Wednesday, 19 November 2025

 Nicole WERNER (Warrandyte) (12:51): I rise to lead the debate on the Children, Youth and Families Amendment (Stability) Bill 2025. It is my first time leading the debate on a bill in this Parliament. I want to begin by saying that it is a genuine privilege to do so. To be given the responsibility to lead this debate on legislation goes to the very heart of the work that we do for children, young people and families, and it is something I do not take lightly. I note that I will have to pause for the lunch break and return to this, so I will just make some opening remarks before lunch.

This specific bill, which seeks to make some significant changes, has been something that I have really been considering and looking into deeply. I think particularly as a new mother, having had my first baby in January of this year, and as the new Shadow Minister for Children and also Shadow Minister for Youth and Future Leaders, this is something very significant to me. It is not lost on me how important the work that we do in this place is and how important it is particularly where it pertains to our most vulnerable, the children that we care for. This is an important opportunity to examine how our systems support Victoria’s most vulnerable children who are in the care of the state, how we provide them with genuine stability and security and how this Parliament can do better when it comes to keeping children safe. This is arguably the most significant change to the child protection and out-of-home care sector since the reforms were introduced by Minister Wooldridge when we were in government in 2014.

[NAME AWAITING VERIFICATION]

Given the seriousness of this work and what it seeks to achieve for Victoria’s most vulnerable children, I do have amendments I will be moving in the house, probably after the lunch break at this stage. Can I also just make a note of and thank the Minister for Children in the other place Minister Blandthorn, whose office has actually been quite exceptional in arranging the briefings for us. Liam in her office – if I can say a thankyou to him – has been very courteous and very helpful. I always appreciate that even though there might be robust debate in this chamber and in this house and words that fly back and forth, we can be respectful of one another and still be able to have good working relationships outside of the robust debate and theatrics that sometimes happen in this house.

What the bill seeks to achieve is to amend the Children, Youth and Families Act 2005 to revise the legal framework governing children who are subject to protection orders, with the stated aim of maximising safe, timely and sustainable opportunities for family reunification. The government has described this bill as a major reform, and it is. It represents the most significant change to Victoria’s child protection system in more than a decade, and it fundamentally reshapes how the system will make decisions about stability and long-term outcomes for vulnerable children. The bill primarily amends the act in three major ways: firstly, by replacing the concept of permanency with the concept of stability, which actually is a reversal of reforms passed in 2014. That change is more than semantic. It introduces a new holistic definition of stability that includes legal, physical, cultural and relational components. It shifts the foundation on which all case planning, court decision-making and departmental interventions will be based. As I said, it is quite landmark.

The bill substantially changes the duration extension framework for family reunification orders. It allows the court to issue an initial family reunification order for up to 24 months, doubling the previous maximum of 12 months. It also permits the court to extend a family reunification order by additional periods of 12 months, and I will note that that is with no limit, as defined by this bill, on the number of extensions. Initially the family reunification order could be made for 12 months. It is now being doubled to 24 months from the outset, and now the cumulative 24 months is being removed from that. So there will be the ability to then apply for additional extension periods of 12 months, with no limit on the number of extensions, provided the court considers this to be in the child’s best interests. To enable this, the bill repeals the cumulative 12-month cap, as I said, and removes the requirement for there to be compelling evidence that reunification is likely in order to justify an extension.

Finally, the other key reform in this bill is that it removes adoption from the hierarchy of case planning objectives. This means adoption will no longer be considered as an option for children in the statutory child protection system.

These three changes directly reverse the coalition’s 2014 reforms, which were designed to anchor the child protection system around permanency and ensure that children were not left to languish in uncertainty. The reason that these reforms were passed in 2014 – and again I note that these are what this bill now seeks to reform and reverse essentially – was because there were children adrift in the system. There were children in the care of the state that were adrift, languishing in the system, and in many cases in this state of limbo where they were not able to return yet to their families and were then in the system for a long time. It might have been because there were systemic issues where there were structural barriers or simply that their parents could not access services to get their lives in a place where they would be able to take on the care of their children again.

I will note here that every parent loves their child. That is not at question here. It is not about the love of a parent for their child, but it is the capacity to parent that we would like to underline on this side of the house. There are situations where the capacity to parent is not there or the ability to parent is not there, given the circumstances that perhaps the parents have undergone. Perhaps it is that the parent themselves is a victim of domestic violence. Maybe it is that the parents, in many cases, were children in the care of the state themselves. It is about the capacity of parents to be able to parent their children. For us on this side of the house, it is the child’s best interests and the child-centred approach to those in the care of the state that we are arguing for today.

Before I go to the concerns about the bill, perhaps I will just quickly note that the government presents this bill as a pathway to better outcomes for children, but on closer examination it reveals several serious concerns, and these concerns have been raised by stakeholders. They have been raised by stakeholders, practitioners, those with lived experience and those from organisations that support vulnerable families every day. They go to the heart of whether this bill will actually deliver stability for children or whether it will simply change the language whilst perpetuating the very uncertainty that children in the system already face. That is why our position on this side of the house is to not oppose the bill but to move a reasoned amendment, and that is after careful consideration. We have also consulted with stakeholders, who have provided us with a lot of feedback and a lot of concerns that they have, noting that the issues that this bill seeks to address are serious, complex and deeply important. That is why we will be moving an amendment after lunch.

Sitting suspended 1:00 pm until 2:02 pm.

Business interrupted under standing orders.

The SPEAKER: I would like to acknowledge in the gallery the ambassador for Pakistan, His Excellency Ifran Shaukat, and Consul-General Wajid Hassan.