Wednesday, 15 October 2025

 John LISTER (Werribee) (10:15): I rise today to speak on a committee report from the Legal and Social Issues Committee, of which I am a member, and I would like to acknowledge my fellow members in the chamber, the member for Bayswater and the member for Eildon. In some of those meetings there have been some reflections on previous committee reports, so I want to use this opportunity today to talk particularly about the inquiry into increasing the number of registered organ and tissue donors. I would like to thank my colleagues who were on the committee at the time of preparing this report – the member for Lara, the member for Geelong, the member for Narre Warren South, the member for Bayswater and the member for Clarinda – for their work, particularly those members who are still on the committee now. Thank you for your hard work in assembling this report.

It was of particular interest to me. As someone who is a registered organ donor myself I feel really passionate about some of the issues that are explored in this report and also as the extended family member of someone who, in their passing, gave that last ultimate service to the community through having that discussion with family beforehand and making sure that their organs could be donated to people who needed them so much. I would like to pay tribute to my Uncle Dave for having that foresight in his final months to make sure that he could be on that register. I think it is a particularly personal thing. It is literally the things that make up you, and it is a really hard conversation to have. It is easy in the sense that we know an organ donation will go to a good cause and organ donations go to people who desperately need these things. But it is also a difficult thing to think about yourself in past tense and to think about what happens after you leave this mortal coil.

Some of the findings from the report I found particularly interesting and important in this context. It was conducted in the context of declining consent rates in Victoria and Australia: in 2023 a little under 50 per cent for Victoria and around Australia just above 50 per cent. It is really important that we have people registering to guide family decisions, because ultimately that decision is made with medical professionals and family after our passing. This report found that when people consented to donation, 82 per cent of the time families also went ahead with that process. However, if people had not already registered that they wanted to be an organ donor, only 39 per cent of people ended up being able to donate after their passing.

It is interesting. There is a bit of an anomaly in our system from past systems, and I talk to a lot of older people in my electorate who say, ‘I am an organ donor. I registered when I got my licence.’ That system was superseded when a national system came into play in the early 2000s. It is really important for those back at home or out in the community to check to see what their status is, because you had that good intention back in the day when you got your licence in the 1990s, but it is really important to make sure that you go back and check that you are still a registered organ donor. I welcome that finding and recommendation from the committee.

Of particular importance to my community, which is extremely diverse, is the work that they did around our multicultural and culturally and linguistically diverse community. There are a lot of social and religious beliefs and perspectives that may preclude organ donation. But it is important to have those conversations with faith leaders, and I encourage those organisations that do work with organ donorship as well as faith leaders across Melbourne and Victoria but particularly in my community in Wyndham to make sure that we are having those conversations with the people who are trusted to have those really hard conversations. Like I said, it is very hard to talk about yourself in the past tense when it comes to these things.

I think another particularly pertinent thing around organ donation is – just like my Uncle Dave, who never sought to be recognised for what he was able to do in his final act – it is particularly important to have that recognition through Births, Deaths and Marriages Victoria and to look at how we can do that through a legislative framework, because ultimately you want people in history in hundreds of years time to be able to see that there were people in our community that cared and did that.