Tuesday, 11 August 2026

 Anthony CARBINES (Ivanhoe – Leader of the House, Minister for Artificial Intelligence and the Digital Economy, Minister for Major Events, Minister for Medical Research, Minister for Racing, Minister for Economic Development) (14:41): With bated breath we have been waiting, and I am pleased to move:

That, under standing order 94(2), the orders of the day, government business, relating to the following bills be considered and completed by 5 pm on 13 August 2026:

Crimes Amendment (Recruitment of Children for Criminal Activity) Bill 2026

Energy and Resources Legislation Amendment (VEET Strategic Review and Other Matters) Bill 2026

Multicultural Victoria Amendment Bill 2026

Safe Patient Care (Nurse to Patient and Midwife to Patient Ratios) Amendment Bill 2026

Workplace Protection Orders Bill 2026.

The business program is of course about doing what is right for all Victorians, because the Carroll Labor government will govern for all Victorians. We have had a big week. It is an important government business program this week as always, and we have some important matters in the business program that members are looking forward to contributing to. They will be debating the Multicultural Victoria Amendment Bill 2026 to establish Multicultural Victoria, replacing the Victorian Multicultural Commission and providing new direction and a stronger voice for multicultural and multifaith communities. It is census day today, and we know that Victorians come from some 300 different ancestries, speak more than 290 languages and practice almost 200 faiths. On our side of the house, we support Victorian families from all culture and faith backgrounds – I am sure that is the case for most members in this place – and know that they make a substantial and valuable contribution to the state of Victoria. We will not be doing any deals, though, with One Nation or Pauline Hanson. We will not be part of any wacky coalitions with those on the outside who want to cause division and debate in the community.

James Newbury: On a point of order, I may be mistaken, Speaker, but I understand this is the debate on the government business program.

The SPEAKER: What is your point of order, member for Brighton?

James Newbury: Relevance.

The SPEAKER: Leader of the House, come back to the government business program.

Anthony CARBINES: Our government supports multicultural Victoria. We say it loudly, we say it proudly and we show it with our deeds in our investment in multicultural communities, our investment in faith-based schools and faith-based health services and our contribution to community organisations and volunteers and the work that they do in our sporting clubs and in our volunteer and service clubs – the effort and the work that they put in, the ties that they have with their communities over very many generations and the contributions that they make. The reforms that we bring into this place on multicultural Victoria go again to strengthening and responding to the needs of multicultural communities and how they see themselves and would like to be advocated for and have their interests advanced in this place by our government.

We will also be cracking down on organised crime, making it an offence for an adult to recruit a child to commit a serious crime. The Crimes Amendment (Recruitment of Children for Criminal Activity) Bill 2026 is a direct response to organised crime groups that prey on vulnerable kids in our community. These laws make it an offence for an adult to recruit a child to commit a serious crime, regardless of whether the criminal activity is actually carried out by that child. These are tough issues to work through – they are complex – to make sure that the courts can hold offenders to account and that police are able to bring charges and evidence to bear before the courts, but we are confident that the legislation coming before the house achieves those aims. It is insidious behaviour; we have zero tolerance for it. It harms vulnerable kids, it sets them on a destructive path and it makes us all feel less safe.

The Carroll Labor government understands that community safety is our number one priority. That is why we will also be introducing new workplace protection orders to protect retail and transport workers. Violence, threats and intimidation directed at Victorian workers doing their job are unacceptable. The bill creates a new workplace protection order scheme to protect retail and transport workers. I want to thank on behalf of everyone our retail and transport workers, remembering that retail work is not just for people who have put in decades of service representing the businesses that they work for and supporting consumers; it is also where a lot of people get their first start in life in the workforce. Our Premier was one of them, at Kmart, but so many other young people get their first start at taking responsibility, getting out there and learning through on-the-job training. We want to make sure they are protected too, that their experiences are good experiences.

Unfortunately, we have seen time and again people being disrespected in their workplaces, and we cannot have that, particularly for young people who need the protection and the support of our laws, of our Parliament, of their fellow colleagues in the workplace and of those who employ them. The orders are flexible. They can be used to ban people from the workplace. They can impose other conditions from a court that they consider necessary to protect Victorian workers. We understand you should feel safe at work, you should be valued at work and you should be able to return home from work feeling safe and feeling good about the contribution that you have made through the day or the night. We want to make sure that these laws are passed this Parliament. There will be further reforms that we are bringing forward to this Parliament in other legislation. I commend a very full program, and I make sure also that, unlike the Liberal–One Nation coalition on the other side – (Time expired)

 James NEWBURY (Brighton) (14:47): I rise to speak on the government business program, and I do start by saying that, unfortunately, you will perhaps notice throughout my contributions this week a lessening of the sunny disposition that I normally possess in the chamber, because of a broken toe. I do want to let you know before I commence my first contribution of the day that that sunniness will be a little less than normal, but we will persevere nevertheless. I apologise in advance.

