Thursday, 30 November 2023

Adjournment

Gayle TIERNEY (Western Victoria – Minister for Skills and TAFE, Minister for Regional Development) (18:27): I move:

That the house do now adjourn.

I Cook Foods

Georgie CROZIER (Southern Metropolitan) (18:27): (646) My adjournment matter this evening is for the attention of the Minister for Health, and it is in relation to the I Cook Foods matter. Today it has been found, on the legal costs for the I Cook Foods matter, that the government will have to pay for the legal costs. The Supreme Court ordered the state government to pay the majority of I Cook Foods’ costs following the 10-day civil trial, and they will not require I Cook Foods to pay any of the costs racked up by the Department of Health, according to the Herald Sun.

I want to just say that I brought this issue into the house in April 2019, because at that time Ian Cook wrote to me and he was concerned about the closure of his business in Dandenong. We had two parliamentary inquiries on this matter, and I am very, very concerned about what happened throughout those parliamentary inquiries, because over the course of these recent court cases we know what occurred. The evidence that we got in those inquiries was not the evidence that the courts heard, and I believe that the Department of Health willingly knew what they were providing to us and willingly knew that they were not going to give us the evidence that that inquiry needed to have, because Mrs Painter was in fact free of listeriosis. She had been treated effectively with antibiotics and did not die of listeriosis as was claimed by Dr Sutton, the Department of Health and indeed the government. In fact she died of acute pulmonary oedema, and she had suffered from very severe chronic heart disease – had a long history of 15 years.

I am really concerned. As we know, in the first inquiry Dr Sutton provided evidence that was incorrect, and then he came back into the second inquiry and had to correct the record. We know from what has happened in the courts that there was an injustice done – that I Cook Foods was shut down by the department illegally. What we now know is that the department has cost the taxpayer millions of dollars in legal fees to defend their appalling track record on this very, very significant saga. The action I am seeking from the minister is that they provide a full account of the legal costs and how much it has cost the taxpayer, because every single Victorian deserves to understand exactly how much the department has paid out defending a case that was rotten to the core in the first place. The injustice that was done to the Cook family is one of the most shameful periods in the state’s history.