Tuesday, 17 March 2026

 Richard WELCH (North-Eastern Metropolitan) (14:05): I am pleased to rise on the Entities Legislation Amendment (Consolidation and Other Matters) Bill 2025. I think just to rehash a joke from last sitting week, it could have been named the ‘Better Entities Legislation Amendment (Sooner) Bill’, as is the naming protocol we seem to adopt for all legislation these days. This bill is presented as a reform – streamlining government, reducing duplication and improving efficiency – and in principle that is entirely reasonable, because the Silver review did identify a public sector that had become overly complex, fragmented and top heavy, with more than 500 entities, thousands of boards and committees and layers of duplicated responsibility that slowed decision-making and inflated administrative costs. The diagnosis is not contested; it is completely true that the government runs the most inefficient, corrupt, tone-deaf, non-consultative, dysfunctional, non-transparent, unaccountable government in Victoria’s history. Reform is long overdue; that is a universal truth the entire state agrees with. The question is whether this bill will meaningfully respond to any of that. When we test the bill against those measures, it becomes clear that what is presented as structural reform is in reality something much smaller, something much more modest and something pretty underwhelming, except for that it makes a couple of missteps in the process.

The Silver review identified potential savings of approximately $5 billion over four years alongside the reduction of more than 2000 ongoing roles across the public sector; that is the scale of the problem the government itself accepted in commissioning and setting out and seeking that report from Helen Silver. But the government’s cuts and efficiencies embodied in this bill deliver $35.7 million over four years, with ongoing savings of just $9.4 million annually. In any serious financial analysis, that is a million miles from the scale of the issue the government has created – a $5 billion structural inefficiency is being met with a $35 million response over four years. So it is not really a reform in any meaningful economic sense, and it is not really a structural form; broadly it is cuts, sneaky little cuts around the edges while the core financial problem remains untouched. This makes me wonder about the government’s entire approach to the debt crisis. There is this little tinkering effort, and then there are things like introducing taxes on cats and dogs, taxing car parks and taxing CFA volunteers, but at the same time it is perfectly happy to allow $15 billion in taxpayer money to march out the door via a government overseeing CFMEU corruption. It is perfectly happy to cancel the Commonwealth Games at a cost of nearly three quarters of a billion dollars, and let us not forget, today is the day when the games should have started in Melbourne.

It seems to be the work of infinitely small imaginations working on ever-shrinking bubbles. This bill arrives when Victoria’s net debt is increasing at approximately $1.7 million every hour, projected to reach well over $200 billion. The interest bill alone is $1 million an hour, and that is what Victorians count in terms of missing nurses, health services, police, unfixed roads, uncut grass, uncleaned graffiti, in raised taxes on land, on accommodation, on GPs and on school payrolls – basically everything that affects their cost of living. So if we talk about cuts, remember it is not just what the government cuts from services, it is also what it takes from families too. Every tax rise and every new levy is a cut to a family’s income, to their savings and to their goals. I think it is appropriate to point out this week as we face potential economic consequences regarding uncertain oil supply, we also face the fact that the state runs its budgets so close to the precipice that there is no contingency left for the unexpected or for the issues that have been kicked down the road that now come home to roost or for genuine crisis or even for something as recurrent and predictable as unfunded projects and project costs with demonstrably false price tags. No responsible government runs a state like this. It is reckless with the lives of the people it is its first duty to protect. This is the state’s working capital being consumed continuously – money that is not going to police or paramedics or teachers or infrastructure that yields a return but simply to servicing accumulated debt. In that environment the government’s sudden pivot to efficiency is not a strategic reform program, it is a response to a genuine fiscal constraint. That is what happens when a system that has expanded for decades reaches the limits of the balance sheet and is forced to contract.

When we turn to the substance of the bill, the pattern becomes clearer. The government has confirmed that this legislation implements seven recommendations of the Silver report. At the same time, it introduces a series of changes – abolishment of the Victorian Environmental Assessment Council, alterations to the Essential Services Commission, changes to mental health governance – that were not recommended by the Silver review at all. What we have is not a disciplined, systematic implementation of an independent review that the government itself asked for, it is the partial adoption of selective recommendations combined with completely unrelated cuts.

At the same time, the response in this bill is not simply consolidation of the finances, it is concentration of authority, power and decision-making. Functions are absorbed, independent bodies are reduced or removed and decision-making authority is drawn closer to the centre. Consolidation can improve clarity, but concentration, if not carefully managed, reduces scrutiny and rigour. Crude reforms that just make a system smaller can be less accountable, less informed and less connected to stakeholders. If managed badly, it can create risk, and the concerns around the number of mental health commissioners is a very good example of both of these first two problems here.

It is also evident in procurement. Under a debt-ridden ‘spend as if there is no tomorrow’, ‘don’t update your costs’ Labor government, procurement is not a peripheral administrative activity. It is where Victorian financial discipline has been completely lost and as a consequence has become completely corrupted. Yet the bill abolishes the Victorian Government Purchasing Board and transfers its function into ministerial and department control. We are considering this change in the context of highly credible reporting that up to $15 billion, if not $30 billion, has flown from major infrastructure projects via criminal and improper channels. In that environment, removing an independent procurement oversight body is not a neutral act, it is a reduction in control at the point of highest financial exposure. In any commercial organisation that would be unthinkable. Controls are strengthened where risk is the highest, not relaxed. If structural change is required, procurement discipline should be anchored in Treasury, where financial accountability is core, not diluted to broader ministerial discretion.

A similar shift occurs with the Essential Services Commission. The bill removes the requirement for the minister to seek ESC advice on local government rate caps and strips back its role in commercial passenger vehicle pricing and towing charge reviews. These functions were not recommended for removal by the Silver review. The practical effect is that independent economic advice is removed from decisions that directly affect household costs. The argument is that this streamlines decision-making, but the government has no problem in making decisions, it just has a very big problem in making good decisions. What it actually does is remove the last skerrick of rigour and constraint designed to protect Victorians from those bad decisions. It shifts pricing decisions from a framework of independent scrutiny to one of ministerial discretion. In a cost-of-living environment that is not a vague, abstract governance change, it is a transfer of material risk. The government’s propensity for bad decisions does not disappear; it is simply going to be managed with fewer checks and balances.

The mental health provisions raise a different but similar concern. The bill reduces the Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission from four commissioners to one and alters governance structures in ways that go well beyond the Silver review and cut across, importantly, the intent of the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System. There are a range of amendments going around on that. Some have been circulated, some have not – we will probably get to the substance of those later in the day – but it would have been helpful to know what those amendments are now as we debate the bill. There will obviously be more discussion of that in committee as well. The multicommissioner model was intended to embed lived experience alongside clinical and systemic oversight, ensuring that we had accessible, involved, engaged real-world decision-making. Reducing that to a single commissioner really oversimplifies the structure. It narrows perspective and concentrates authority in a system where diversity of insight is essential. The sector’s concern at this point is well founded, and they have made their views very clear, because the complexity in human systems is not resolved by centralisation, it is managed through balanced governance and inclusion.

To be fair to the bill, there is legitimate argument that the existing systems across the span of it contain inefficiencies. Oversized boards can slow decisions and in some cases reduce the quality of their decisions. Arms-length bodies can drift from accountability and focus and go off on their own tangents. In other areas consolidation does definitely improve focus, performance and accountability. But efficiency is not the only objective of institutional design; integrity is equally important. When a reform improves efficiency at the expense of independent oversight, the system might operate faster, but it becomes more fragile. The purpose of independent bodies is not to obstruct government but to provide constraint where constraint is necessary. We start to see a pattern here: procurement oversight is reduced, independent pricing advice is diminished, mental health governance is centralised and lived experience is marginalised. Many of these changes were not recommended by the review that ostensibly underpins the bill. What ties them together is the need to make spending cuts and a shift towards centralised, discretionary decision-making.

