Thursday, 4 June 2026

 Brad BATTIN (Berwick) (12:24): I rise on the Victoria Police Amendment (Police Reservists) Bill 2026, and I will first of all put our position in relation to this from the coalition, the Liberals and Nationals, that we will be supporting this bill. There are many reasons we will be supporting this, but I think as a starting point we must understand why we are where we are when it comes to needing the police reservists back in police stations here in Victoria. Any person that woke up this morning and managed to read either or both of the major papers, being the Herald Sun and the Age, would have just read another article about more crime here in Victoria, and they could actually understand, because they had some stats that highlighted some of the major issues here in this state. Car theft – over 32,000 cars were stolen in a 12-month period. That is getting to a stage where each and every day people are genuinely concerned that when they park their car at a train station, it might not be there when they get back.

The biggest impact of this is that insurance companies, as we saw today, have had to pay out $243 million in claims for 12,000 of those cars just in Victoria – $243 million has been paid out in insurance payments for stolen cars here in Victoria. The next state is Queensland, with just over $100 million. That is a big difference: just over $100 million paid out in Queensland, $243 million paid out here in Victoria. If I combine every state total of what was paid out on insurance for stolen cars, it still does not add up to what was paid out here in Victoria.

That is a stat that people should be worried about. We are just talking an average car, a Toyota RAV4 from 2020. The insurance rates on that vehicle now are skyrocketing in one state and not others. The saddest part about it was when a minister was asked about it he turned around and said it was because of the technology in the cars. That is why the cars are getting stolen: it has been made too easy by the manufacturers. From what I could hear from the minister I think his message to those people that are struggling to pay their insurance because it is too expensive is that what they should do is go out and buy a new car with newer technology, with less chance of being stolen. All those families out there that are struggling with the extra $500 in insurance, if you can just go out and buy yourself a $50 000 or $60,000 car, there is less chance of it being stolen. That would work if we were not seeing Audis being stolen, Mercedes being stolen, BMWs being stolen and Maseratis being stolen. It does not matter here in this state – they are stealing any car they can get their hands on.

There are two groups of people that are profiteering out of this. There is a bunch of crooks, some that are doing it just for a bit of a thrill. There are others that are probably selling on those cars, putting them on shipping containers and sending them overseas. The other one making money on this, believe it or not, is the Victorian state government, because insurance keep going up and every time it goes up there are new duties. The stamp duty goes up. All this extra money comes in from taxes because there are so many taxes on insurance at a state level. No wonder they are not trying to stop the crime happening here in this state. They are profiteering out of it. That is a massive concern here in Victoria.

There are plenty of reasons that we need to make some changes, and it is not just around this bill today, but I will go into that in a second. Victoria’s crime rate, everyone knows, is at a 20-year high. Everyone knows it. We are getting to a position now that these are record crime levels in almost every category, across every crime, in every region and every part of Victoria. This is not a Melbourne metro problem. A crime in this state is committed every 50 seconds. I have not even got to 5 minutes in – 10 crimes have been committed here in this state in that time. There is a theft from a retail store every 13 minutes. Someone is stealing something from a retail store every 13 minutes. Again, someone is profiteering from it. Kids or whoever is stealing it, whether it is for themselves or others that go on in organised crime and they are taking it off and selling it. But I can tell you who is paying for it: every person in Victoria who goes shopping at Coles, Woolworths, Aldi or your local stores, because they have got to recover their costs somewhere and their insurance bills are going up and they all pass that on to the final person, the consumer. That is what is impacting partly not just our crime crisis but the cost-of-living crisis here in our state. We need to stop it.

There is a serious assault every 28 minutes here in this state. And as I said today, a copper going home from work, from protecting the community this weekend, was walking through Southbank and was set upon by three people and assaulted in the street. Why is it that a copper who has done his job, his time, his shift, to protect us cannot even walk home safely? How do you reckon that copper felt the next morning when he woke up and read on the front page of the paper that one of those crooks had just been let go from court with a 12-month good behaviour bond for burning down a factory and causing $4.6 million in damage?

In what state, in what country – in what place anywhere else in the world – can you burn down a factory and cause $4.6 million in damage and walk away with a 12-month good behaviour bond? Nowhere. That is why we have got a crime crisis here in this state – because the consequences are weaker than I have ever seen in my time here. Every week there are nine carjackings across Victoria. Carjackings used to be when you watched 1990: The Bronx Warriors, a movie that was out many years ago. All the carriages through New York were graffitied, and you hopped in your car and you saw every so often a carjacking. It was something that happened in the movies. There are nine a week on the streets here in Victoria. Nine times a week someone is sitting in their car and someone comes up and assaults them to get that car. They steal the car from them at that spot at that time.