We will not be supporting the government business program, because we have seen week in and week out that the government business program that is proposed and what this house does are two different things. We see changes on a day-to-day basis that by Thursday mean that what was proposed is not the substance of what is delivered in this chamber, and there are things in this chamber that we should be debating, that should have been included in the government business program. I do say, and I have noted this before, there were no private members bills accommodated. We are nearly at the end of the term, and private members bills have not been accommodated at any point throughout this term. The Leader of the House spoke in some great detail – some might say foreshadowing debate, but I will leave that there – on the workplace protection orders. On this side of the house we recall moving amendments to a bill in November last year. We recall only last week proposing a private members bill on that same subject matter. Had we had time in this chamber, which is not afforded through this government business program, we could have seen changes in law that would not have led to the delay on issues like we are seeing with workplace protection orders.

We are seeing important proposed legislation that has been drafted not only by the opposition; we saw the Greens today move a private members bill. Without speaking to the substance of what they proposed, it is an important mechanism that should be afforded but which has not been afforded time in the government business program. There are a number of bills in that regard. We see notice given today for a number of matters in the Attorney-General’s portfolio area, for which private members bills have already been drafted and attempted to be moved in this chamber.

The list now is very, very long of bills that have been drafted, have been moved in this chamber and have been denied by way of the government using their numbers to block any debate and then later come back into the chamber to say that they are considering legislating in that way, oftentimes perhaps a year after the fact. Workplace protection orders are one example. Suppression orders are another example. If this government business program enabled debate for private members bills, that would not be the case. The list is now very, very long of legislative proposals that the opposition has put forward that have not seen change.

When it comes to the government business program, it is not just private members bills that have not been afforded time; we have seen a government not use its time in this chamber wisely and at times debate as few as two bills in substance in a week, and now we have five because the government has so poorly mismanaged its time. Throughout my time as Manager of Opposition Business I have raised that very point in the government business program debate. We are now seeing additional bills in the last days. After today there are only eight sitting days left in theory – who would know – of this Parliament, but the government business program has been shown over that time to be very poorly mismanaged. As I started by saying, what we move today will most likely not be what we consider by the end of the week. That is why we will not be supporting the government business program today.

 Dylan WIGHT (Tarneit) (14:52): It gives me great pleasure to rise this afternoon and make a contribution in favour of this government business program. It is always a pleasure to follow the member for Brighton. To no surprise, the opposition will not be supporting the government business program this week, as they do not every single other week. As I often say, but particularly this week, it is incredibly disappointing that we have no level of bipartisanship in respect of supporting this government business program considering the incredibly important content that is on it. Every day in this chamber when in government is a gift and incredibly important, no more so than this week, when we have the opportunity to debate legislation that will fundamentally change the lives of hundreds of thousands of Victorians.

It is a packed government business program. There are five bills on it. I will pick up the member for Brighton’s point as he limps out of the chamber. On the use of time in this place, he made several comments about the government not supporting private members bills. The Liberals, at least in this term, have taken a leaf out of the political book or the strategy book of the Greens political party. Whenever there is an issue and the opposition know that the government is working to create legislation and create a bill to try and fix the issue, they run into this place and throw on the table a private members bill, which is often ill thought out, not drafted, and of course we oppose it. Then they take the opportunity to go on social media and criticise the government for not supporting their ill-thought-out private members bill, which a lot of the time has not even been drafted.

To go to the contents of this week’s government business program and the work that we will be doing in this chamber for all Victorians, the Multicultural Victoria Amendment Bill 2026 is a piece of legislation that is quite close to the hearts of people in my community of Tarneit, being one of the most multicultural places and fastest growing areas anywhere in Australia. I know the member for Greenvale next to me is in the same boat with his local community. I know how important this piece of legislation will be to them as well.

Nathan Lambert interjected.

Dylan WIGHT: And Preston. I want to speak particularly about the outer suburbs. Our multicultural communities are what makes those places great – the diversity of places like Tarneit and like Wyndham, with significant South Asian and Middle Eastern communities, who are here to work hard and to provide for their families. The Labor Party, this Carroll Labor government, will always support those communities and will most certainly not stand by and allow the demonising of those communities by particular political actors out there that are trying to get in here.

The Safe Patient Care (Nurse to Patient and Midwife to Patient Ratios) Amendment Bill 2026 – we know how incredibly important that is. We have been, over the last four years, working feverishly out in Wyndham to deliver a new emergency department at the Werribee Mercy Hospital, which will double the capacity of patients being able to be seen in that emergency department. But with a new emergency department and more capacity, you need more health workers, because it is no good having a great big emergency department that all of Wyndham can be seen in if it is not staffed. So that piece of legislation is incredibly important to my community as well.