I think the best sign of an organisation or someone managing something beyond their abilities, under stress or when they are worried they have lost control is when they start to micromanage. That is when they start to pull all controls to themselves. That is where they cut people out of the process, because that is the instinctive reaction of someone who does not feel in control of what they are doing. It is not a nuanced way to solve a problem. It is not really a genuinely sustainable way to manage your problems. But then if you are in the process of a kneejerk reaction to other financial pressures that you have put upon yourselves, this will be the inevitable consequence. When independent scrutiny weakens, cost tends to drift upwards incrementally through rates and fees and charges that compound over time. When procurement controls soften, the probability of waste and fraud and leakage increases, and there is only too much evidence of that to deny it. When governance structures are simplified beyond their functional need, system resilience declines. And when reform departs from its stated foundation, such as a royal commission, confidence in the reform process erodes.

I will return to the biggest bad joke about this bill. The government cannot reasonably claim that this is a response to the Silver review when it delivers just $35 million in savings over four years – that is less than $9 million a year – and apparently it is going to cost $5 million to implement. This is against, currently, a $160 billion debt and while we are careering towards a $200 billion debt. It is against the backdrop of the government’s infamous five-step plan to stabilise debt by increasing it indefinitely, as we career from what was about $22 billion of debt eight, nine years ago to $160 billion, then to $200 billion and then in the forwards to $220 billion in no time at all. The government cannot claim alignment with the review when introducing significant measures outside its scope, and it cannot claim to strengthen governance while reducing independent oversight in procurement, pricing and system supervision. We should be clear about what is happening here. This is not a comprehensive reset of the machinery of government. It is a partial consolidation combined with a rebalancing towards central control driven in most part by fiscal pressure, not by a desire for genuine structural reform.

We see the need for reform. We see the need for efficiencies to be gained. We see the bloated state of the state apparatus. We see the opaque nature of a government system, an intricate matrix system, where everyone is responsible but no-one is accountable. We see the plethora of boards, associations and committees stuffed with political appointees being paid for things that other people used to do voluntarily. We see all of that. For that reason we will not stand in the way of the bill. We will not oppose the bill, because some consolidation is warranted and some measures are sensible. If only they were being done in a sensible and systematic way that represented genuine systemic reform, not cherrypicked random items that you flick through here and there. I think the lack of system, the lack of vision around how we are doing this is pretty telling. It is not like anyone has sat down and said, ‘Here is a comprehensive reform package.’ It is a little bit here; it is a little bit there. And it is borne out that the quantum is $35 million over four years, versus $160 billion of debt and versus an operating budget that is now in deficit. It may be in surplus by the end of the financial year, but certainly in December it was back in deficit, according to the Victorian Auditor-General’s Office.

We think there should be a couple of amendments to this. We think the Essential Services Commission should be retained in pricing decisions. We think that procurement governance should be strengthened, not weakened. We think there should be structural safeguards. We think that there should be three mental health commissioners, not one. We do not want to confuse consolidation and control with reform and efficiency. I will await the clarification on the amendments, and we will have more to ask in committee.

 Aiv PUGLIELLI (North-Eastern Metropolitan) (14:24): I rise to make a brief contribution on behalf of the Greens with respect to the Entities Legislation Amendment (Consolidation and Other Matters) Bill 2025. I will be followed by Dr Sarah Mansfield from our bench as well. This bill before us today is about saving the government money in the lead-up to an election, and the irony is it is actually not even that much money in the scheme of things for this government. It is actually pennies down the back of the couch, really, when you look at the individual bodies set to be abolished under this legislation. But anyway, it is important to remember that every budgetary decision of this Labor government is a choice. It is a choice whether they want to invest in a public school whose students have had to have assemblies outside in the scorching heat or pouring rain because they do not have a hall or if they want to build another giant toll road across our city. It is a choice whether they want to invest in protecting our precious natural places and stop the extinction of our native species or if they want to invest in another gas project that will continue to fuel climate change for decades to come.

This bill is the government’s choice to cut back on the public service instead of investing in its vital work so that it can continue to provide those essential services to so many Victorians. The government is spruiking these cuts as streamlining and as efficiency. But let us be clear, it is neoliberalism as usual, another example of the Labor Party losing its way and caving in to conservative ideas of austerity. Budgets are an opportunity for governments to show what they want to prioritise, and this bill shows that Labor is prioritising austerity for the public sector and is instead investing in, I do not know, projects that funnel funds to private construction companies to build more toll roads that Victorians did not ask for.

All Victorians benefit from a well-resourced public service. They provide a vital role in supporting families and supporting communities, workers and businesses right across our state. I am pleased that this bill does not go quite so far as all of the things the Silver review recommended. They have not decided to cut musical instruments from students. They have not decided to cut the doctors in schools program. But these cuts, the ones in this bill, will still have a tangible impact on our communities and particularly on environmental management and, for example, on our mental health system’s oversight. The public service was already found by the Victorian Auditor-General’s Office to be struggling with chronic under-resourcing and overwork. What do you all expect is going to happen now if you keep cutting things further? It was found that the public service cannot deliver on one-third of its targets because of under-resourcing and overwork. These cuts will only make that worse.

To talk to some of the specifics, though, of this bill, at a time when up to a third of our irreplaceable native plants and animals are threatened to the point of extinction, this bill seeks to dismantle important institutions that protect wildlife and habitats including our very coastline. It weakens our environmental frameworks and our expert knowledge base at a time when protecting ecosystems and mitigating climate impacts could not be more important. The Victorian Environmental Assessment Council (VEAC), the Victorian Marine and Coastal Council, Recycling Victoria and the Mine Land Rehabilitation Authority will all cease to exist. Matt Ruchel, the executive director of the Victorian National Parks Association, has said:

The benefit of these institutions to nature in Victoria is immeasurable. Nature can’t afford these cuts. It’s setting up a recipe for short term decisions and thinking, when nature needs long-term care.

This is on top of the staffing cuts that have already occurred in the Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action, in Parks Victoria and in the Victorian Fisheries Authority over the last few years. It is just devastating. With VEAC gone, who will provide the independent expert advice on vital decisions for the management of public land? With the marine and coastal council gone, who will plan for coastal erosion, for algal blooms like we are seeing just over the border in South Australia, gas decommissioning, oil spills and the climate impacts on Victoria’s coasts? The department will not have the resources, the scope or the expertise that these standalone bodies have brought to our state for so many years. It will be a travesty, if this bill passes, that they will be lost.

As well as the cuts to our environmental framework and oversight, the bill does propose some significant changes to the Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission, which has seen some large funding cuts and a 40 per cent reduction in staffing. I understand there are a range of amendments before the chamber with respect to this, and they all seek to make different changes to these parts of the bill. I know that my colleague Dr Mansfield will speak in more detail to our concerns about the mental health aspects, the Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission and its ability to oversee the mental health and wellbeing system here in this state, but I will just briefly cover a few main points.

The bill has proposed to remove the lived-experience requirement for commissioners at the Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission, as well as from the board of the Victorian Collaborative Centre for Mental Health and Wellbeing. I would like to remind the chamber of recommendation 28 from the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System:

Developing system-wide roles for the full and effective participation of people with lived experience of mental illness or psychological distress

‘System-wide’ is the term used there. That includes these important decision-making bodies, and I hope that with the amendments that are before us today that this vital element can be protected. The royal commission also recommended that the Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission be the key body responsible for ensuring that the government is accountable for improving the mental health and wellbeing system and implementing the recommendations of the royal commission. It was recommended as the primary body for oversight of the system, and this bill proposes to narrow the scope of the commission and remove its ability to collect certain information. Again, I am hopeful that we will be able to restore the scope and the data collection ability of the commission, as this is the bare minimum, and actually I would like to see the commission have greater access to data so that they can more effectively do their work.