The reason this is all happening is because we have got more than 1500 vacancies on Victoria Police rosters. It does not matter where you are in the state. There are shortages in stations in Werribee. There are shortages in stations up in Swan Hill. There are shortages in Mildura. There are shortages down in Drouin. There are shortages down in Mallacoota. There are shortages in Warrnambool and Portland. Heaven forbid, we have even got a station that has no police, not even to respond – not even out on the road. So when the government say, ‘The reason we’re closing these stations is to put more police on the beat,’ they should explain that to the people in Clyde North. They do not even give them police to hop in the van. The consequences of that were seen this weekend. We saw a violent attack with machetes and baseball bats in a shopping centre, and blood was all over the ground. People do not want to go shopping there – their own community are now avoiding it. That is the crime crisis we have here in this state.

All of these things that have been happening do not even go into the area that I know the member for Brighton talks about a lot: aggravated burglaries. Victoria recorded 7878 aggravated burglaries in a 12-month period – that is getting to the stage of nearly one an hour. We are seeing aggravated burglary at nearly one an hour. Many of us in this place will have people contact their office who are victims of crime. When you speak to them, you know the pressure that is on them. They do not ring their local member of Parliament after that unless they are pretty stressed out. Imagine being home and having someone break in. You walk out of your room – this happened to one of the local dads I spoke to, Mark, and his wife Tenille – and there are two guys in the hallway and your daughters are in the house. How would you feel? I know what I would want to do and, let us be honest, what most people would want to do. We are seeing this happen too often. I have spoken to it in here before.

The member for Mildura introduced me to one of the dads up in Mildura who got a phone call. He and his wife were at a concert in Perth and the phone kept ringing. You know what it is like if your daughters are ringing – you go out and answer it because you want to make sure they are okay. He answered the phone: ‘Dad, someone’s in the house.’ He was in Perth – what could he do? They were in Mildura. It was an aggravated burglary in their house. They rang the coppers, and the coppers were brilliant – they turned out as quickly as they could – but those kids will never feel safe in their own home. That is what this crime crisis creates. It creates a place of absolute uncertainty and unsafety. People do not feel safe in their own communities, in their own cars or in their own homes.

That is why we will support the bill – because we do support bringing reservists in. I may be corrected, but I think there is still one reservist in the system. If they are not, it is not that long since they left. The reservists in the past used to do a lot of the admin work. They would also help out with rosters – they would put the rosters together. Obviously a lot more of that is electronic now. Putting the reservists in the station means we can bring back some experience. We can bring back police officers who understand investigations and understand the operations of a police station. The rules are in the bill: you have to have done more than two years. I guarantee you there are a lot of coppers out there that have done 10 or 15 years and are no longer in the job but would not mind going in and helping out. They want to educate and train the next generation as well and work with them. These are good men and women who have served our state and are willing to come back and help serve it again. Can I just say thank you to them for coming in and doing this role. The pay rate is not the biggest pay rate in the world. They are not coming in here for money, they are coming in here because they know that they can genuinely make a difference.

One of the biggest reasons that I am going to support this bill today is because the number of people who are resigning from Victoria Police and the years of experience we are losing will impact the next generation of coppers coming through. They will not be able to have the same mentors that I had when I was there, the ones I still remember, like Leo van Tol, who every time that I did something right or wrong stood by me and made sure I learned how to do it better next time. If it was Nigel McGuire White and you went out and spoke to someone at the flats in Prahran and you went in there and you did it and you came out, but you did not do it exactly as it should have been done, Nigel would work with you to make sure you got it right. There are coppers that have been there for years that pass on to the next generation how to be a better copper. It is not the stuff you can learn in a book at the academy. The academy teaches you not to get sued. That is what it teaches you. The coppers you work with teach you how to become a copper, and we are losing that. At a retirement event for Victoria Police that came through recently – they have their big event once a year; it used to be about 50 or 60 people they would get along to celebrate and thank them for the work they had done – there were 300-plus, on one Friday. Now, you do not get invited there if you have done two years in the service. These were people who were long-serving police officers, and 300-plus of them were going in one go. That is a lot of experience that we are losing from Victoria Police.

