just one example of the hundreds of country people who will be disadvantaged by the decision by Regional Roads Victoria to close Trevaskis Road. I implore the minister to intervene and stop the closure of this road and make Regional Roads Victoria go back and do their job properly by advertising the proposal and having genuine consultation with the users of Trevaskis Road. Do not close this road by stealth. CLYDE ROAD, BERWICK, LEVEL CROSSING REMOVAL Mr MAAS (Narre Warren South) (17:14): (5720) The matter I wish to raise is for the attention of the Minister for Transport Infrastructure and concerns the Clyde Road level crossing removal in Berwick. The action I seek is that the minister join me to inspect the progress of the works to remove this level crossing. Works have commenced at Clyde Road to improve safety, traffic flow and connection to nearby precincts, while also providing an upgraded bus interchange, new walking and cycling connections and planting of more than 37 000 trees, plants and shrubs. Piling rigs recently arrived at the site which will drive piles 29 metres deep and use more than 308 cubic metres of concrete and 35 tonnes of reinforced steel to support the new road underpass and rail bridge. The completed works will benefit our local community, as more than 22 000 vehicles travel through this crossing each day with the boom gates down, and that is up to a third of the morning peak. Melbourne’s south-east is growing rapidly, and with increasing demand on both rail and road transport, we as a government are removing these dangerous and congested level crossings, with 45 of the planned 75 already gone. Upon completion, this project will ensure that many in my community get home sooner and safer, while creating thousands of new jobs during construction. I hope that the minister will be able to join me to inspect the current level crossing removal works, and I look forward

ADJOURNMENT Thursday, 4 March 2021 Legislative Assembly 945 to continuing to work alongside the local community and the minister to help deliver this very important project. MATERNAL AND CHILD HEALTH SERVICES Mr SOUTHWICK (Caulfield) (17:15): (5721) My adjournment is to the Minister for Health. The matter that I wish to raise is a proposal from a Ms Raizel Fogel to establish a mother-and-infant- friendly residential unit for new mothers to recover from their pregnancy and delivery. This can be quite an exciting time for a new mum and a family, bringing a child into the world, and quite often there are a number of services for those who are suffering from a very difficult pregnancy. For everybody else, the support is there with family. But there is the term ‘good enough’ new mums—a term that was phrased by paediatrician-turned-psychiatrist Donald Winnicott. This is where you have a whole lot of mums who are good enough to go home but who fall through the cracks in terms of the supports needed to bring a new child into the world—things like new feeding patterns, sleeping patterns and options for accommodation and support. Raizel Fogel has taken things into her own hands and has taken a number of new mums and bubs into her own home to provide supported accommodation. She has done that off her own bat with her own funds. She has set up a really good model—such a great model that she has engaged a number of other doctors to look at this model and to provide support. In fact there has been a research project done to look at this. I want to particularly acknowledge Dr Romina Withanage, Professor Margaret Hay and Professor Samuel Menahem, who I know has done some great work with paediatrics and really rates this program as an important program to go forward. I know that the federal member for Macnamara, Josh Burns, has looked at this program and has advocated to the government for this. I know that from the Australian Jewish News Rebecca Davis has looked at it and has put questions to the Minister for Health on how we can actually support this, roll it out and potentially fund it. The matter here in terms of action is to look at this as a pilot program, a program that could be supported and extended to all new mums that are currently falling through the cracks, to be able to provide all the support that is needed to bring that new child into the world. I want to acknowledge the great work that Raizel has done in setting up this pilot program in my electorate of Caulfield—one that should be supported. I would urge the Minister for Health to look at this, to meet with Raizel and to see how we can extend the program to provide the funding necessary to ensure we get more mums to take up this very important initiative. TARNEIT REVITALISATION PROJECT Ms CONNOLLY (Tarneit) (17:18): (5722) My adjournment is directed to the Minister for Local Government in the other place. The action I seek is that the minister join me at a future meeting with the new board of the Tarneit revitalisation project. As the minister knows, last year’s building works package allocated $500 000 towards urban revitalisation projects in and around Tarneit, including park upgrades, improving footpaths and beautifying the community. Indeed work has already started, with $35 000 from the fund going towards a mural at Tarneit Gardens shopping centre, with a $15 000 contribution from Wyndham City Council. Last year’s budget also allocated $12 million to be rolled out over the coming years towards urban revitalisation projects around metropolitan Melbourne, including this one in Tarneit. The Tarneit community that I represent is a very vibrant one, and it is fantastic to see what we will be able to do with this money and the benefits it will bring to the community. As chair of the revitalisation board I look forward to welcoming the new members of the board, who will be announced shortly, in time for our first meeting planned later this month. This might not look like a lot of money, but sometimes it is the smaller things that make all the difference, and when it comes to growing suburbs like Tarneit, every single dollar counts. So I would greatly welcome the minister’s presence at a future meeting as I discuss with local groups and community members how best this money should be invested into our local community.