I think the crux of it is we are keen to see the Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission succeed – to do what it was set up to do – and reducing its scope, its powers or its leadership will not in any way achieve this success. Actually, I want to see our entire mental health system succeed, and to do that it needs resources, it needs staffing, it needs funding and it needs good oversight and systems management. However, there is definitely much more work in these spaces to be done. In the words of the Health and Community Services Union, our mental health system is ‘widely recognised as underfunded, overstretched and structurally broken’.

These proposed cuts from Labor today are not the solution. The Greens want to see our mental health systems, our environment management bodies and all of the public sector supported, well resourced and enhanced, not cut, not merged, not consolidated into oblivion. So we will be opposing the bill and hoping to salvage what we can through amendments from right across the chamber.

 Sonja TERPSTRA (North-Eastern Metropolitan) (14:31): I rise to make a contribution on this bill, the Entities Legislation Amendment (Consolidation and Other Matters) Bill 2025, and of course I rise today in support of this bill. The bill sits squarely within the government’s priorities of delivering high-quality public services in a financially responsible manner, and it is to ensure that the public sector is appropriately focused on delivering essential services.

The Victorian government commissioned an independent review to focus squarely on any waste and inefficiency that could be found, with a focus on entity consolidation. The review found that there are some entities and boards whose functions are not or are no longer required or whose functions overlap with existing work of core departments. Consolidating functions into departments enables clearer lines of accountability and makes government less complex to navigate. In the 2025–26 budget it included a range of savings and efficiencies which were consistent with the objectives of the Silver review. This included ceasing or scaling back programs where the original aims have been achieved, where the level of investment is no longer required or where programs no longer represent the best value for money. We are making sure our public service is laser focused on Victorians, with good schools, good health care, safe communities and real help with cost of living.

Not only are all of these measures that we are taking fiscally responsible, but it is also about making sure the public service is in the best shape it can be. Also, there is nothing wrong with government making efficiencies where programs are no longer fit for purpose. I know we have been criticised for this, but I just think that it seems the government cannot win either way. Either we are cutting something or we are not. But there has actually been a review that undertook a comprehensive look across services, which was done at arm’s length to government, and we are acting on those recommendations. Families are watching every dollar they spend, and they expect the government to do the same. We are reducing waste and inefficiency so we can invest in the things that matter to Victorians the most. We have been clear that we will never make cuts to the frontline services that families rely on. I just want to repeat that, because I think there has been some misinformation spread that we are making cuts to frontline services. We are not. I will repeat my remarks. We have been clear – very clear – that we will never make cuts to frontline services that families rely on.

The changes that are being proposed by the bill are sensible and support the government’s plan for responsible fiscal management without frontline cuts that hurt families. Today there are more frontline services for Victorians than before the pandemic. Compared to 2019 there are an extra 671 police and protective services officers, which represents an increase of 4.1 per cent; an extra 3890 teachers in our government school system, which represents an increase of 9 per cent; and an extra 10,282 nurses and midwives, which represents an increase of more than 30 per cent. This is in contrast to what would happen to frontline services under a Liberal–National government, because they have already foreshadowed that they would cut $11 billion out of the budget but they have not told us how and where. What you can see is we are looking for efficiencies and then to reinvest that money back into services. It is pretty clear what the choices are and why we are doing this, and that is to make sure that we have an appropriate way forward to make sure that Victorians get the services they need.

There are a series of house amendments that will be introduced into the Legislative Council in response to sector feedback since the bill was tabled. This is in response to feedback from the sector and other members. These amendments strengthen lived-experience leadership in the commission and the centre and clarify data-sharing obligations to make it easier for the commission to access the information it needs to carry out its work. These amendments are in regard to the mental health portfolio. Specifically in regard to the Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission and in regard to the number of commissioners, the house amendments will provide for the appointment of a deputy mental health and wellbeing commissioner, bringing the total number of commissioners to two, and they will require that at least one of the mental health and wellbeing commissioners or deputy mental health and wellbeing commissioners is a person who identifies as having lived experience or living experience or has been a carer.

In regard to data access, the amendments will clarify data-sharing obligations and that the commission will continue to be able to request information from the health secretary that is relevant to its work and that the health secretary is required to provide this information while ensuring that individual identities and personal health information are protected. Also, in regard to the Victorian collaborative centre, the house amendments require that at least two of the five board members will need to have lived experience, including at least one consumer, with the second member being a consumer, a carer or a supporter. If the board increases to seven members or more in the future, the requirement will increase to a minimum of three members with lived experience. Those amendments will be put to the chamber later today. As you can see, although the bill has been tabled previously, the government has been committed to ongoing discussions with members in this place but also with sectors and listening to their feedback. It is hoped that the amendments will go some way towards satisfying those requests that we have had.

One example of one of the entities that this bill will touch on – and I will say at the outset VicHealth is not included in this bill and is not captured by this bill at all; there are some entities that are, but VicHealth is not one of them – is Recycling Victoria. This is just an example: the Victorian government will integrate Recycling Victoria into the Environment Protection Authority Victoria, or the EPA as it is otherwise known. Recycling Victoria’s functions, people and assets will transition to the EPA, creating a single entity: a stronger and clearer regulator for waste recycling and resource recovery in Victoria. So it actually elevates the role that recycling will have and should have in terms of what government sees as its priorities. Putting it in the EPA, as I said, will help reduce any duplication and will result in savings. This means industry, councils and the community will have one primary regulator and program interface rather than navigating separate bodies, so that makes sense. At the moment responsibilities for standards, compliance and circular economy programs are spread across multiple bodies, and that can lead to, as I said, duplication, slower decision-making and confusion about who does what as well as higher administrative costs. So these are all the things that we are targeting to try and reduce. Integrating Recycling Victoria into the EPA will clarify roles, reduce fragmentation and also strengthen end-to-end regulation of waste and resource recovery. These reforms align with the government’s Economic Growth Statement as well, including our commitment to reducing the number of regulators and making it easier to do business in Victoria while maintaining strong environmental protections.

This is not a retreat from our waste and circular economy ambitions either. Our commitment to diverting waste from landfill, improving recycling, building a circular economy and protecting the environment remains very firm. By bringing together program levers, standards and enforcement within a single well-resourced regulator we are strengthening our ability to deliver those outcomes, not weakening them. Our message is clear: services will continue, ambition remains high and we are modernising how we regulate and support waste and recycling to deliver better results for Victorians and the environment. I might leave my contribution there. I know my colleagues on the government benches will also have lots to contribute to this debate on the bill. I commend the bill to the house.

 Melina BATH (Eastern Victoria) (14:41): I am pleased to rise to make a brief contribution on the Entities Legislation Amendment (Consolidation and Other Matters) Bill 2025. In doing so I note that this is an omnibus bill. It is a little bit from column A and a bit from column B. It has elements of recommendations from the Silver review and then elements of the government’s own thought process. Of course the Silver review found that the Victorian public sector was overly complex, fragmented and top-heavy, comprising more than 500 entities and thousands of boards and committees, leading to duplication, slow decision-making and high indirect costs. You do not have to be Einstein, particularly living in regional Victoria, to know that working with government departments and government bureaucracies – and some of the aforementioned are in the entities bill – can create all sorts of hassles, all sorts of frustrations and all sorts of impediments, and often not good outcomes, not only for regional people but also for the environment, which is one of my interests, and also in terms of mental health and issues related to that.

