Wednesday, 29 July 2026

 Tim READ (Brunswick) (18:02): I took my place here almost eight years ago, after it took a week of counting to learn that after 100 years of Labor a slender majority of Brunswick residents had opted to turn the seat Green. I came in and sat here and studied the room: the gold pulled from the earth, the building built with wealth extracted from a newly conquered land, the First People pushed aside to make way for tree felling, for sheep. Some of my ancestors were involved in colonisation. I acknowledge First Peoples today and I offer my respect to their elders, and I would like to think that we do things differently now, but I am not sure I can be confident.

I quit my job as a doctor and my postdoctoral research in sexually transmitted infections, and I became a daily witness to question time. Question time often begins with the introduction of a visiting overseas delegation, and then we proceed to embarrass ourselves with riotous behaviour. Questions are often thinly veiled condemnation, and answers are irrelevant and punctuated by frequent points of order. Choreographed roars of disapproval drown out criticism. New or useful information is uncommon. The overseas visitors often depart early, and I wonder what they think. For years I felt embarrassed that we could not have conducted ourselves a little better, but reflecting on democracies and nations that style themselves as democratic, I am having a rethink. We should be wary of orderly, polite parliaments. A chamber where elected representatives call out the government’s failings and where members can yell at each other – that does not mean they always should – is more likely free and representative than less democratic parts of the world, where there are serious consequences for stepping out of line. We should still improve question time, but carefully. Also, when I first sat here, I was horrified at how mean MPs seemed to be here in the chamber, shouting hostile comments while others speak, often verballing them. Then I was puzzled by how nice the same people seemed to be as soon as they stepped outside. It troubled me for years. It helps to think of this place as a stage where the players overact outrageously and then wipe their make-up off as they wander out for a coffee.

Despite the theatrics, most of us are here for the right reasons. We all want good outcomes for Victorians, and we disagree on a lot, but few are here for mercenary reasons. Politicians are unfairly maligned, and for me, politics is the work you do to improve people’s circumstances, not just now but in the future. Politics is hope in motion. We politicians might want our opponents to lose their seats, but we cannot help but feel some warmth towards those we work with.

It is a weird juggling act. Not that proof was needed, but when I made a public spectacle of my cancer diagnosis earlier this year, the genuine concern from so many members was a great support, and I thank you all. I had a blood transfusion yesterday, and a big thanks to the anonymous donors who helped me get here. I wonder how they would feel knowing they donated to a politician and a Green one at that. And a heartfelt thankyou to the staff at Peter Mac. I feel so well looked after there. Now that my illness has progressed and I have run out of treatment options I am starting to see life and politics from a new perspective. My bucket list is no longer important to me. I would love to see Mexico, but I am fine with watching an actor on SBS eat her way around that exotic country. And I can always send the member for Rowville if I want to know more.

It is more important to me now to see smiles on the faces of those I love, so I want to talk now briefly about how we can put smiles on those faces, not just now but in the future. The first thing that comes to mind over the eight years in which I have sat here is the way inequality has grown in this country. Nowhere is it more obvious than in housing, and many Australians under 40 no longer expect to afford a home. They will rent for life. Renters have long been neglected, partly because renting was seen as a brief phase that people went through while they saved to buy a home, except that now many see that they never will. A young staff member in my office a couple of years ago had her rent go up by 30 per cent. The mouldy room she was renting did not get 30 per cent better all of a sudden; the rent just went up by an exorbitant amount. She had to move to find a place she could afford, and a lot of renters have to move once a year now to find a place that they can afford. It is something of an annual migration. Surely this is a wonderful example of something the next Parliament can fix to put smiles on the faces of young Victorians. A limit on rent increases similar to the ACT would be a great start.

As public trust in governments and institutions declines – and I am sure question time might have something to do with it – and more politicians are tempted by the anti-politician rhetoric from One Nation, we have an opportunity to reverse this trend by strengthening the institutions that safeguard our democracy. Giving our anti-corruption commission similar powers to its equivalent in New South Wales is where I hope this or the next Parliament will start. The single most important step I want to emphasise is to implement recommendation 1 of the Integrity and Oversight Committee’s recent report into IBAC’s powers. Parliament simply has to remove a few words from the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission Act 2011, which limits IBAC currently to only investigating a relevant offence. Removing those words would enable IBAC to expose and deter the maladministration and dodgy behaviour that is not strictly illegal but which undermines public trust in our political system. A couple of additional powers to follow outsourced public money and to hold public hearings and you have got yourself a standing royal commission at half the price. That would put some smiles on some young faces. And I must take this opportunity now to thank my colleagues on the IOC for their work and the IOC secretariat for their research and hard work over the past four years.

There are many more ways we could improve integrity and should improve integrity in this state – too many to list – but I am delighted that today in this chamber we are in the process of bringing an end to the undemocratic manipulation of the election of members of the Legislative Council. I am referring here to group voting, which was responsible for electing at least 20 per cent of that chamber in 2018 after an outrageous but entirely legal cash-for-preferences deal.