The reason we are going to support this bill is that hopefully a few of them will go, ‘I’m going to go back. I want to go back in and pass on the skills that I have.’ They may have been a detective from homicide. They may have been in the armed robbery squad. Some of them have been around long enough that they would have been in the old Asian gang squad. These are the skill sets that we need and that we can pass on, such as how to talk to people. Going through the academy you learn in a very controlled environment. They do the best they can with what they have got. They teach the best things they can in those environments. The academy over time has improved so much on the skill sets that people walk out with because of the way they can set up the role-plays, but the reality is that it is always a controlled environment.

That changes when you get out and you walk into someone’s home for the first time for a domestic violence situation. You are told the things that can go wrong, but until you experience it, you do not really get it. A good example of that is if you go into a place for a domestic violence call and you know who the victim is and you know who the offender is. You already know it; you have heard the stories before. You walk in and there is a bloke, and you know he is the offender. Then you go in to do the right thing and you go to arrest him and remove him, and you get attacked by the victim, because the victim is scared. They are not attacking you because they do not like you. They are not attacking you because they hate coppers. They are attacking because they are fearful that they will be blamed for you arresting their offender, their perpetrator. These are the things you cannot train for much in the academy until they happen, and that is why you need the experience in the street. If you send in two constables without that experience, the consequences will be horrendous.

Over time in Victoria Police we have seen a decline in the numbers. We have got over 500 full-time members in there, but we have also got the 1500 vacancies, and we are starting to get to a position now where the Chief Commissioner of Police is coming out and saying, ‘By closing or reducing the hours in stations, we can put more police on the beat.’ The reality is we used to have both. That is how you keep the community safest. The real way to fix this, whilst this is a very, very, very small bandaid for a very big broken leg, is to actually bring in 3000 new police and ensure that we can recruit the numbers we need so we can open the stations again and get police back out on the beat. The advantage of this program is now we can do that as well by bringing them in and having the experience back at the station to work with these recruits and newer police officers as they go through.

I met up with a couple of the coppers recently from the academy. They will tell you now that there are plenty of people that want to come in – and the government are going to be patting themselves on the back at the moment, going on about double squads and what have you right now. It is a shame they did not do it last year when we had the vacancies. All of a sudden they have just realised there is a problem when it comes to going through the academy. Let me assure you, the one thing that every copper that I have spoken to has turned around and said they do not really trust this government on is that on 1 December, if they are still in government, there go the double squads, back down to what they were, because, let us be honest, they have a plan. This government has got a plan to cut the numbers in Victoria Police. Let us be honest, that is their saving. And there is no bigger evidence –

Members interjecting.

Brad BATTIN: They can all laugh, but let us be honest, there are 500 less police today, full-time equivalent, than there were under Daniel Andrews. Jacinta Allan is the one, the Premier is the one, that has cut by that. They have cut them.

There are 1500 vacancies from when Daniel Andrews was there, until the new Premier. So the new Premier has come in, has obviously been left the debt from the previous and is now cutting Victoria Police and cutting safety here in our state.

A member: Not true.

Brad BATTIN: I heard ‘Not true’. The facts are in their own figures. In the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee (PAEC) hearings they came out again last week. There are less police today than there were two years ago by 500 full-time equivalent police. There are 1500 vacancies on the rosters. There are more than 40 police stations closed. Mernda police station, a 24-hour station here in this state, is now going down to two or three days a week. Whittlesea is going to ‘by appointment’. I am just going to ask you: how many people can make an appointment for when an aggravated burglary is going to happen? I do not think you can. How many people can make an appointment at their local police station and say, ‘I’m getting chased by somebody. I’m the victim of domestic violence, and the place of safety I want to go is the local police station’? You just cannot. This is where this government has failed when it comes to Victoria Police, and as I said, this bill here is a very, very minor fix for it.

I think it is really important that we do what we can do to make a genuine difference when it comes to community safety here in Victoria. We need 3000 new police. We need to recruit 3000 new police, get them through the academy and get them onto the beat. Why? Because there are 1507 vacancies – we can fill them – and we need 1500 extra so we can get the number back up with the population growth we have had here in this state. The population here in Victoria is growing at a rapid rate. In Casey we have got nearly 400,000 people, or probably just over. Compare that to Tasmania. We have actually got a population similar to that of Tasmania. They have got a whole police force; we have got three stations, and one has no police. There is a big difference in what is happening in those communities. We are lucky to have three or four vans on the road at night. In Tasmania they have got many stations open all night – a big difference. Crime rates are different too. Maybe that is reflective of having Victoria Police available to go on the road.