I just want to put on record today in this house the work that my shadow minister Emma Kealy has done in the mental health space. I know that she has been a fierce advocate for mental health and indeed the recommendations of the royal commission, noting that the government was seeking to reduce the number of mental health commissioners down to one and that we have heard in the other house and in this house that through sector feedback there will be some house amendments. It is an interesting thing that house amendments have come through after this government had consultation with the sector, but they were not in the initial bill that was produced in 2025 to adopt the recommendations from the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System about lived experience. So in one sense in drafting this bill it disregarded them; it sought to diminish them. The government has then gone out for consultation, not before the bill was introduced but during the bill process between the lower house and the upper house, and it is now looking to do house amendments. Again I put on record Emma Kealy’s fierce advocacy in this space. We have amendments that we are bringing from the royal commission’s philosophy about lived experience – we have a balanced approach to that – and in a sense the government has walked back on its decision.

That being said, I think that the Liberals and Nationals are predisposed to support anything that supports better mental health while still streamlining bureaucracy in other areas. To go to some of these areas, let me just give you a quick walk-through of the entities bill. It amends the Circular Economy (Waste Reduction and Recycling) Act 2021 to abolish the head of Recycling Victoria – that is a true form of recycling. It repeals the Victorian Environmental Assessment Council Act 2001 to abolish VEAC, and I will have plenty more to say on that one. It abolishes the Victorian Marine and Coastal Council, and the government would tell us that that is because much of that work is done. Again there is other commentary around that, which I am happy to explore. It abolishes the Mine Land Rehabilitation Authority. That was really established in full in my electorate when we saw the closure of the Hazelwood power station, and people have various views on the mine rehabilitation authority. In one way it can be reabsorbed back into the department; in another way there are some significant issues that need to be of acute focus for government in relation to mine rehabilitation.

I want to put on record my thanks to Professor Rae Mackay, who was the initial mine rehabilitation commissioner. He came here from overseas, from England, to provide his expertise. He has spent a lifetime moving around the world in mine rehabilitation and geology and geography. All of those intricacies are beyond me, but he has taken it upon himself to provide some very good scope and detail. Some of his comments were that there has been a lot of good material prepared by the authority and that that still needs to be available into the future, not only for government and internal department use but also for public transparency, so I will be putting that on the record during committee of the whole. The website, he suggests, also contains material that should be maintained at least for the near future to have that transparency and good information for people.

Part of the whole idea around mine rehabilitation is that it comes back to being safe and sustainable. But also the mine is very close of course to the townships of Morwell and Churchill and Traralgon as well as buffering up against the Loy Yang area. People have an acute interest in this in my electorate, and they want assurance that government not only is doing the right thing but has the right plan for mine rehabilitation. It does not need to be off-the-shelf overall, it needs to be bespoke for our area and our mines. They are very deep mines; they are very big mines. I am just putting on record my thanks to, as I said, Professor Mackay and other associated people that have worked there. But we need to ensure that the good work that is being done is not lost in the traffic.

That said, the abolition of VEAC is something that is of great interest to me. I note that some of the great people who I have had the honour of working with over time – the BUGU, Bush Users Group United; the Prospectors and Miners Association of Victoria; the horse riders; the trail riders; the four-wheel drivers; the list could be long – fought very hard to oppose the position that VEAC recommended to government in relation to the closure of the Wombat State Forest in to national park. That is not because we want to pillage and plunder – that is far from the truth – but because we believe that active management of our public estate is the best way to go. VEAC over its course, during operations and looking into the Central West Investigation, disregarded over 66 per cent of the responses, the submissions. It ignored them and went in its own direction, and I believe, sadly, over time – VEAC was set up in 2001 – it has become politicised, and we have heard from the Ombudsman that the public sector has been politicised. I am concerned that the planning and recommendations to government were not based on sound science but were based on this ideology, and indeed the closure of this is not something that I will lament. If the government in the last 11 years had been focused on more boots on the ground, keeping pests and weeds down and ensuring that public access was maintained while also ensuring that they were properly monitoring threatened species and ensuring that bushfire mitigation – and I could go on on that for hours – was adhered to, then we would have been protecting our state parks and national parks far better. So I do not believe that the closure of VEAC will be any great loss.

There are indeed other entities. It is almost a parallel process that has been going on. The Commissioner for Environmental Sustainability Victoria provides independent advice, supposedly. I say that because I do not think it has had enough teeth and enough funding directed to it in terms of auditing and monitoring. It certainly has produced a state of the forests report, and if you go down through that state of the forests report there is great concern about what government is not doing. My argument would be that we certainly need good communication, we certainly need good advice and we certainly need more boots on the ground out in our state forests and national parks. We do not need more suits giving ideological advice. With that said, I would always implore the government to put a greater focus on devolving the work of the suits in Melbourne and sending them out to the regions where they can actually look after the forests. This means focusing on doing the work – taking down pests, controlling pests, getting rid of weeds that are choking out and threatening our native flora and fauna. It has been 11 years that this government has been in office, and we are seeing more degraded forests and misused land.

I have given my commentary on the Mine Land Rehabilitation Authority and VEAC. Moving on, I just want to spend a little bit of time on the Essential Services Commission. I know my colleague Mr Welch thoroughly interrogated that, but I have had phone calls from Rural Councils Victoria and from the chair of Rural Councils Victoria, who are very concerned about the reduction of the role of the Essential Services Commission and removing the requirement for the ESC to provide advice when setting council rate caps, shifting fare settings and powers to the minister and replacing those reviews with ministerial-directed reviews. These increase that ministerial discretion, and I think they diminish that oversight. The Essential Services Commission does have a role. Rate capping is a blessing and a curse, depending on where you sit. I know it came in in 2015. It provides certainty for councils, but with a state government, an Allan government, that is cost shifting onto our local councils all the time, it is providing a harder and harder arena in which councils do business. But the Essential Services Commission certainly has a role to play, and I think it is warranted. I know we will move those amendments in relation to that, and I thank Mr Welch. Also, as I said, we have amendments in relation to the Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission. I am very supportive of those.

What we know is that after 11 years in government we now have a government that is looking to have ‘reforms’ in relation to about $36 million of savings over four years and about $9 million annual savings. Well, when you look at what this government has spent on budget overruns and allegedly $15 billion on corruption in the CFMEU, this is just, in effect, rats and mice. In this case we think it is better to support some measures of cost cutting. It is a bit from column A, a bit from column B, some from the government’s own mindset and some from the Silver review. We are very concerned that this government continues to blow out budgets and create such distress in our communities where vital services – police, teachers, nurses, hospitals, schools – are dilapidated or not developed because of government blowouts.

I am just going to circulate some amendments in the name of my colleague Richard Welch, and I will do that on behalf of him and the Liberals and Nationals now. I have acquitted my role and responsibilities there. Finally, the bill is better than nothing and we will not be opposing it, but we want to see these amendments that we will put get through.

 David LIMBRICK (South-Eastern Metropolitan) (14:56): Sooner or later this government, or potentially the opposition if they ever win government, will have to face the reality that Victoria has to live within its means. Either they do that through planning in advance and managing our finances in a responsible way, or they do it through pretending they do not exist until the point that we get to a financial emergency. Lots of people have asked me over the years since I have been elected here, ‘How do you actually know if we are really in financial trouble?’ Well, there is an easy answer to that, which is: if we start to see ads on social media for state government bonds, that will be the point at which we are in big trouble, because that means that the Treasury Corporation of Victoria can no longer place bonds with institutional investors and is looking for retail investors. We are not quite there yet. We have not got to that point. My understanding is the Treasury corporation can still happily place bonds in institutional markets, so that is a good thing, but we need to make sure that we do not get to that point.

