Thursday, 6 February 2025

 Georgie CROZIER (Southern Metropolitan) (17:43): (1391) My adjournment matter this evening is for the attention of the Minister for Health, and it is in relation to any potential outbreak requiring a public health response. The action I am seeking is regarding the significant changes and the loss of experienced personnel from the public health team in the Department of Health and the loss of experience with the numbers of chief health officers that have gone – we have lost the department secretary; the whole place has been gutted. There is a concern around the expertise that is now left within the Department of Health. I am wanting to get reassurance from the Minister for Health that the department is prepared to manage a major public health response should the need arise – for instance, if there was an outbreak of avian flu in Victoria or some other virus like we have experienced with COVID. God forbid we go back to those days. None of us ever want to go back to that. However, there is a significant impact to community, and we know with the outbreak of avian flu in May of last year there was an egg farm near Meredith that was impacted, as were a number of other farms, and over a million chooks were killed to arrest that virus in those chooks at that time. In the States I notice that there has been detection of the H5 virus in dairy cattle, but it has also crossed over into humans, and I think there are something like 67 humans with this avian flu. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention over there are dealing with it.

I am raising this again because I am concerned about the impacts of the public health team in the Department of Health and want to understand exactly what the health department has in preparation for an outbreak – we are still in the summer months, and we are coming into autumn and then winter – and what the government has in place should something like this occur in Victoria. As I said, we do not want another COVID response. I am not suggesting that for 1 minute, but I do want to understand what the Department of Health has got in place should there be an outbreak, because we do not want the response that we had with COVID and how it affected Victorians and Australians. Indeed far too many people are still feeling the impacts from the government’s response through that time.