ADJOURNMENT 946 Legislative Assembly Thursday, 4 March 2021

GEMBROOK ELECTORATE SEWERAGE Mr BATTIN (Gembrook) (17:20): (5723) My adjournment debate tonight is to the Minister for Housing, and the action I ask from the minister is to attend with me to meet the residents of 25 Emerald-Monbulk Road in Emerald, who have contacted me regarding the inaction of the department to successfully fix a septic tank issue at the block of units. We have had failed previous attempts to fix this system at the location, and there have only been temporary fixes, with residents still not having enough to get the system working properly. I have written to the minister on two occasions now raising this as an urgent issue, and we are still yet to receive a response. Residents have gotten in touch with me most recently stating there have been a number of health issues at the unit block, with many fearing this could be linked to the poor-quality septic system at the place. This is simply not good enough, especially with several residents being of age, and no-one should be living in a house without a good working waste management system. I ask the minister to visit 25 Emerald- Monbulk Road with me in Emerald to see the condition of the system himself, speak to the residents and arrange to get this fixed urgently. CRANBOURNE ELECTORATE TRANSPORT INFRASTRUCTURE Ms RICHARDS (Cranbourne) (17:21): (5724) My adjournment is to the Minister for Transport Infrastructure, and the action I seek is an update on the Big Build projects in Cranbourne. As the minister knows, we are getting on with duplicating 8 kilometres of track on the Cranbourne line between Dandenong and Cranbourne, and of course we are building a sparkling new train station at Merinda Park in Lyndhurst. I have seen a lot of fluoro around Cranbourne, and I am aware that there are more than 1000 jobs that will be created during construction. I am also conscious that these roles encompass the current phase of the project, which involves removing the level crossing at Greens Road. As the minister is aware, this government is also getting on with widening Hall Road all the way from Cranbourne-Frankston Road to McCormicks Road in the Carrum electorate, and I understand this vital project will create 2067 direct and indirect jobs. But wait, there is more. The work to upgrade the Western Port Highway will create 83 direct and indirect jobs. I ask the minister to let me know when the Hall Road and Western Port Highway projects will get underway. AGL CRIB POINT GAS TERMINAL Mr BURGESS (Hastings) (17:22): (5725) On Monday, 8 February, Shadow Minister for Energy and Renewables Ryan Smith and I announced that a Liberal Victorian government would prevent AGL from developing a gas import terminal at Crib Point. The Andrews government’s senseless and ideological moratorium on onshore gas exploration led to Victorians being hit with a 125 per cent rise in their gas prices between 2014 and 2019, and now Daniel Andrews wants the residents of Crib Point to pay for that with industrialisation of their quiet coastal town. The SPEAKER: Order! I just ask the member for Hastings to pause. A couple of quick matters— Mr BURGESS: The adjournment is to the Minister for Planning. The SPEAKER: And I ask the member to use correct titles. Mr BURGESS: Crib Point residents and indeed residents from around the Mornington Peninsula and across the state have been clear and unified about this project: they do not want it. The Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning has received in excess of 6000 submissions regarding this proposal, the overwhelming majority against it. Further, the local Mornington Peninsula Shire Council has been vocal in its opposition, stating that AGL’s proposal is deeply unpopular and has no social licence from the local community. In fact locally three levels of government are opposed to this badly flawed project. While AGL and the Andrews government initially claimed this project would create 300 jobs, it was later revealed that few if any jobs would be created and that the two or three that may eventuate would require specific skills that would be filled from the existing AGL workforce, again proving that this proposal offers absolutely no benefit to the local community. This project is so inappropriate that the town’s own consultant admitted to a public meeting of local residents that he