We have got the Crimes Amendment (Recruitment of Children for Criminal Activity) Bill 2026, which particularly targets the recruitment of children by gangs for criminal activity, and of course the Workplace Protection Orders Bill 2026, because every worker, regardless of where they work, deserves to go to work, come home and be safe. I commend the government business program to the house.

 Martin CAMERON (Morwell) (14:57): I rise in support of the Manager of Opposition Business as we oppose the government business program this week. Over the entire year we have come into the chamber mostly with very light weeks when we have bills to debate, and the last few weeks that we have come in here we have had four and now five bills to debate on the program. The issue there is that we love getting up on our feet on this side of the chamber and participating on all bills that come through the chamber. I think we showed last sitting week that the bills had to chop and change very, very quickly. There were a lot of members in the chamber that wanted to get up and speak on certain bills. Sometimes members in the chamber do not want to speak on certain bills, but they need to have the right to be able to choose to get up. I know I enjoy getting up and speaking on all bills, but when we are chopping and changing so rapidly between bills it does make us very time-poor to be able to prepare. I know the member for Shepparton spends a lot of time with the bills to make sure that her contributions are in line with what the bills are about and to be able to articulate what the opposition’s points are to hold the government to account. To do that and then have a bill just stopped and move on to the next one can be very frustrating at times.

I notice on the government business program this week that we have the Crimes Amendment (Recruitment of Children for Criminal Activity) Bill 2026, and that is a really important bill that I am sure most members will want to get up and speak on. I know it is in the house today supposedly so we can get up and speak on it, but it is very hard for a lot of our members from regional Victoria that do want to get up and actually talk about the impacts of what this bill will mean for our communities. We all want to be on our feet talking about that, but again, with five bills in the house, it is more than likely that we will get a certain time to do it and it will swap again. That is the point. We have so many bills in the house that what we perceive we are going to be talking on for the week comes in very short and sharp timeframes.

The Energy and Resources Legislation Amendment (VEET Strategic Review and Other Matters) Bill ‍2026 is also another one that is important for a lot of areas around Victoria – to be able to get up and talk about energy and resources, for one, and to make sure that the legislation that we are putting in place is supporting the future of our energy sector.

On the multicultural one, the Leader of the House got up, and I was reading between the lines but he was sort of intimating that the multicultural fraternity down here in the city is maybe not as important to us members in the regions. We also have a wonderful multicultural community down in the Latrobe Valley. We have a huge variance of multicultural societies and people who actually love living in the Latrobe Valley. For us to be able to get up and talk on a multicultural bill and be able to talk about the multicultural people that are in our community and the important role that they do have for the fabric of the way the Latrobe Valley is run – we have a lot of people in our health workforce that come from right across the world. To be able to get up and talk on the Multicultural Victoria Amendment Bill ‍2026 will be a pleasure.

We also have the Safe Patient Care (Nurse to Patient and Midwife to Patient Ratios) Amendment Bill ‍2026. Just talking about the health component of that, that goes hand in hand. We can have these new hospitals and wonderful hospitals, but we do need to be able to staff them. And the Workplace Protection Orders Bill 2026 I feel is nearly the most important one to get right, to protect our family members when they are standing at the front of house doing their working role.

 Lauren KATHAGE (Yan Yean) (15:02): Don’t those opposite sound just like Goldilocks? First there are not enough bills, then there are too many bills. I would like to remind them that this is not their house, and I think the bills are just right. The bills that we have here to debate this week reflect that the government is delivering what the community are asking for. It shows that our government listens and acts. A good example of that is that in going around and speaking to people about the rego rebate, so many people have said that they will be using that money for winter power bills. Having on the list this week the Energy and Resources Legislation Amendment (VEET Strategic Review and Other Matters) Bill 2026, which is going to modernise and expand the Victorian energy upgrades program, we know is so important for communities who want to see those power bills come down. It is one of the things that people are raising with me when I am doorknocking, and our government has done the work to make sure that we can continue that downward trend through increasing renewables. I am really happy to see that on the list.

Another concern that is raised with members is also reflected in this bill, and that is around young people committing crime and the fact that they are being induced to that by recruiters. Those recruiters need to have really serious consequences, and that is why we have on the list this week the work to make sure that those people face up to life imprisonment. There is a lot more that we are doing around that, as has been discussed in the chamber previously and by earlier speakers today around changes to bail, adult courts and the like. And that is not to exclude, of course, the violence reduction unit, which is doing really important work in our community.

For people who do end up on the wrong side of the law or who are getting involved in things they should not be, that also has an impact on our health system and our emergency departments, which are doing such a fantastic job. I had reason to be in one recently with my daughter after she fell off some play equipment. I marvelled at what the nurses and doctors were able to do, the skill and the compassion that they showed. We need to make sure that for patients and for nurses and midwives those ratios are right, and so I am really happy to see that we have, as part of the government business program this week, work to increase ratios of nurses and midwives to patients and 260 additional full-time nurses. That is absolutely fantastic.