When the previous Treasurer Mr Pallas resigned, I did something a bit wild. I put my hand up and said I would take the job as Treasurer for the sake of Victoria. Yes, I volunteered my services to the Labor Party and to the government, not because I like the Labor Party but because I care about the future of this state. I could be the bad guy. I said, ‘I don’t mind. You can blame me for all the bad stuff, and the ministers, when they get their budgets cut, can point the finger at me and I will leave Parliament with everyone hating me.’ But the good thing would be we might actually get our finances under control in Victoria. Unfortunately, the Labor Party did not take me up on my offer and did not even respond to me. I was pretty disappointed about that. They did not even get me in for an interview. At least give me a chance. They always talk about inclusion and stuff, but anyway, that did not happen. Despite my disappointment, Minister Symes got the gig, and like always, I give everyone a fair chance when they start a new role and have a look at things. So I had an open mind. I know that she was Attorney-General before and it is a big shift into Treasury. Anyway, the Treasurer announced at one point the Silver review, and I thought, ‘Well, this sounds like a good idea.’ If you come in as a Treasurer, it makes sense that you would want to get finances under control and it makes sense that you would get someone who knows what they are talking about to review things and see what sorts of savings can be made and what they can do. I think all Victorians and even the Labor Party would agree that there is a lot of waste in government and maybe you could get rid of some of it. So we got the output of that Silver review, and that lands us where we are today, where we have the Entities Legislation Amendment (Consolidation and Other Matters) Bill 2025.

This bill has been alluded to by others – I think I heard the words ‘rats and mice’ and ‘pennies down the back of the couch’ and this sort of thing, and I tend to agree that there are actually not a lot of savings. But what this bill is attempting to do in a very small way is get rid of some government waste through removing commissions and removing agencies and this sort of thing and consolidating them into other departments. I am not going to oppose that. I think that is a good thing. My complaint here is that it is going nowhere near far enough for what needs to be done. I do not know what was originally proposed by the Treasurer to cabinet, but I am sure it was more ambitious than this. But eventually this is what got through cabinet, and it is decidedly less than ambitious, unfortunately. I would like to see a bill that is a lot thicker than this one. Even though this is pretty thick, I would like to see it a lot thicker with agencies that can be removed or replaced.

Some of the things that this bill is doing are entirely sensible. I know I have heard the opposition complain about removing the commissioner that oversees rate rises for councils. Well, my understanding is that the commission basically just does a report every year and says that the cap is going to be equal to CPI. I mean, I could do that; I would do it for free if the government wanted me to. If they want me to write a report, I can do that. I am sure someone in the Treasurer’s department can do that also. I do not think it is that controversial. Increasing rates in line with CPI is fine, I guess. It means they are not going up in real terms, so that is a good thing.

What we need to do in Victoria is get away from this idea that cuts are somehow bad. In fact I think that both the government and the opposition underestimate how popular the idea of slashing the public service can be. We only need to look at other countries, and I have mentioned them many times before. In Argentina President Milei got elected on the promise of taking a chainsaw to the size of the state, and indeed he has done that and turned Argentina around. They are on a totally different trajectory now. Their budgets are under control. They are seeing economic growth, foreign investment, all sorts of good things. Housing and rental affordability has increased dramatically. It is wonderful. But also closer to home, in New Zealand, the Association of Consumers and Taxpayers party have been promising this for years. They are now in a coalition with the government, but they have done some wonderful work on cutting back waste in the New Zealand government. I think that this is something that we should be thinking about here as well. The idea that we cannot remove waste in Victoria is wrong. There is so much waste in Victoria.

The government, to their credit, have actually proposed a few other things, not necessarily in this bill but related, and it just blows me away that the opposition do not support some of these things – for example, defunding VicHealth. The savings from defunding VicHealth would actually be more than what is in this bill. It is about $50 million a year of ongoing funding. I think even supporters of VicHealth would agree that their recent trajectory has been very far removed from their glory days of Life Be In It. But apparently the opposition have promised to keep VicHealth. They want to keep this agency. They promise to not make any cuts. What the opposition are promising is basically a worse proposition, in many ways, to what the government is trying to do, which is pretty depressing for Victoria. I would really like the opposition to come out and say that they are going to make these great big cuts and make everyone in Labor really angry about it so then they could point the finger and say ‘You’re the razor gang’ or ‘You’re the cuts guys’ or whatever. I think that both Labor and the Liberal parties underestimate the potential popularity of this. Maybe that is what Labor are worried about, which is why they are sort of happy that the Liberal Party are not really proposing anything that deviates too far from the current norm. In fact the opposition seem to just be claiming that they are better managers than Labor. I do not know; I would like to see evidence of that. If they want to be better managers, I would like to see what they are going to get rid of, because there is a lot to get rid of. The size of this state is astronomical and the size of our debt is astronomical.

I will tell you something I would get rid of: I would knock the Suburban Rail Loop on the head. I think that given the current and projected debt in this state and the revelations about how much of that construction work is actually being siphoned off to organised crime, and without getting a royal commission into organised crime to figure out where that money is going and what the vectors through which it is going are, to commit to a project that is going to cost hundreds of billions of dollars – and that is best case scenario; of course it will be much worse than that and large proportions of that money are going to get siphoned off to organised crime. I do not know what the contract-break fees are going to be to cancel the SRL, but whatever they are, they are not posing the existential risk that going ahead with the SRL is posing here. I just think that this is a huge problem that we need to solve, and this is one way of dealing with it. We can say we are not going to go ahead with the SRL. I know that the opposition have committed to pausing and reviewing it because they do not want to make a clear statement about whether they want to knock it on the head or not. I know that every time you bring up the SRL the government says, ‘What about all these workers that we’ve got working on the SRL?’

If you talk to anyone in the housing construction sector, they will tell you the biggest problem at the moment is the price of not only materials, which it competes with the government on, especially things like concrete and sand and this sort of thing, but also labour. They compete. I have spoken to so many builders that have had tradies that work for them just disappear and go and work on government projects because they get better pay – of course they do. They work on the government projects because they get these inflated amounts paid out by the government, by taxpayers, by debt, which one day the government hopes will be productive assets. But who knows when that will happen and whether it will actually stack up financially. In the meantime, our construction sector has builders going bankrupt left, right and centre because of costs blowing out, and a large part of that cost is because they are competing with the government. The idea that these guys working on government construction projects would not be able to get jobs somewhere else in the economy is ridiculous. There are shortages all throughout the economy at the moment, and in fact it is one of the things that is pushing up house prices.

The other thing with the SRL that concerns me is that both the government and the opposition seem to have bought into this fantasy that we are going to have these huge high-rise towers of cheap apartments everywhere. It is problematic for a few reasons. Labor want to believe it because they want to believe that the towers will actually exist and there will be more apartments for people. The opposition want to believe it because they want to run NIMBY campaigns. I do not believe that it is ever going to happen, because if you talk to anyone in the construction sector, they will tell you that the only apartments they can make money on at the moment are large luxury apartments. Small, cheaper apartments simply do not stack up economically. They do not make any sense. People do not want to buy them, they cannot sell them, they cannot make a profit on them; they are not going to get built.