ADJOURNMENT Thursday, 4 March 2021 Legislative Assembly 947 would not want it beside his place. It is extraordinary to sit in this place and listen to the Premier pretend he cares about people and climate change while at the same time forcing a natural gas plant onto the residents of Crib Point. The Labor Party continues to demonstrate that it sees Crib Point as a toxic dumping ground and completely ignores the views of the people who actually live there. I made a commitment to my community 15 years ago to fight against any reindustrialisation of Crib Point. I stand by that commitment as strongly today as I did then, when the Brumby Labor government Minister for Planning, Justin Madden, gave the go-ahead to a bitumen plant in exactly the same location, again against all opposition and in direct contradiction to a written promise from Labor to Crib Point residents that they would not let this happen. You just cannot trust these people. Together with the community we fought off the Brumby Labor government’s attempt to force bitumen and urea plants on Crib Point a decade ago, and we will fight this one off too. Each subsequent attempt to locate inappropriate and toxic developments at Crib Point only serves to emphasise one of the central and enduring objections to Labor’s plan, and that is that if a toxic project is allowed to be set up at Crib Point, the community will lose its ability to argue that other toxic projects would be out of character. That is what is known as the classic slippery slope of industrialisation. As the bitumen and urea plants’ subsequent development would bring 24/7 B-double trucks through local community townships, you can see that any industrial development would lead to the same outcome. On behalf of my community I ask the minister to do the right thing by the people that live in this area and reject it. KINDER TICK Ms KILKENNY (Carrum) (17:25): (5726) My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Early Childhood in the other place, and the action I seek is for the minister to provide an update on what the Andrews Labor government’s Kinder Tick initiative means for young children and families in my electorate of Carrum. Early childhood education is absolutely crucial and something I will fight for every day, and the Andrews Labor government is making sure that all Victorian children will have access to not just one year of play-based learning before school but two. We have embarked on the biggest reform in early childhood education with the rollout of universal subsidised three- and four- year-old kindergarten, and we are leading the nation. This year the Andrews Labor government has delivered free kinder for children enrolled in participating funded kinder programs, saving families around $2000 for every child enrolled. This investment will not only make sure more kids can access a great early childhood education, it will make it easier for parents, particularly women, to return to the workforce as we recover from the pandemic. In 2022 Victoria will continue its rollout of subsidised three-year-old kindergarten right across metro Melbourne and throughout Victoria. From next year every Victorian child will have access to two years of play-based learning before school—what a wonderful thing this is. I am proud that Victoria is leading the nation in one of the most profound educational reforms we have ever seen. I would like to thank all the early childhood teachers and educators in my electorate for their dedication and hard work, giving our littlest Victorians the very best start in life—because they deserve it. I look forward to receiving the minister’s update about this government’s Kinder Tick initiative. ELWOOD PRIMARY SCHOOL Mr NEWBURY (Brighton) (17:26): (5727) My adjournment is for the Minister for Education, and the action I seek is for the state Labor government to commit funding to assist Elwood Primary School realise their vision of refurbishing their outdoor environment through their landscape master plan. Elwood Primary School is an exceptional school. It is also a community school in the truest sense. They are one of the largest primary schools in the area, currently educating almost 760 students. One of the school’s unique features is that it prioritises development of the whole child, and there is no doubt that the school’s teaching staff, led by principal Nicole Richards, are model educators. Elwood Primary School is a community hub in every sense. Their gates are always open to Elwood, and it is a treasured community space, with the school’s bimonthly markets being a calendar fixture.