Of course something that the community has been speaking about and feeling very deeply in this past week but also earlier is around crime against retail workers, harassment of retail workers, stalking and the like. It is simply not acceptable, when people go to work to raise funds for their family and they are providing a service to the community, that people would seek to harm them. That is why I am really proud to see the workplace protection orders included in the government business program this week.

You can see I am going through some of the biggest topics that we talk about with our constituents and that we hear from community, and I am really proud to see those reflected in the government’s business program. Included in that are the multicultural amendments that we are making to make sure that the community voice and community advocacy of multicultural communities are wedded to policy and grants and that they are not separate, because we recognise and are putting in action the fact that there needs to be more than just advocacy. Advocacy needs to have a clearer path to directing government action, which is what Multicultural Victoria, the body that we will be discussing this week, seeks to do – give community a clear voice. And giving community a clear voice can be I think a good summary of the government business program this week, and I look forward to debating the bills in the house.

 Nicole WERNER (Warrandyte) (15:07): I rise to speak to the government business program, which we will be opposing, as the member for Brighton has already spoken to, as well as the member for Morwell. It is the case that the government has not allowed debate on these private members bills, and any wonder – when we hear from the Greens today, and certainly there have been private members bills that we have sought to move in the house – because they are copying our homework. The government are wanting to introduce their laws after we have already introduced them, a good example being today when they introduced the Justice Legislation Amendment (Family Violence, Coercive Control, Good Character, Risk Assessment and Other Matters) Bill 2026. That is one that we sought to move I think in November last year – it was a long time ago. The Workplace Protection Orders Bill 2026 is one that we moved last week, which the government voted against and now are wanting to debate this week, when we could have enacted it already, even with a delayed start date from them in their bill. So there is this flip-flopping from the government of ‘Will we decide? Will we choose to do it? Will we just copy and paste? Well, what’s the Leader of the Opposition doing? Maybe we’ll just copy what she does. Oh, yeah, let’s do a royal commission too, even though it’s going to be a farce. Oh, let’s do our own workplace protection orders bill, even though it’ll have a delayed start date.’ And this is the issue at hand, where there is just this incompetency from the government, and that is why we are opposing the government business program today.

Looking at the Crimes Amendment (Recruitment of Children for Criminal Activity) Bill 2026, if I can speak to that for a moment without pre-empting debate, the glaring omission in this one is that there is a loophole that is created. There is the offence that applies to adults who recruit, but what about when adults recruit a child to do the recruitment for them? That has not been thought about, that has not been put into the bill, that has not been considered in what is happening today on our streets as the crime crisis surges across Victoria. I mean, what an utter mess from this government that they would not even consider this. And we look at, again, the crime that is hitting our streets, that they are trying to tidy up with three weeks to go in the third last week of Parliament before we go to caretaker period, and this is again –

Anthony Cianflone: My point of order, Speaker, is on the member for Warrandyte foreshadowing the debate on the bill before the chamber. We are talking about the government business program, not debating the substance of each respective bill.

The SPEAKER: Yes. I remind the member for Warrandyte to be very cautious about pre-empting debate.

Nicole WERNER: Seeing as I had moved on from talking about the specific bill – I am glad everyone was listening – this is the case at hand, that this government do not know what they are doing. It is minutes to midnight, and they are trying to legislate to hang on to their lives, hang on to their seats. This is the truth: we have a legislative agenda on this side that has been gagged time and time again. We have moved on this side private members bills to ban machetes – not once, not twice but five times over – that this government voted down until they finally legislated, when it was too little, too late. Again they voted it down when we moved to make machetes a prohibited weapon, only then to follow thereafter. They voted against us when we tried to reinstate the offence of breaching bail, and I need not even speak about how much that is an issue on our streets today. We look at just this weekend past, the tragedies that occurred just last week, and why it is so imperative that these bills happen now – not later, not in a delayed fashion but when we bring them to the floor of Parliament. When we look at what has happened in the tragic scenario with youth crime spiralling out of control, with the brutal killing of Van Viet Truong allegedly at the hands of young offenders, this is why it is so important that the opposition should be able to introduce bills to be adopted into law. The government is lagging and delaying and has a history of lagging and delaying, and that is why we oppose the government business program today.

If I am to speak to the Victorian Multicultural Commission, it is now being put back as a statutory body so it is finally independent, as it should be, instead of it sitting under the Department of Premier and Cabinet. It has actually returned to what it was under the Liberal government. This is why we oppose this government. We have got a four-year appointment, on the eve of the caretaker period, that the government has already started advertising as a $400,000 role. This is what this government is up to.

Assembly divided on motion: