Wednesday, 17 June 2026

 Mathew HILAKARI (Point Cook) (11:28): I am so pleased to rise at this point in time on the Dangerous Goods Transport Bill 2026. I actually heard a lot of the contribution from the member for Thomastown yesterday, and she talked about the experiences of her own community and how important this bill is, as it directly affects her in the northern suburbs, but I am going to start by just talking a little bit about the intent of the bill. I see the member for Thomastown now, and it was an extraordinary contribution in talking about those personal experiences from the northern suburbs, so I thank her for putting those matters on the record in particular, because this is one of the things that the Labor government really succeed in: listening to our communities and making sure that we respond to those matters that do arise.

I note that this is a framework which has been updated in the most significant way in the last four decades. That is a really important thing in terms of the dangerous goods that are being moved across our state and used by workers across our state and going on to affect communities across our state. This bill delivers on the Labor government’s commitment to implement reforms recommended by Andrew Palmer KC, now Judge Palmer, following a series of really challenging things that happened across our community in terms of dangerous goods. Obviously the amendments that I speak to also apply to the Occupational Health and Safety Amendment (Dangerous Goods) Bill 2026, as this is a cognate debate covering both of those. Those really challenging events were major chemical fires in Melbourne’s northern suburbs and the inner west in 2018 and 2019.

This really fundamentally goes to the illegal stockpiling of dangerous goods across our community and how they have gone on to hurt and affect our community in such a dangerous way. Of course dangerous goods are needed. We do need dangerous goods for all sorts of things, and they can be through agriculture. In the community that I represent in Werribee South there are dangerous goods being used. There is lots of fuel being stored onsite. I was recently with some farmers in Werribee South, and they talked about the challenges of Trump’s war in Iran. They talked about how they needed to have more fuel onsite at that point in time, but they have to store that safely. They also use a series of chemicals in different circumstances around agriculture and machinery in particular.

In construction, manufacturing and health care – we use dangerous chemicals to produce our food and support that production. We use them in our hospital environments. We use them in our construction environments. Whether that is fertiliser, fuel, plastic, cleaning products or paint, all of these are across our community and across our economy, but they do carry really inherent risks. We must make sure we protect our community against those inherent risks. We see them on the backs of trucks when we are on the West Gate Freeway in the canisters – they could be corrosive, flammable, combustible, explosive, oxidising. There are many hazardous properties that are dealt with and moved across our state and stored across our community.

I see the member for Melton nodding along. He is one of the people who really had to be at the front line of these matters, because as a former ambulance office hitting the tools, these are things that must be known when you turn up to an incident. The member for Frankston in this chamber at the moment – and newly minted minister – knows about this in a really sharp way as well, being a former firefighter. The real lived experience of people on this side of government speaks to why these reforms are so important. Dangerous goods also include explosive and security-sensitive ammonium nitrate, and they present security risks to the Victorian community.

One of the matters that I just thought I would raise at this point is that we have a RAAF base in Point Cook – the oldest military aircraft base in the world, established in 1913. One of the things that we talked about at a community consultation, which had several hundred people there – it was an extraordinary community consultation – was the future of the RAAF base. The defence department has identified that it is no longer needed for the defence of the nation, but one of the issues that came up almost immediately was: what PFAS is onsite? What dangerous goods have been stored onsite over time at this air base? It is an air base; of course there is going to be a lot of aviation fuel. There is going to be a lot of challenging material. It is also a RAAF base. There is a shooting range onsite. Of course there has been ammunition and explosive material on that site for a long time. I was very pleased that the defence department were able to talk through the challenges but also the limited challenges on the RAAF Point Cook base site, because that is important for our community as we think about its future. RMIT has been doing pilot training there for 30 years. It is a really great example of how we support training and improved education across our state – something that I hope continues there for some time. The storage of dangerous goods goes to the future usage of land sites.

Another defence base across Melbourne, the Maribyrnong defence site, knows really directly the challenges of poor storage of dangerous material. We know with PFAS that we have faced as a government real challenges around dealing with that over time. This is why this bill is so important, because it is important both for the present circumstances in storage and movement across our state but also the future circumstances, because if it is not stored right, it does become a real risk for our community. I will get on to a couple of examples of that which really drive home why we need to be so careful about this. As I said, one previously raised by the member for Thomastown is the illegal stockpiling of chemical waste that was occurring across 2018 and 2019.