Plus, this government has disincentivised foreign capital. They like taxing people that cannot vote, so they tax foreigners. That is popular both on the Labor side and on the opposition side sometimes, because people say, ‘Well, we can tax these foreigners. We don’t want foreigners owning things in Australia.’ But what it means is that we cannot do things like normal countries do, which is to have large corporations that will invest in large tower blocks and that sort of thing. If you go to other countries – if you go to the United States or Japan or many other countries – what you will see is large multinational corporations building large apartment blocks and managing rentals at large scale, and they do it very efficiently because they are doing it at scale. But in Australia the vast majority of rentals are handled by struggling mum-and-dad investors. It is a wildly inefficient way to do things. They have more and more and more compliance every year. Of course mum-and-dad investors cannot keep up with that, so then they have real estate agents on their behalf to handle all the compliance, and an entire industry has sprung up around it to manage the compliance. You get all these people doing test and tag and all these other compliance activities. I am sure the government think that they are doing good, but what they are really doing is just making everything more expensive for everyone and it is not really helping things, when in effect things could have been very different.

The Libertarian Party will not be opposing this bill because it does some very small, minor good things. As Mr Puglielli said, it is pennies down the back of the couch really. But I would urge the government and the opposition to be straight with Victorians and tell them how it really is and that we are going to have to change what we are doing financially because we are not living within our means. The current debt projections are terrifying, and that is even if things are on track – and they are clearly not on track, especially with large government projects. We certainly have not got organised crime and corruption under control in Victoria, and the government does not seem very interested in taking drastic action to fix that. They do not want to investigate it. They do not want to tackle the root causes and the incentives of organised crime – it is a huge problem – and committing to going ahead with something like the SRL, with that backdrop, just seems totally irresponsible to me. Therefore I urge the government and the opposition to come up with something a bit more ambitious.

 John BERGER (Southern Metropolitan) (15:10): I rise to make a contribution on the Entities Legislation Amendment (Consolidation and Other Matters) Bill 2025. This piece of legislation will aim to reduce duplication across government, clarify roles and responsibilities with the broader public sector, and help streamline reporting requirements to ensure effective and efficient governance in Victoria. By tackling any inadvertent duplication or duplicate spending in the public sector or otherwise inefficient spending, we can be sure that the public sector is fit, modern and working in the best interests of Victoria.

The Allan Labor government has a commitment to deliver the highest standards of government service in a fiscally responsible manner. These commitments set out in the 2025–26 state budget reflect an important part of our five-step fiscal strategy. Enhancing effectiveness of government and improving the standard of governance is key to delivering better outcomes for Victorians and ensuring the better execution of government policy.

In order to achieve these aims, the bill will make a series of reforms. This includes a move to abolish, reform and consolidate a number of public entities and boards. It will clarify, streamline and remove regulatory and administrative reporting and compliance requirements. A number of other measures will also be taken in order to ensure this restructuring of the public sector can be allowed to take place.

First, the Circular Economy (Waste Reduction and Recycling) Act 2021 will be amended to abolish the head, Recycling Victoria. It will confer the relevant functions of the Environment Protection Authority and reduce other related regulatory burdens. It will repeal the Victorian Environmental Assessment Council Act 2001 to abolish the VEAC, or Victorian Environment Assessment Council, and similarly will abolish the Victorian Marine and Coastal Council by repealing its 2018 principal act too. It will also amend the Commissioner for Environmental Sustainability Act 2003 to confer the functions to the VEAC onto the commission. The Mineral Resources (Sustainable Development) Act 1990 will be amended to abolish the Mine Land Rehabilitation Authority, with its remaining residual functions and powers subsumed back into the state government. The Public Administration Act 2004 will be amended to abolish the Victorian Public Sector Commission Advisory Board. It will change the date by which the VPSC must submit a draft annual plan to the Premier each year. The Financial Management Act 1994 will be amended to abolish the Victorian Government Purchasing Board and to make further provisions for the procurement of goods and services by departments and other entities in the state government. The bill will repeal the Road Safety Camera Commissioner Act 2011 and it will amend the Mental Health and Wellbeing Act 2022 to change the constitution of the Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission. In response to feedback from the sector and other members, new amendments to this bill will strengthen lived-experience leadership in the commission and at the centre and clarify data-sharing obligations to make it easier for the commission to access the information it needs to carry out its work.

Next, the bill will amend the Local Government Act 1989 and the Essential Services Commission Act 2001 to limit the ESC’s advisory and reporting role around local government and council rate caps. The Commercial Passenger Vehicle Industry Act 2017 and the 2001 ESC act will also be further amended to set maximum charges for applicable unbooked services and non-cash payment surcharges. The Accident Towing Services Act 2007 will be amended in relation to the determination of charges and indexation of said charges. The Parliamentary Workplace Standards and Integrity Act 2024 will be amended in relation to reporting requirements of the parliamentary adviser. The Great Ocean Road and Environs Protection Act 2020 will be amended to provide for the transfer of staff from Parks Victoria to the Great Ocean Road Coast and Parks Authority. Finally, there are some consequential amendments to the act as well.

The amendments brought forward under this bill are substantial, and they work towards building a more efficient public sector focused on delivering the outcomes Victorians expect. Where duplication exists, this bill is striking it down and merging bodies where necessary to ensure policy outcomes are delivered. It realigns policy and program functions to ensure that the state government’s priorities are delivered to the highest possible standards. These public bodies have served our state and our communities well, but greater efficiency could be found by transferring the remaining duties to relevant departments or to another public body which covers a broader remit. They ensure that the remaining responsibilities will continue to be fulfilled by another part of the public sector, allowing us to achieve the same outcomes while saving the taxpayer money. This includes a greater concentration of responsibility so that each function of government is not spread out as far and thin across different public bodies and different public entities. They allow for government to continue to deliver services and better public policy outcomes in a way that is more affordable and more sustainable going into the future. Therefore I commend the bill to the house.

 Jeff BOURMAN (Eastern Victoria) (15:15): It gives me great pleasure in this place today to read part 3, ‘Abolition of environment advisory bodies’, and division 1, ‘Abolition of Victorian Environmental Assessment Council’. I have no problems with a good environment – I like a good sustainable environment – but in my time here, I have got to say, I feel I have been fighting VEAC because VEAC, at least from my people’s perspective – which is me as well as everyone else – has been rubberstamping the creation of new national parks. National parks sound great, except they just boot a whole lot of users out. Ms Bath went through a whole lot of stuff which I am not going to repeat, but I understand that the functions will still be there but they will go into the department. But it has been a long time coming. If they had been probably a little more centred and understood that public land is for public use, then they may not have gone down this path.

 Bev McARTHUR (Western Victoria) (15:16): I got into politics to get big government and big bureaucracy out of our lives – out of the bedroom, out of the lounge room, out of the classroom and out of the boardroom. Why? Because I believe that governments often create more problems than they solve, and the Independent Review of the Victorian Public Service, conducted by Helen Silver AO and commissioned by the Treasurer Jaclyn Symes MP, has proven my thinking right. The review acknowledges that Victoria’s public sector has become excessively complex, administratively layered and, in many cases, duplicative. Over time new bodies were created without sufficient discipline or consideration of whether existing structures could perform those functions. The result was fragmentation, blurred accountability and avoidable cost, all carried by the taxpayer in the form of increased taxes, tightened regulation, reduced core services and a debt burden seemingly beyond repair. The review identified nearly $5 billion in potential cost savings, and that does not even account for the billions of dollars already wasted under 12 years of Labor. I am not sure either that it includes the $15 billion that somehow disappeared down the gurgler to the CFMEU.

While none of the second-reading speech, the bill or the explanatory memorandum makes any mention of the Silver review, it is clear to all that the Entities Legislation Amendment (Consolidation and Other Matters) Bill 2025 is the government’s response to the review. Reform in that context is appropriate. Consolidation where functions overlap is sensible. Streamlining governance arrangements can improve clarity and reduce administrative overhead. The opposition does not oppose sensible structural changes, but this change must be guided by principle. It must increase accountability, improve transparency and strengthen confidence in public administration. That is why the opposition will move and support amendments to make this bill better.