We want to make sure that train stations, as we promised in 2010, become places of safety. The way to do that was by putting PSOs at the train stations on platforms, and this government is removing them from 119 stations across Victoria, across metropolitan Melbourne. 119 places that have been places of safety are now no longer places of safety. They are not going to be there. People will just feel more unsafe on the public transport system. There has been a 74 per cent increase in crime at train stations, and the answer to that 74 per cent increase in crime has been to remove the PSOs. No-one has been able to explain that to me logically – that the best way to solve crime on platforms is to remove the PSOs that are there to keep people safe. There is just zero logic in it.

We need to give police the powers for stronger pursuit laws, because each and every time these young offenders steal a car – 32,000-odd here in Victoria – and the police go to pursue them, they basically call off the pursuit. Nobody is willing to take a risk. If we keep letting them get away, they are going to keep stealing the cars. They know that all you have to do is put the foot down – ‘The coppers aren’t chasing you. You’ll be right; you’ll get away with it’ – and they are getting away with it.

Some will say, ‘But we can go and catch up with them later on because it is safer. No worries.’ Seventy per cent of stolen cars here in Victoria remain unsolved crimes, so they are not catching up with them later on. They are getting away with it, and the kids know it. Do you know what they do then? They tell their mates. That is why we have gone from about 100 in the cohort that were really the worst offenders here in our state to over 600 that are the worst offenders here in our state, because the recruitment drive is simple: ‘Come out, earn a little bit of money, steal a car. Coppers can’t get you. If they do, don’t stress. Go to court. We’ll get out before they finish their paperwork. Get bail. Eventually, when we go for sentencing, we’ll get a 12-month good behaviour bond and be back out again.’ And it continues, and it continues. Or even better, you can commit 109 offences and go to court and get all 109 dropped because of doli incapax – yet you still managed to google before you left how you could do these offences, and you then explain later on, ‘I didn’t know the difference between right and wrong.’ That is a broken system.

The pursuit laws are to ensure that Victoria Police can continue a pursuit knowing that they will be protected, that they will have a government from this side who will stand with them and protect them in a legal manner so that if they go into a pursuit, they will basically not be able to get in trouble unless there is absolute negligence. Also, the other side of it, in the event a person starts a pursuit, they should be charged for initiating a pursuit, so there should be a charge specifically for initiating a pursuit. If during that pursuit, there is an accident – not necessarily them but another car from the pursuit, even a police car – and there is a death, the person who started the pursuit should be held accountable. They started the pursuit. Let us send a clear message: it is not okay to steal a car and take off when police chase you, and if you put the community at risk, you will be held accountable. Let us send a pretty clear message: a Wilson-led government stand with police and not with the crooks. We will stand with the victims and make sure offenders are held accountable.

We have seen, I am going to say by now, 10, 15, 20, 30 media releases saying ‘We’ve got the toughest bail laws in the country.’ And yet every day another story comes up and someone who is on bail has committed another crime. It happens over and over and over again, so much so that I spoke to a copper in regional Victoria who arrested a person for a double stabbing and the next day he walked past the crook and said, ‘Hold on, I arrested you yesterday.’ He literally turned around and said, ‘So what, boss? Bailed’ and walked off – not a care in the world. Now the copper feels pretty guilty about what goes on. We have seen the outcomes of what happens when people continuously get bail and they continue to commit crime. You only need to look up the car accident up near Mildura recently where one died and one kid ended up in hospital with serious injuries – they were the offenders.

But that is also the outcome of weak bail laws. That is the outcome of weak sentencing. These kids, if you have the proper sentencing regime, if you have the proper programs to intervene with them, if you have the proper programs to work with them and their families and their community and you can keep them out of the life of crime, you will save their lives, because these kids are dying. I am going to tell you here, I went into Victoria Police not to see crooks die but because we could actually make a change.

Programs that were run made a difference. The police cannot run those programs anymore; they have not got the staff. The old gym system, the Police Citizens Youth Clubs, where coppers interacted with these kids and they had the programs with the boxing, are nearly all gone. We have got to look at bringing some of this stuff back, actually getting them back involved and building the respect levels again. Some of these kids may still go down a path of crime, but it is different because they will have respect for the Victoria Police. And if you can get police out there understanding that as well – it is those old-school coppers, the ones that have been there that know how to deal with these kids. It is those ones that we need to make sure are still working with those kids and that they are building the respect between them. They build a great level of respect. It does not stop them committing crime all the time, but it does build the respect and the crime is different. Because one of the biggest things that has changed in the last 10 years is whilst our crime rate has increased, it is the violent crimes that have increased. The home burglaries have sort of plateaued recently, but the aggravated burglaries have increased, because these kids do not care. The car thefts have increased, but carjackings continue to massively increase. Kids walking around the streets with machetes and batons is almost normal.