ADJOURNMENT 948 Legislative Assembly Thursday, 4 March 2021

The school have a vision to refurbish their outdoor space and have formalised that vision through a $1.3 million landscape master plan. It is the final step in completing their full school vision. Their vision is based on achieving three outcomes that enhance connectedness and best use of available space. The first goal is to install a nature play space on the grounds nearest to the neighbouring children’s centre. The school is situated next to Poets Grove Family and Children’s Centre, a not-for- profit community-owned kindergarten. The two sites are interconnected, and the space will serve existing schoolchildren and provide a welcome space for the kindergarten children, who will one day join the school community. The second goal is to redevelop both the Scott Street and Poets Grove entrances. As a community hub, thousands make their way through the school entrances, and both are not fit for purpose. In fact when the school hold their fortnightly assembly, hundreds of parents struggle to file through a small gate. Finally, the school plan to enhance their play equipment, install shedding, reduce hard surfaces, consolidate their hard play spaces and create new outdoor learning spaces. These enhancements will be game changers for the deserving school community. As the minister will know, the government recently completed urgent structural upgrades at the school. These improvements addressed leaking roofs, cracked walls and unsafe ceilings held up by nailed-in wooden planks. But the school deserves more than the completion of urgent works. Minister, Elwood Primary School is exceptional, and I seek support from the state Labor government to help the school complete their full school vision through their landscape master plan. ROYAL COMMISSION INTO VICTORIA’S MENTAL HEALTH SYSTEM Mr FREGON (Mount Waverley) (17:29): (5728) My adjournment matter this evening is for the Deputy Premier in his capacity as the Minister for Mental Health, and I ask him to update the house on how the Andrews Labor government will be assisting people in the Mount Waverley district with acute mental health needs. The Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System has told us what we need to do to fix our broken system. We have said that we will adopt every recommendation, and we will, and I have spoken before about my own lived experience and my family’s experience. Today I am going to give the tiniest insight into the day-to-day struggle of one of my constituents and her family. The following is a very small part of a very important contribution provided to the royal commission, one of more than 12 500. This goes to the background of Thea’s illness, and I warn the house that the following involves the mention of suicide:

… she struggles to access treatment and regularly runs away (at least once per week on average and more often recently) from home and treatment centres and attempts suicide. This generally involves breaking windows and climbing the fence when escaping from home. Police and ambulance are called as a result. Further on the submission states:

Over the past four years, Thea has been hospitalised more than 50 times for suicide attempts. Thea’s suicide attempts have included many different methods and means. For example, we have to keep all of the cupboards in our house locked up because of Thea’s attempts to take overdoses of various medicines. Now, Thea’s father was present at the Royal Exhibition Building on Tuesday. He was there to hear every word that was said. Thea and her family are relying on us. Now it is up to us in this house to work together to put into place every recommendation in the report. I look forward to the minister’s response, and I also will do everything I can to make life easier for Thea, her family and every other family who struggles daily with mental illness. RESPONSES Ms ALLAN (Bendigo East—Leader of the House, Minister for Transport Infrastructure, Minister for the Suburban Rail Loop) (17:31): The member for Narre Warren North raised a matter regarding coming and checking out— Mr Maas: South.