While our lead opposition speakers Richard Welch and Jess Wilson in the other place have gone into considerable detail about the various aspects of this legislation, I would like to focus my attention on its impact on local government. Clauses 143 and 144 of the bill amend two principal acts, being the Local Government Act 1989 and the Essential Services Commission Act 2001. These amendments remove the requirement for the minister to obtain advice from the Essential Services Commission (ESC) when setting the annual rate cap. They also removed the commission’s role in assessing the outcomes of the rate-capping system and its obligation to prepare and publish biennial reports which identify emerging trends in the sector. In practical terms, this reduces the independent advisory and analytical function that currently informs the rate-setting framework.

The rate cap is an important bulwark against the raiding of ratepayers’ wallets, but like CPI, the rate cap is also a blunt instrument directly shaping the financial capacity of councils to deliver services and maintain infrastructure. When the state limits the revenue base of a council, it assumes the responsibility to ensure that those limits are grounded in evidence and subject to independent scrutiny. I have great suspicion of some of Victoria’s commissions, particularly those which pander to activists or the government of the day at the expense of the taxpayer, but I cannot say the same for the Essential Services Commission, which plays a significant role in ensuring fair utility prices and council rates in this state. Its work has provided sector-wide data, financial sustainability analysis and transparent reporting that allows both councils and ratepayers to understand the basis upon which rate decisions are made. Removing that advisory requirement alters the balance of the framework, shifting the process more into the heart of the executive sphere without a mandated independent input.

Local government is the tier of government most directly connected to communities. At their core, councils are responsible for local roads, waste collection and community infrastructure, with many more taking on cost-shifted responsibilities for state-created services. Councils are already operating in an environment of sustained cost pressure. The level of cost shifting keeps mounting. The minister installs more monitors and extends their terms at the ratepayers’ expense, and workforce constraints within the areas of planning and engineering persist, particularly in our rural areas. At the same time, regulatory expectations continue to expand and councils’ access to untied funding falls. That context makes transparency in the rate-setting process more important.

As the ratepayers’ best friend, I am determined that the principle of rate capping remains. I acknowledge that some councils believe that the rate-capping system has struggled to reflect structural cost pressures, and many councils face growing difficulty maintaining service levels while remaining within the prescribed limits. In this environment, the process of rate capping must be defensible on the basis of published evidence, so that ratepayers know that ministerial decisions reflect genuine economic conditions. This bill removes the obligation to seek that independent advice and fails to clearly articulate what alternative evidence framework will be publicly available in its place. And for what? The entire bill is projected to save $35 million – a drop in the ocean against the $5 billion the Silver review identified. Yet for that modest saving, the government is prepared to abolish a safeguard on council rate caps and shift the process from independent oversight to ministerial discretion. That is not streamlining – that is making rate capping more political.

Unlike the Minister for Local Government, I have consulted the sector. I engaged the Municipal Association of Victoria, Greater South East Melbourne, Outer Melbourne Councils, Rural Councils Victoria and representatives from other councils. They represent the interests of virtually every council in this state across regional, rural, interface and metropolitan areas. Words like ‘concerned’, ‘unfortunate’, ‘bad’ and ‘disappointing’ featured throughout the responses I received. Sadly, every single one of them confirmed that consultation was limited or non-existent at every stage of this process. No surprise: this government hates consultation – talks about it, never practises it. They also universally believe that removal of the ESC’s advisory role would diminish transparency and increase uncertainty in financial planning from a revenue perspective. Councils seek predictability, evidence and clarity rather than unfettered revenue growth. Legislative change that directly affects councils’ financial architecture should involve structured and meaningful engagement. Sadly, that is never the case with this government.

The Silver review was concerned with duplication and administrative inefficiency across the Victorian public sector. Its objective was to rationalise structures and clarify accountability. That objective should not be interpreted as a justification for reducing independent oversight where it performs a valuable function. Of course, where advisory bodies are redundant, they should be abolished. Where reporting requirements are excessive, they should be rationalised. But where independent scrutiny contributes to public understanding and financial discipline, its removal should be stopped in its tracks.

As Shadow Minister for Local Government, I want all levels of government to operate within their proper lanes. I want their roles and responsibilities to be clearly defined so that no-one is trespassing into areas that they are not equipped to handle. While councils could always do better in terms of their expenditure, the state holds significant sway over their revenue-raising capacity while continually shifting costs onto a sector which they never should be handling. So when the state constrains local government through mechanisms such as rate caps, it must do so transparently and based on evidence that is open to public scrutiny.

The broader objective of streamlining public entities is legitimate. Where this bill abolishes duplication and clarifies responsibility, it may well contribute to a more coherent administrative structure. However, removing the requirement for independent advice from the Essential Services Commission without clearly setting out what will replace that function is simply unacceptable. For that reason, amongst several other very reasonable, very considered amendments, we are seeking to omit clauses 143 and 144, and I call on the house to support this. Councils as well as their ratepayers, be they home owners, farmers or small business operators, deserve to know that the rates they pay are fair and reasonable and based on facts rather than the whim of the minister.

 Ingrid STITT (Western Metropolitan – Minister for Mental Health, Minister for Ageing, Minister for Multicultural Affairs, Minister for Prevention of Family Violence) (15:29): I am pleased to rise today to make a contribution on the Entities Legislation Amendment (Consolidation and Other Matters) Bill 2025. In doing so I will outline a number of amendments to the entities bill that the government will propose. Can I just take a moment to thank all members for their engagement with me and my office in relation to those aspects of the bill that deal with mental health entities in Victoria. I am grateful for that engagement, including with the opposition spokesperson for mental health Emma Kealy. These house amendments have been developed following extensive consultation and close discussion with lived-experience peak bodies, specifically VMIAC, Tandem and Self Help Addiction Resource Centre (SHARC). I want to acknowledge their advocacy, their expertise.

Members interjecting.

Ingrid STITT: On a point of order, Acting President, it is a bit hard to hear.

The ACTING PRESIDENT (Michael Galea): Quite right too. I ask members to keep all noise in the chamber to a minimum as a mark of respect to the speaker.

Ingrid STITT: I was just talking about my discussions with the lived-experience peak bodies VMIAC, Tandem and SHARC. I want to acknowledge their advocacy, their expertise and the constructive way in which they have engaged with the government throughout this process. Their message to me has been clear: lived experience must remain central to the governance and leadership of Victoria’s mental health entities. And I have listened carefully to those concerns.

In relation to the governance of the Victorian Collaborative Centre for Mental Health and Wellbeing, some stakeholders expressed concerns that the bill, as originally drafted, removed the explicit requirement for lived-experience representation on the collaborative centre board, and I understand why this concern has been raised. At the same time it is also important to ensure that the board is structured in a way that ensures the appropriate diversity of skills and expertise required to govern effectively. In order to balance these objectives the government will be proposing to amend the bill so that two of the five collaborative centre board members must be individuals with lived experience, with one of those members being a consumer with lived experience of mental illness or psychological distress, and the second member being a consumer with lived experience or a person with experience caring for or supporting a person experiencing mental illness or psychological distress. This will ensure that lived experience remains embedded in the governance of the collaborative centre, while allowing the board to maintain the breadth of skills necessary to guide the organisation. I am also conscious that the size of the board may change in the future, and for that reason the government is proposing an additional safeguard with the legislation: if the board expands beyond seven members, there will be a requirement that at least three members have lived experience. Together these amendments will ensure that lived-experience representation is clearly enshrined in legislation and remains a strong and enduring feature of the collaborative centre’s governance. I believe this strikes the right balance and responds directly to the concerns raised by Victoria’s lived-experience community.