Over in this building near the Knight Kerr Room there are some antique chairs upholstered in red velvet. They reminded me of the padded red seats in the Legislative Council, and I wanted to wheel one out in front of the daily press conference a few months ago by the car park door just to make a point about group voting. It seemed a lot of effort, and I was not sure security would let me walk out with a precious parliamentary antique. But my staff are braver than I am, and two of them wheeled one of these chairs into a meeting room near the car park door, so I was committed. The next morning I approached security and asked if they would help me carry a heavy chair out to a press conference. They agreed, being very polite. I sat with the chair outside security waiting for our turn in front of the cameras just as the Minister for Police walked past remarking, ‘Nice chair, Tim.’ When my moment arrived I rolled the chair in front of the cameras, affixed a $55,000 price tag to it, and spoke about Victoria’s group ticket voting system, which enables people to effectively buy a seat in the upper house.

My best press conference stunt resulted in zero coverage of the red chair, but today we are debating and about to pass a bill that will ensure upper house members are answerable to voters and not to a paid preference whisperer. I congratulate the government for this and also not so long ago for opening ministerial diaries to the public. I acknowledge the work of many in the community, including the Greens, who have pushed hard for these integrity reforms. Integrity puts smiles on faces. I have mentioned the growing public disenchantment with politicians that seems to be pushing many Victorians toward Pauline Hanson, and it would be complete for me also to comment that these must be voters who are either attracted to or willing to overlook her scapegoating of immigrant communities. In the United States that scapegoating has turned into overt persecution, and armed immigration and customs enforcement gangs are snatching immigrants off the streets. Look, it is hard to imagine this happening in Victoria, but we must fight the scapegoating and the race-baiting if we do not want to find out. We want more people of colour in the next Parliament with smiles on their faces.

Marketing tells us we want a big car and a big TV and a big house, but for me it is important that Victoria has farms that can still produce food as our world heats up, that we have forests to admire and oceans with sea life instead of slime. Despite the increase in renewable energy here, Victoria is still pushing up CO₂ by burning over 100,000 tonnes of coal every day, not to mention the gas, petrol, diesel and jet fuel we burn. When I first sat here in 2018, CO₂ made up 409 parts per million of the atmosphere, and that has grown to 432 parts now. While the fight to decarbonise and tackle global heating has been pushed out of the limelight by more pressing cost-of-living concerns, it remains the most consequential struggle of our time, and economic and environmental concerns are closely connected. Just in January last year in the Los Angeles winter, fires there destroyed 11,000 mostly very expensive homes collectively worth around US$30 billion, which through the global reinsurance market has pushed up insurance premiums around the world, including in Australia. People are paying for climate change, whether they think about it or not.

I say this not to make us uncomfortable but to remind us of this opportunity to make our children proud if they could truly say their own state was a leader in the battle against global heating. That would require us to deal with some current threats to our decarbonisation: the rise of energy-guzzling data centres and the political opposition to renewable energy, to wind farms and to transmission lines. I guess any of those wanting to delay the switch to renewables has to balance electoral convenience against the future of our children. At least President Trump is doing all he can to help boost the sales of electric vehicles. The fuel crisis is another opportunity for Parliament to put smiles on the faces of people who want to leave their cars at home by building bike lanes and pedestrian crossings so they can walk, ride or scooter to work or to the train station.

I gave my first speech here in February 2019, and I said:

Obesity, type 2 diabetes and an increasing risk of heart attack and stroke all go together, fuelled by a lack of exertion and the processed food and sugary drinks that are so cheaply and widely available and so heavily advertised.

I warned that Victoria’s excellent health care is at risk of being overwhelmed. In fact Victorian governments had a good record here, leading the nation in the 1980s in banning cigarette advertising and setting up the world’s first health promotion foundation, VicHealth. Think of the many illnesses, hospitalisations and deaths that VicHealth has prevented over the ensuing four decades. Soon, however, that work will wind up, as the present government seems intent on dissolving VicHealth into the Department of Health – unless, of course, the next Parliament decides that maybe Victoria needs an independent, funded health promotion foundation to lead the fight against the preventable chronic diseases that threaten to overwhelm our excellent but expensive healthcare system. Now, that would put some smiles on some young faces.

I will close by thanking all my MP colleagues for your warmth and friendliness over the years. Thanks to the Greens MP party room, who have become family, to the clerks and Parliament staff who make this remarkable institution work – especially to security by the back door – and to our dedicated and underpaid electorate offices and to the Greens staff. I thank my family for their support: Judy, Peter, Ange, Urs, Martin and Louisa, and above all my partner Ange, for everything. I thank the many people I have met in Brunswick over the years – supporters, critics, members of the Greens and other parties ‍– for engaging in the honourable pursuit of politics.

Members applauded.