I refer back quite often to the book by Geoff Canada – and I have always said, we will never get there – which is Fist Stick Knife Gun. It is the New York model. It is about how it eventuated from kids that had fights in the street until eventually someone brought a stick to the fight. Then they started to have fights with sticks until someone brought a knife to the fight. And the natural progression from that was that someone brought a gun, and that led to the gun violence through America.

I hope we do not have the same gun culture here. We do not have the same availability of guns here in Victoria or Australia. But I never thought we would get to the stage we have got now, where 16-year-olds are turning up with machetes in shopping centres in broad daylight and they do not care. They literally do not care. In Chapel Street we have seen someone running down the street with a knife. In Lygon Street we saw a group attack each other with machetes, and we are almost coming to a stage where it is a normalised part of Victoria. It is not normal – it is just not. And the best way to stop those things, particularly when you think of those areas – Chapel Street, Lygon Street – is to put coppers back on foot patrol in the area. Give them the police resources so they can have the foot patrols down there.

Anthony Cianflone: That’s what the bill is about.

Brad BATTIN: The bill is about putting 200 reservists in one station.

The ACTING SPEAKER (Wayne Farnham): Member for Pascoe Vale, come to order.

Brad BATTIN: I guarantee, member for Pascoe Vale, this will not put one extra copper on the street, because these are for the 40 stations that are already shut. So the coppers are already out there, according to you.

The ACTING SPEAKER (Wayne Farnham): Through the Chair, member for Berwick.

Brad BATTIN: According to the Labor government the coppers are already back out on the street. That is why they have closed the stations. So these ones are to reopen part of those stations, not to put extras out there. If you want to put more coppers on the street, recruit 3000 Victoria Police, put them back out in the stations where they are needed, bring back bike patrols, bring back foot patrols and bring back where community safety is also around a perception. When coppers walk down the street in a group of three or four and sit down and have a coffee, have a chat to some of the business owners, walk along Chapel Street at night in their high-vis vests and chat to some of the people waiting at nightclubs, that is what changes crime, because people feel safer and crooks look around and see coppers everywhere and go, ‘I’m not committing a crime today.’ If you wanted to move the drug habit, which we did back in the day in Dandenong, you brought in the force response unit. I could not stand them half the time because they came in and gave out fines for everything, and all the crooks would get angry down there and cause us more dramas. But it worked, because we would actually go in there and start to get the ones that were offending – and back then you used to get jail time, so they would catch the offenders for committing crimes – put them away, and we would see the crime increase again six and 12 months later after they got out of jail. Now you see it increase 90 minutes later, because they get out on bail.

These are the things that you can do, but you need the resources for it. So as I have said, we do support bringing in the 200 reservists, but it needs to be part of a broader plan. Let me assure you, under a Wilson-led Liberals–Nationals government we have the plan to make Victoria safer, and that includes the 3000 police. That includes a genuine break bail, face jail, so if you commit crimes whilst you are on bail, you get one strike, you are out. We will protect our coppers with proper pursuit laws to ensure that they are protected and those that start the pursuits are held to account here in our state. We will make sure the police have the resources to put more police on the beat and to protect the community. We will get the PSOs back on the railway stations so people know where the places of safety are. And one of the things that is most important: we will reopen the 40 police stations that the Labor government have shut or reduced the hours for, so when you need the police you know where to go, and when you get there you will not be met with a closed sign. You will be met with support from a Victoria Police officer who is there to help you and make sure that you stay safe.

The ACTING SPEAKER (Wayne Farnham): Just before I call the member for Pascoe Vale, I will remind the chamber of the use of proper titles.

 Anthony CIANFLONE (Pascoe Vale) (12:54): I rise to speak in support of the Victoria Police Amendment (Police Reservists) Bill 2026. In doing so I commend the Minister for Police for bringing this bill to the chamber and the work of Victoria Police in informing it and guiding it, which of course I support in my capacity as the Parliamentary Secretary for Community Safety as well. Everyone across our community deserves the right to be and feel safe in their homes, in their streets and in their suburbs, workplaces and communities, and that is why the government will continue to take strong action to keep our communities safe, strong action on crime and strong action on the root causes of crime – very much contrary to the comments of the shadow minister, which I will turn to in a moment.