ADJOURNMENT Thursday, 4 March 2021 Legislative Assembly 949

Ms ALLAN: South. Sorry. As soon as I said it I knew I had my north and south wrong. My apologies. I will start again. The member for Narre Warren South has raised a matter regarding the great progress that is happening at the Clyde Road level crossing removal site. His update on how the level crossing removal is well underway is greatly appreciated, and I will take up the opportunity to come and check out the progress—maybe even by the time it is removed altogether—and to inspect the work that is underway. Mr Battin interjected. Ms ALLAN: Well, member for Gembrook, I am glad you have piped up over there because I think it is worth putting on the record that at the last election the member for Gembrook was actually part of the Liberal team that wanted to stop the removal of this level crossing by withdrawing the funding for the level crossing at Clyde Road as a cost-saving measure as part of their program. Mr Battin: On a point of order, Speaker, misleading the house is something that we have to be very, very, very cautious about. There is zero evidence on the record about what the minister is stating. We have fundamentally supported the changes— The SPEAKER: Order! The member will resume his seat. I appreciate the comments that the member is making, but it is not a point of order. Ms ALLAN: I would be delighted, if the opportunity arose, to table the opposition’s costings from the last election that removed the funding for a whole bunch of level crossings that we are now delivering, including Clyde Road, to in turn fund their own election commitments. So I think the member for Gembrook can pop his crocodile tears away and I will go back to talking about the Clyde Road level crossing removal. I am really pleased to advise the house that on the Pakenham line we have already removed 10 level crossings and Clyde Road is one of another six that we are removing right along the Pakenham line. So it is a great project, there is a lot more work to be done, particularly as part of this project and as part of our program to remove 75 dangerous and congested level crossings right across metropolitan Melbourne. I look forward to taking up that opportunity with the member for Berwick, and if the member for Gembrook wants to come and see how it is done, he is welcome to join us. The member for Cranbourne in her adjournment raised a matter about some further advice, and I will be pleased to come back to her on the advice around the timing of the delivery of the Hall Road and Western Port roadworks that are commitments of our government—again election commitments. But I was also delighted to hear the member for Cranbourne talk about the terrific progress that is happening on the Cranbourne line. I think it was called the ‘sparkling new’ Merinda Park station. I know the member for Cranbourne knows this, but Cranbourne will become the first level crossing free train line in our metropolitan network when we complete this set of works as part of the Cranbourne line upgrade—four level crossings to go, a brand new station and a level crossing free line all the way to Cranbourne. This is a great project. It fits in with other great projects that will support the member for Cranbourne’s communities—the airport rail, the Suburban Rail Loop and a whole bunch of other road projects. Can I just say to the house, the member for Narre Warren South and the member for Cranbourne are terrific examples of members who get in and get it done, who work with the government, who advocate long, proud and hard for their communities, who work very hard each and every day for their communities, and I am proud to serve in a government with such great local MPs who certainly give a true and accurate voice to the issues and needs of their communities. Another eight members raised matters for other ministers. I note the member for Gembrook has already dealt directly with the Minister for Housing on the matter that he raised in this place. In referring the other seven matters to the various ministers can I commend the member for Mount Waverley for his very powerful presentation on the challenges of living with mental health issues each

ADJOURNMENT 950 Legislative Assembly Thursday, 4 March 2021 and every day. I think the member for Mount Waverley’s contribution is the most appropriate way to end what has been a difficult but very important week in this place. Mr Battin: On a point of order, Speaker, I just want to confirm in relation to the response from the minister where it was stated that I have dealt directly with the Minister for Housing that I am still getting a response from the minister. That is not the response, me handing a piece of paper to the minister on the way through. Ms ALLAN: I noted that the member for Gembrook and the Minister for Housing spoke about this matter and that paperwork was handed by the member for Gembrook to the Minister for Housing, who I am sure, because he is a good and decent man and the member for Gembrook raised a matter regarding a particular need of a housing tenant, will follow it up. I had hoped that the reflections I made about the contribution of the member for Mount Waverley would have been the end of this week. I do hope now that we can finish this week, go home to our electorates and our families, and reflect on the challenges we have all grappled with this week. Mr Battin interjected. Ms ALLAN: I was not being smart. A member interjected. The SPEAKER: Order! Ms ALLAN: Speaker, I was actually demonstrating that I had noted that the member for Gembrook had reached out to the Minister for Housing and had an arrangement with him across the aisle. It was in good faith and good spirit that I made note of that so it was on the record. I would hope we can reflect on the events of this week and come back in better shape next sitting week. The SPEAKER: Order! There is no point of order. The house is now adjourned. House adjourned 5.37 pm until Tuesday, 16 March.