In August 2018 in West Footscray – I saw the member for Footscray earlier, and I am sure this is very much imprinted in her mind – a warehouse fire broke out. It contained millions of litres of toxic chemical waste – millions. It was an extraordinary accumulation, and it should not have been there. Two hundred firefighters needed to turn up, and 40 firefighting appliances were involved in the response. There were more than 100 injuries reported as a result of that, and health issues from exposure to smoke and other substances, and fatigue, were reported. A number of firefighters, who did an extraordinary job in just turning up – when many in the community need to walk away or get away from a situation, they turn up and they run towards that. And they did, but they have experienced health problems as a result of fighting that fire in particular. It is an extraordinary thing that firefighters do every single day.

The water run-off from this terrible, terrible incident contaminated the neighbouring Stony Creek. It killed wildlife and destroyed vegetation. There were more than 2000 dead fish recovered. Community health warnings then lasted several months after the incident. So when we are talking about this bill, we are talking about things that go on to have a long tail in our community both for those people who respond to the incident, those firefighters and those emergency workers who turn up, but also the broader community – it goes on to impact livability across our community. The rehab work – well, there were 70 million litres of polluted water that had to be removed. Seventy million litres of water – that is an extraordinary amount. There was more than 2800 cubic metres of contaminated sediment, which upset and destroyed the environment in this area.

I do not need to go on further on that one. But in Campbellfield in Melbourne’s northern suburbs – and this is what the member for Thomastown really drove her points home around – in April 2019 another large fire broke out at a chemical waste processing facility. I am not going to get long enough to go through all the issues that I want to cover in this, but I do want to just thank the minister for bringing forward these bills. I also want to thank all the ministerial team and departmental staff and the EPA, who have been working on these matters for some time. These are important works in front of the Parliament. I hope the opposition is supporting this bill – I am looking over, but I am not seeing any nods. I commend this bill to the house.

 Steve McGHIE (Melton) (11:38): Acting Speaker De Martino, it is good to see you in the chair. I just want to give a shout-out. Yesterday you provided me with a little gift from Sicily, which is fantastic. I am sure it will be put to good use. It is a bottle opener, and I am sure it will be put to good use, so thank you.

A member interjected.

Steve McGHIE: No, I have not drunk it yet, because it is a bottle opener. We are talking about dangerous goods. I can assure you that what I will be using it on are definitely dangerous goods. Anyway, thank you for that.

I rise in support of the Dangerous Goods Transport Bill 2026 and the Occupational Health and Safety Amendment (Dangerous Goods) Bill 2026. Dangerous goods are something that most of us rarely think about, yet they are part of our everyday lives. As the previous speaker, the member for Point Cook, raised, a lot of the dangerous goods that are in our community are used for many, many products – for cleaning products, fertiliser, food, fuel, plastics, paint and many other products. We just take it for granted that these dangerous goods are safe, and we only think about them when things go wrong. But every day, dangerous goods travel along our roads and railways and move through our ports and are stored and used in workplaces right across Victoria. They are used to produce the food that we eat and of course the fuel that we rely on and the medicines that treat us. Building materials are made up of them, and they are used to construct our homes and our buildings. They are products that we use every day – that is how important these goods are, and that is why we need to treat most of them with caution but also transport them with caution. They are certainly essential to our economy and our modern lifestyle, but of course they do carry some inherent risk.

Of course when dangerous goods are handled safely we do not notice them. It is fine. Everything goes well. But when they are not, the consequences can be devastating not only for the workers that are directly involved but for all the emergency services personnel, the surrounding communities and the environment – again, as has just been alluded to by the member for Point Cook, the damage that has been done by some of these spills and fires and things like that. That is why this legislation is so important.

These bills represent the most significant reforms to Victoria’s dangerous goods framework in more than 40 years, and they implement the recommendations from the Palmer review. I think there were 49 recommendations. They modernise the legislation that has simply not kept pace with contemporary industry and strengthen the powers available to WorkSafe to prevent tragedies before they occur. That is the whole idea. It is about prevention of any disasters that may occur around these goods. For us as legislators, our responsibility is not simply just to respond after a disaster strikes, it is to learn from any failures that we have had in the past and ensure that our laws will reduce the likelihood of any failures ever occurring again. That is what we hope to do with these legislative changes and the introduction of this legislation.

We have been fairly fortunate in Victoria, but we have experienced some reminders of what can happen when dangerous goods are not managed appropriately and properly. In my former career as a paramedic I certainly attended a number of incidents involving dangerous goods that I have kept in my mind since finishing as a paramedic. I will go to two events that I certainly attended. I actually looked them up in some media stories today, but the first one was back in 1986. It was called the Sims Metal explosion in Brooklyn. I was a paramedic working out of the Sunshine branch. It was quite a distance from this factory, and unfortunately this factory exploded because of a furnace exploding. Unfortunately four men were killed and seven people were seriously injured. We were the second ambulance to arrive at the scene. I was working with a good friend of mine who is now retired, Gavin Hall, out of the Sunshine branch, and we were directed to a gentleman. When we arrived at this Sims Metal explosion – and this was a massive sort of warehouse-type building – it was flattened. It looked like a bomb had hit the place – absolutely flattened – and the poor gentleman that we were directed to had all of his clothing blown off. He was squatted down on the ground. He was conscious. All of his skin was falling off him, but he still had his work boots on. As I say, he was conscious, and we transported that gentleman to Western Hospital, Footscray, and then on to the Alfred Hospital. He would have suffered with at least 90 per cent burns. I do not know the outcome for him. I assume he did not survive. I am assuming that. As I say, there were four dead and seven men that were seriously injured in that incident. To see the size of that building that was flattened through this explosion was incredible.

A few years later I attended the Coode Island fire and explosion, which happened in August of 1991. There were a couple of incidents there at Coode Island. There was an incident on 21 August 1991, and it happened in the afternoon at around about 2 o’clock or a quarter past 2, where there was an explosion there. A 600,000 litre chemical storage tank exploded. I think there were several hundred firefighters involved in the response to that fire. They did contain that after a few hours, but interestingly enough a pipe the next day exploded also. They were such significant fires for the people that remember the Coode Island fires. People were evacuated from nearby suburbs, Footscray Primary School was evacuated, buildings were closed down and the ships ceased coming up the river, so there were many surrounds affected by it. I remember we responded to that incident, but we were stood off it. We were put up at the Western Bulldogs football ground at the time, and many, many emergency service workers were there just on standby to attend to that incident that went for a number of days and affected the local communities.

I think the clean-up bill for that was around about $35 million in regard to that incident. So you can see the devastation of these particular things that occur when they do occur inappropriately. It makes you think about that down the track. Of course when you attend dangerous goods events as an emergency service worker, there are a lot of unknowns – things such as: what are the chemicals that are present and are they stable, is there a risk of another explosion, is the smoke toxic, is the structure safe, has everyone been evacuated, can crews safely enter? Fortunately for paramedics, generally they do not go into those scenes until the firies declare them safe. Thanks to the firies for doing that. But, as I say, paramedics will not engage directly into those facilities unless they are declared safe. So you can see the importance of this legislation in regard to how it affects our local communities and all of our emergency service workers that attend. A shout-out to the firies in regard to the outcomes of these incidents for them, because many, many firies suffer from the outcomes of these incidents due to their exposure to these chemicals. It is certainly very, very dangerous for the emergency service workers that are directly involved in these incidents.

We have got to reduce the risk, and that is what this legislation provides for. It provides for greater powers to WorkSafe to investigate and to enter facilities to prevent – and that is the key to it – any chance of these fires occurring and these chemical exposures happening. They have been referred to, the two fires that happened in more recent years, in 2018 in West Footscray and then the 2019 one out at Campbellfield, and the damage that was done by those and who was exposed to it. I think 200 firefighters were involved in both of those situations, and there were surrounding suburbs that were affected and the clean-up costs. But these bills provide for greater penalties. They provide for greater investigation and allow WorkSafe to enter premises to detect and prevent any potential risk to the community. They are important bills, and I want to thank the minister responsible for bringing this legislation forward and these two bills. I commend the bills to the house.

 Sarah CONNOLLY (Laverton) (11:48): I too rise to speak on this cognate debate on the two pieces of legislation before us this morning, those being the Dangerous Goods Transport Bill 2026 and the Occupational Health and Safety Amendment (Dangerous Goods) Bill 2026. The real aim of these two pieces of legislation is to deliver on key recommendations from a really important report, the Palmer report. They make some of the biggest changes to Victoria’s dangerous goods framework in over 40 years. These are two really good bills that will have immeasurable impacts in my community in Melbourne’s west.

I would like to begin by acknowledging that dangerous goods are really important in my local economy in Melbourne’s west but also here in Victoria’s economy. They are used to produce essential goods, including cleaning products, fertilisers, plastics, paints and so many things that we use without thinking too hard about how they are made. So many of these factories are actually in the electorate of Laverton in the industrial belt that I also have the privilege of representing. The industries that use these dangerous goods are really important. There are lots of jobs attached to them, and the work that goes into handling these dangerous goods by workers is just as important. Most people do the right thing. What we know is that the folks who work in these industries – the people who make the chemicals and the people that make the plastics, the explosives and the paints – so many of them live in Melbourne’s west in my electorate, but they also come there to work. They deserve to be able to work safely and go home safely under a legislative framework that protects them from these dangerous goods and prevents the risk that their workplace, at the end of the day, goes up in flames.

The member for Melton has just talked about some of the experiences he remembers from when these places went up in flames. It is a truly horrendous thing, seeing the impact and listening again to the impact these workplace accidents have had on workers.

The reality for Melbourne’s west is that we have had some really horrendous, bad safety hazards, chemical explosions and major fires that have broken out in our local community just over the past couple of years. In 2018 there was – this just feels like yesterday; I remember it like yesterday – a massive, big warehouse fire that broke out in West Footscray involving millions of litres of chemical waste. This fire took more than a week to put out entirely; it just kept burning and burning. It was so close to the boundary of my electorate, and I have no doubt it impacted folks who live in Braybrook and Sunshine but also folks who work in Tottenham and Brooklyn, to say nothing of the impact this had on Stony Creek – if you are a Westie, everyone knows Stony Creek – with the fire water runoff and contamination. It killed over 2300 fish and eels, which were collected from the estuary. This stuff hits really close to home. It is something that I do have to say sits in the minds of Westies, and we remember these incidents like they were yesterday.

This was the one fire that took more than 200 firefighters and 40 firefighting appliances to put out. It burned for a week. There was another one in 2019 in Campbellfield in Melbourne’s north. Same story: another chemical waste processing facility. That too took several days to get under control. Both of these events were why our government commissioned the Palmer review of the Dangerous Goods Act 1985 in the first place, and its associated regulations. In the meantime in my electorate in Melbourne’s west, we have gone on and we have seen further incidents. Just a few years ago – I think it was probably about two years ago – there was a set of chemical fires in Laverton North and in Derrimut, which fall partly in my electorate. You may have seen the plumes of smoke billowing all the way up from the other side of Port Phillip Bay in St Kilda. If I recall correctly, this was not the only one. So when I say my community are interested in these two bills and that these two bills are so important, I mean it, because what we are seeking to do is prevent this from happening in the first place and make these places so much safer.

We want stronger regulations. We want stronger protections so that workers and the locals who work in these factories are safe from major chemical fires and explosions and so that communities nearby can enjoy cleaner skies and waterways free from fire, water contamination and horrible industrial and hazardous pollution. The Palmer report was handed down in 2022, and what it actually told us was that the existing Dangerous Goods Act was no longer fit for purpose and that we needed to change how we handle dangerous goods here in Victoria. Forty-nine recommendations came out of this inquiry, of which we accepted 22 in full and another 14 in principle. Eleven required further consideration and work. What both of these bills do today is address the 24 recommendations from the review, and all of them require legislative change. Most importantly, they also enable the other accepted recommendations to be implemented through these regulations.

What I will note is that the report also made two alternative suggestions for these reforms: either incorporate dangerous goods laws into the existing OH&S legislation or create a new standalone piece of legislation. We have actually gone ahead and opted for the latter. One of the reasons for doing so is that we think it will reduce the risk of inconsistency with other acts over time, which is really important. It is also going to make it easier for duty holders, like the businesses that will need to comply with the act, to be better placed to understand their obligations and compliance requirements if there is to be one piece of legislation that governs this framework that they need to understand. Basically, we are going to make it simpler for businesses to follow the laws and ensure these workplaces are safe and that we no longer have these terrible workplace incidents and fires that seem to happen all too often, particularly in Melbourne’s west.

So what exactly do these two bills do to make good on these changes? Well, we start off with the amendments to the OH&S act to make the main regulator for dangerous goods – manufacturing them, handling them, using them and so on. We are going to introduce a new general duty that requires a person who undertakes activities that involve dangerous goods to make sure, as much as they can, that they are undertaking these activities in a way that is safe and manages the potential risks that their activities pose to the health and safety of others, which is really important.

In addition to this, the bill also introduces a number of new offences for people and for businesses who do not do the right thing when handling dangerous goods. These include making it an offence if they fail to comply with the new general duty, as well as aggravated blatant breaches of the general duty where someone actively does the wrong thing and risks the health and safety of others. Enforcement tools will be expanded to address these breaches, which will include the introduction of civil penalties, as well as stronger powers for WorkSafe to go in and investigate and enforce the law against businesses who might not be doing the right thing and taking the right precautions and duties required when working with these goods. I think our government’s messages to businesses are clear: we are making the law easier for you to understand, you are not having to go to numerous pieces of law and regulations and legislation to see what your duties and obligations are, and if you breach them and you do it on purpose, we are coming after you and you will face the full force of the law. That is something people in my community will wholeheartedly agree with and have wanted to see for a very, very, very long time.

WorkSafe inspectors will have the power to enter a property if they need to intervene and address a risk with these goods. This will make sure that we are being proactive in identifying risks and failures to be safe early on. So before an incident occurs we want to be able to identify those risks and not just have to come in after the place has gone up in flames or people have lost their lives.

These are two really important bills. There is a lot to talk about in relation to them and there is a lot that has been talked about. I think I am the last speaker. I do have to say that they might not make the front page of the news or the 5 o’clock news or 6 o’clock news, whatever you are watching tonight, but these will make a huge impact within my local community. I know a lot of people raise some of these dangerous goods and hazardous goods facilities in Melbourne’s west. Like I said, a lot of people work at them. But what I can say to people now is that we have put in legislation that is looking at preventing things from happening in the first place, and for those doing the wrong thing, they will face the full force of the law with WorkSafe coming after them.

 Daniela DE MARTINO (Monbulk) (11:58): Thank you, Acting Speaker Kathage, for replacing me in the chair so I could speak on these two incredibly important bills, this cognate debate in support of the Occupational Health and Safety Amendment (Dangerous Goods) Bill 2026 and the Dangerous Goods Transport Bill 2026. I listened with great interest to both the member for Laverton and the member for Melton and previous speakers about these bills. They are vitally important. It has been about four decades since we have really tackled this area in legislation with new legislation, and it could not come at a better time.

I am not sure if you know, but my husband has been a national OH&S professional manager of health, safety and environment – the title sort of changes depending on where you work – for a good quarter of a century, which makes him sound very old and he probably will not appreciate that from me, but tough. But really it speaks to the fact that over his 25 years of experience in occupational health and safety I have heard many of his points of view on OH&S and the importance of ensuring that we are safe when we go to work and that we come home in the condition that we went to work in. But also in terms of dangerous goods, it is vitally important that the wider public is safe as well – those frontline workers who turn up, the workers themselves who manage and handle the dangerous goods but the greater public too. Because as the member for Melton was describing before, these dangerous goods are really important goods; we cannot function without them. Many things that we do in society require these dangerous goods. They are used in agriculture, they are used in construction and manufacturing, they are used in health care, they enable production and distribution of essential goods – that is, fuel, fertiliser, cleaning products, plastics, paints and food.

We need dangerous goods to operate in a modern society, but we need to ensure that the way they are handled, stored and distributed is with as much care as possible to prevent terrible incidents from occurring. Unfortunately there have been past incidents where dangerous goods have not been managed correctly, and the impact on the community and on the environment has been so profound and has been devastating for some.

The chemical fires at West Footscray in 2018 and Campbellfield in 2019 were really defining moments for our state. That warehouse in West Footscray, which was storing millions of litres of chemical waste, ignited in a fire that burned for over a week. I know my colleagues have described this fire, but to actually try and conceive that more than 200 firefighters were deployed to respond to it – that is an extraordinary number of people, and many of them sustained injuries and long-term health impacts as a result of toxic exposure.

I mentioned before my husband being a 25-year career professional as a national manager of occupational health, safety and environment. He is also a volunteer firefighter. He would not have turned up to West Footscray, because he is not a professional firefighter and we live out in the hills of course, but I know that it is incredibly important that first responders, frontline responders, are not exposed to things that are going to have a long-term health impact on them. It is incredibly vital, and these two bills are absolutely essential. The environmental damage as well – it is no surprise that I have quite a passion for the environment, given the nature of my electorate and my background in organics. I know that there are a lot of dangerous goods used in food production, but toxic fire water run-off contaminating Stony Creek killed thousands of fish and damaged ecosystems. It can take an incredibly long time for those ecosystems to recover, if at all. Communities were warned at the time that they had to avoid contact with the water for not a matter of hours, days or weeks but for months. That is quite the environmental impact, but the potential impact on human health too was profound.

