Wednesday, 4 March 2026

 Richard WELCH (North-Eastern Metropolitan) (17:21): I would like to take the opportunity to make some comments on the inquiry into community consultation practices. The report was handed down yesterday. I say this as a member for North-Eastern Metro: within my electorate we have particular experience of consultation and what I deem the misuse of the consultation process, because we have the North East Link, we have the Box Hill suburban rail loop activity centre, we have the Glen Waverley Suburban Rail Loop (SRL) activity centre and we also have the Blackburn activity centre. In all four cases I have seen the government’s consultation processes in person – have some personal experience of it – but I also have a number of constituents who are very, very angry at the way the consultation process has been done, in their view, in a highly manipulative way.

I would like to draw attention to a couple of things within the findings of the report. I will start particularly with findings 4 and 5. Finding 4 is:

When the terminology of engagement and consultation are used without specific meaning, expectations clash and trust erodes.

I just posit to begin with that the definitions of ‘engagement’ and ‘consultation’ are not ambiguous. They have absolutely clear meaning, unambiguous meaning. It is only when those terms are abused and used to mislead that there is a problem. No wonder trust is eroded, because the definition is clear. The expectations of the public are therefore clear. When they are told they are going to a consultation and engagement exercise, that is exactly what they are entitled to receive.

Finding 5 is that:

Some in the community do not consider the provision of information a form of engagement …

That is right, because those words have definitive meanings, and simply handing someone information is not engagement nor consultation by any normal use of the English language. So of course they felt let down by that process. I have personal experience of that as well from when I have gone to SRL consultation sessions. It says it is an information night, a consultation night, and you go in there and you will ask someone a perfectly basic question about the project, and on more than one occasion they will say, ‘Oh, no, I can’t talk about that today. I can only talk about this aspect.’ They deliberately narrow the focus of the so-called consultation, in that sense, to a very particular set of things that probably only represents about 20 per cent of the subject matter that would be naturally of interest to the person from the community coming to see it. It is a deliberate ploy to narrow the focus: ‘Oh, the person who’s responsible for that is not here; I can’t speak about it, but I can tell you about this thin sliver of it.’ What that is in effect, in practice, is a lie by omission. It is saying, ‘We’re consulting, but we’re not going to touch these topics.’

I will share a personal experience. In the Box Hill SRL activity centre all of the diagrams and all of the public information that we were consulting on included the area of the Box Hill brickworks, which is a landfill site that is currently open space, and it is very important to the community that that remains open space, hopefully to become permanent parkland. Very early SRL drawings showed a road through it, so naturally the community wanted to know if they were going to build through the site. I went there and I asked, ‘What’s this line?’ The person who was representing the SRL at that consultation period said to me, ‘No, there are no plans to build on this site – no plans. No, that’s just a walking path.’ So I went and asked another person there, and I pressed; I had to persevere. They said, ‘No, it might actually be a bike path that goes through the park.’ I pressed further, and I said, ‘Well, is there going to be any housing?’ ‘No. Look, it may be a road.’ If I had not pressed three times within that consultation period to someone, after having been stonewalled, that information would never have been provided to me. That was a consultation period in 2024. Subsequently of course they are building across the entire site. So what was I consulted on – nothing, and that is typical of the entire exercise across all of the consultation periods in my electorate. My people have been misled with lies by omission.