As part of this I would like to acknowledge and commend the work and the role of Victoria Police in keeping us all safe 365 days a year, 24 hours a day right across our community. We know the risk that police face every single day when they put on the uniform and go out on duty, and we saw the devastating consequences and risks of what that means on 26 August last year in Porepunkah. We continue to commemorate Detective Leading Senior Constable Neal Thompson and Senior Constable Vadim De Waart-Hottart.

We must continue doing more than ever to keep our community and our police safe by giving them the powers, the tools, the resources and the investments they need and they deserve and they request in doing their job to keep us all safe. Again, contrary to the comments of the shadow minister, we have continued to take that strong action. We have appointed the new Victoria Police commissioner Mike Bush, who is now a year into the role and very much working towards modernising the deployment of Victorian police resources. We have invested $5 billion into Victoria Police since 2014. We have provided police officers with a pay rise, recognising their work. We have recruited more police – again, contrary to those comments. 3600 more police have been recruited under this government since 2014. Victoria has the largest police force in Australia – period, full stop – with 15,500 sworn police officers and 1400 PSOs. Our Made for More campaign, which received more money in the recent state budget, has seen applications skyrocket to five-year highs, the amount of people applying to join the police force, with 8700 applications last year alone. The police academy is continuing to facilitate double squads graduating every two weeks, with 1300 new recruits each year, 52 recruits every two weeks.

In terms of laws, we continue to progress strong laws, including the bill that is before us today, of course, and starting with our tough bail laws to crack down on violent, dangerous and serious repeat offending. We have implemented adult time for violent crime so that serious, violent young criminals face the same consequences as adults; life sentences for recruiting a child to commit serious crimes; and tougher laws and measures to crack down on organised crime, bikie gangs and illicit tobacco. We have tripled the number of tobacco licensing inspectors. Just today Minister Erdogan announced the introduction into the Parliament of new laws around closure notices for tobacco premises that sell illicit tobacco.

These laws are making a difference already. Remand decisions where a judge sentences someone to jail have increased by nearly 70 per cent. That is 10,000 more offenders that have been remanded since these laws have been brought into effect. Bail revocations have increased by 84 per cent. Children’s Court bail refusals are up by more than a third, and overall bail refusals are now at record highs. We have also of course introduced the nation’s first ban on machetes and other measures to take dangerous weapons off our streets, and that has led to 17,500 machetes being seized by Victoria Police and over 12,000 being surrendered. Almost 30,000 machetes have been taken off our streets since the machete laws were introduced by this state, which the opposition continue to campaign against. We have introduced brand new offences for assaulting workers and posting and boasting about crime online, and we have introduced serious vilification reforms.

We are listening to Victoria Police about how they deploy their resources too, with a new intelligence-led PSO model enabling Victoria Police to put PSOs where they are needed, when they are needed, based on real police intelligence. As well, there is over $8 million in funding to support Operation Pulse, which is seeing PSOs patrolling shopping precincts to keep families, workers and shoppers safe. We are boosting more PSO resources even further, with $44 million in this year’s budget to recruit at least an extra 50 PSOs. In terms of crime prevention, we have established the violence reduction unit, which is investing in local place-based initiatives and youth crime early intervention diversion programs, including community safety and social workers in schools, which we are funding through organisations like Blue Light, the Les Twentyman Foundation and so much more. As parliamentary secretary I am delighted to be working very closely with the VRU and its CEO Andrea Davidson to progress that very important work.

One of the biggest issues that was not mentioned by the opposition speaker in his opening contribution was the number one law and order issue in this state, which is family violence. He did not even go anywhere near that.

Members interjecting.

Anthony CIANFLONE: He did not go anywhere near it.

The ACTING SPEAKER (Wayne Farnham): At this point in time, as per standing orders, we will break for lunch. The member for Pascoe Vale will have the call after lunch.

Sitting suspended 12:59 pm until 2:02 pm.

The SPEAKER: I would like to acknowledge in the gallery His Excellency Dr Siswo Pramono, Ambassador of the Republic of Indonesia, and Yohannes Jatmiko Heru Prasetyo, who is the Indonesian Consul-General in Victoria. Welcome.