Then in April 2019 another major fire broke out at a chemical facility in Campbellfield, and again firefighters were deployed in large numbers and workers ended up hospitalised. Toxic smoke spread across surrounding suburbs, and that forced school closures, disrupted daily life and had an incredible impact on people. It is quite frightening as a person to think, ‘I can’t breathe the air outside. It may do damage to me.’ Again, in the wake of these incidents we realised more needed to be done. Regulators actually uncovered multiple sites across Melbourne and regional Victoria where dangerous chemicals were being illegally stored. It is abhorrent that this goes on. It is abhorrent that it occurred in the past. This legislation that we are debating today means that there will be real teeth, because we saw that there were systemic weaknesses in our regulation, oversight and enforcement of dangerous goods, and the system simply had not kept pace with the risks. Well, it is going to now.

The Palmer report, which was delivered in 2022, found Victoria’s Dangerous Goods Act 1985 was no longer fit for purpose and was outdated, inconsistent with modern approaches and misaligned with the occupational health and safety framework which governs workplace safety more broadly. Forty-nine recommendations were made to modernise the system, and these bills give effect to that work. They are not minor amendments. This is not tinkering around the edges. These are structural reforms designed to create a safer, more coherent, more effective framework for managing dangerous goods.

The first major reform is delivered through the Occupational Health and Safety Amendment (Dangerous Goods) Bill. This bill incorporates dangerous goods regulation into the Occupational Health and Safety Act 2004, making it the primary framework governing how dangerous goods are handled, stored, manufactured, processed, used and supplied in Victoria. It is a significant and practical change. Previously, obligations were spread across separate legislation, and that creates complexity and potential inconsistency. There is nothing more dangerous, I think, than complex laws. You do not know where to find them, how they overlap, how they interact with each other. It makes sense to bring them into a single coherent framework, one that is already well understood by industry and already aligned with modern risk-based regulation. This is actually going to make my husband’s job easier.

It will make it easier in many ways for OH&S professionals to understand exactly what the legislation is and how it should be applied, because ultimately these laws are about one very critical principle: every Victorian deserves to be safe, from the workplace to the wider community, and our laws must reflect that expectation, and they must ensure that it is made possible.

The duty at the centre of this framework is a new general duty. This duty requires any person undertaking activities involving dangerous goods to ensure as far as reasonably practicable that those activities are carried out safely and without risk to health, safety and property. It is a fundamental shift. It moves beyond a purely prescriptive model to one based on proactive risk management. It requires duty holders to identify hazards, assess risks and take reasonable steps to eliminate or minimise those risks. It places responsibility where it belongs: with those best positioned to control the risks.

Complementing this reform is the Dangerous Goods Transport Bill. It establishes a standalone act to regulate the transport of dangerous goods by road, rail and inland water and introduces its own general duty requiring that dangerous goods are transported safely and without risk to public safety, property and the environment. The separation is both deliberate and necessary. Transport involves unique risks and is governed by national frameworks, including the Australian dangerous goods code. By creating a standalone act Victoria is now aligning with most other jurisdictions and ensuring consistency across state borders, and that alignment is critical. Dangerous goods are transported across jurisdictions every day, and a consistent regulatory approach supports compliance, reduces confusion and enhances safety outcomes nationally.

I was listening with intent to the member for Laverton talking about the strong laws being supported by strong enforcement – that is critical to these laws. Both bills introduce a range of offences that reflect different levels of culpability, from failures to comply with duties to aggravated breaches to reckless conduct that places lives at risk. These provisions send a clear message: safety is not optional, and serious breaches will carry serious consequences. It also expands the use of civil penalties. It provides regulators with a more flexible and proportionate enforcement toolkit. Not every breach requires criminal prosecution, but every breach must result in accountability, so courts will have access to a broader range of orders, including injunctions, monetary penalties and requirements to undertake safety improvements. This ensures enforcement is not just punitive, it is preventative, and that is such a critical focus of these reforms. There is so much more to this, talking about the strengthening of WorkSafe’s powers. With only a few seconds left on the clock, I do commend both bills to the house.

 Luba GRIGOROVITCH (Kororoit – Minister for Youth, Minister for Carers and Volunteers) (12:08): I move:

That the debate now be adjourned.

Motion agreed to and debate adjourned.

Ordered that debate be adjourned until later this day.