I also want to address amendments relating to the Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission. The changes proposed to the commission were designed to strengthen and simplify its governance, allowing it to focus more effectively on supporting consumers and carers and holding government and health services to account. My view remains that the current structure has not enabled the commission to fully deliver on its statutory functions or meet the expectations of the community. However, stakeholders have also raised an important concern that the commission must continue to include strong lived-experience leadership to inform its priorities and direction. In response to that feedback the government is proposing a further amendment to retain two commissioner positions. Under this model there would be a designated commissioner and a deputy commissioner. There would be a requirement that one of the two commissioners, either the commissioner or the deputy commissioner, be a person with lived experience of mental illness, and this will ensure that lived experience continues to inform the leadership and oversight of the commission. This model enables collaboration and shared leadership while preserving clear lines of accountability and decision-making, addressing the governance challenges that have been identified under the previous arrangements. The minister’s statement of expectations provides guidance to support the effective functioning of the commission. This will include reporting against the statement of expectations in the commission’s annual report so that members of the public can have a clear understanding of the commission’s activities, including the processing and resolving of consumer complaints.

Finally, I want to address concerns that have been raised regarding the proposed changes to data-sharing arrangements involving the commission. Several stakeholders in the sector expressed concern that the bill would unintentionally limit the commission’s ability to access information necessary to perform its oversight functions. I want to be very clear that this was not the intention of those provisions. The proposed amendments were developed to address ambiguity in the existing legislation regarding the respective roles of the commission and the Department of Health in overseeing health service performance and to strengthen protections around confidentiality when it comes to access to consumer records and personal data. However, I acknowledge that these proposed changes have not been well understood and have generated significant concern across the sector. In considering that feedback the government is proposing an amendment to clarify data-sharing obligations. The commission continues to be able to request information from the health secretary that is relevant to its work. The health secretary will be required to provide this information while ensuring that individual identities and personal health information are protected and consistent with the Health Records Act 2001.

These house amendments demonstrate that the government will always listen carefully to Victoria’s lived-experience community, peak bodies and mental health sector organisations. They reflect a genuine effort to respond constructively to that feedback while still maintaining the objectives of the bill. Importantly, these changes being proposed today have been developed in close collaboration with and are supported by the lived-experience peak bodies, VMIAC, Tandem and SHARC, and I want to thank them for their engagement and for their leadership.

The Labor government remains committed to strengthening governance across Victoria’s mental health system entities, ensuring that people with lived experience remain at the heart of decision-making and have a genuine, meaningful role in shaping the future of our state’s mental health and wellbeing system. I am looking forward to working constructively with members across the Parliament to secure support for the amendments and to progress this important work.

 Rachel PAYNE (South-Eastern Metropolitan) (15:37): I rise on behalf of Legalise Cannabis Victoria to speak on the Entities Legislation Amendment (Consolidation and Other Matters) Bill 2025. To begin, I would like to be clear that we do believe that there is value in reducing unnecessary waste and we are not opposed to all of the changes in this bill. That being said, we do not believe that reducing waste should come at the cost of proper oversight and lived-experience representation. While in the short term retaining these safeguards may create added costs and inefficiencies, their value must be understood in the long term – the costs that they save over time by reducing risks and improving outcomes. With this in mind, our main concerns in this bill are twofold. We are deeply concerned about the changes that will reduce oversight as it relates to the environment and mental health sector and changes that remove lived-experience leadership.

When it comes to lived-experience representation, this bill removes requirements related to the appointment of commissioners of the Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission and replaces them with a general requirement to understand specific matters. The current arrangements require lived-experience representation for commissioners, both those with experience of mental health or psychological distress and those with experiences caring for or supporting a person experiencing mental illness or psychological distress. It also removes lived-experience requirements relating to the leadership positions at the Victorian Collaborative Centre for Mental Health and Wellbeing. No longer will there be specific requirements for directors; instead they will just need to have relevant experience, skills and knowledge, and requirements related to board members are completely removed. The Victorian Collaborative Centre for Mental Health and Wellbeing is responsible for connecting lived and living experience leadership, innovative service delivery and research to drive change to Victoria’s mental health and wellbeing system. Lived experience is central to this role.

We want to acknowledge that the government has worked in good faith to try and improve the changes to the mental health sector in this bill, but you do have to stop and ask why it took so long for this work to take place. From what we understand there was limited or minimal consultation on these changes before they were announced. It is really therefore no surprise that we are now having to discuss walking back some of these changes. I will be putting forward questions on this and several other concerns during the committee-of-the-whole stage.

The mental health sector and public at large remain sceptical that this government is making genuine progress to improve mental health outcomes for Victorians and to make effective use of the funds generated by the mental health and wellbeing levy. It is in this environment that the government chooses to progress legislation that removes lived-experience representation from the sector, both of those who have experienced or are experiencing mental illness or psychological distress and of their carers. Lived experience is all too often the last group of people to get a seat at the table. It has taken sector failures across decades for lived experience to finally be valued for what it can do and get the promise from this government that lived experience will always be central to the mental health workforce. When the time has come to cut costs, the idea that it will be lived experience on the chopping block all but confirms the sector’s worst fears that lived-experience inclusion was tokenistic and that when times are tough it is the first thing to go.

The royal commission was clear: people with lived experience must be involved in the leadership and design of the mental health system, not merely consulted. The reason for this is not that lived experience is a feel-good thing we do; it is something we do because it actually works. It keeps the system accountable, it secures better outcomes and it makes sure it is human centred. We strongly oppose these changes and will support any amendment that will prevent the loss of lived-experience voices in these roles.

I would like to again touch on the changes to the Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission, because they go far beyond just the removal of the lived-experience requirement. These changes also go to the very role of the commission. The Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission is an independent statutory authority that is responsible for holding the government to account for the performance, quality and safeguards of Victoria’s mental health and wellbeing system. The changes in this bill include reducing the number of commissioners from four to one. While a reduction was recommended, we understand that a specific number was never specified.

Further, this bill removes information sharing agreement powers and enables the minister to issue an annual statement of expectations that specifies strategic priorities, opportunities for improvement in the performance of the commission and any emerging risks to the mental health and wellbeing system. It will also limit the monitoring and reporting functions of the commission to performance, quality and safety of the mental health and wellbeing system in the course of their dealing with complaints or conducting investigations, inquiries or complaint data review. It also limits functions to monitoring and reporting on progress to improve outcomes of the mental health and wellbeing system, rather than to improve mental health and wellbeing outcomes.

The changes to the commission share a very clear theme: restricting its ability to provide independent oversight and to identify systemic failures. For any oversight body this would be troubling, but for one that is only two years old there is a particularly disturbing quality to these changes. A range of stakeholders have contacted us to express their concerns about these changes. While I understand the government is responding to these concerns in the form of several amendments, there is no reason that it should have gotten to this point to begin with. Sector consultation could have prevented all of this and avoided unnecessary uncertainty and distrust brewing in the sector.

We know that this is by no means the end of the government’s cost-cutting exercise, with more legislation to come to enact the recommendations in the Silver review. With that in mind, we hope that the government learns something with this tranche of changes. When you are looking to abolish, absorb or reduce the size of an organisation, that can be when consultation is most frightening, but it is also when it is most important. We hope that the next time we do not have to make these kinds of last-minute changes, but we can assure you that if it comes down to it, we will be there to call it out and secure changes.

With respect to changes to environment bodies, we are deeply concerned about the decision to abolish Recycling Victoria and confer its responsibilities, functions and duties to the Environment Protection Authority Victoria. This will undermine environmental oversight at a time when the Victorian Auditor-General’s Office has warned that Victoria is not on track to meet its target of diverting 80 per cent of waste away from landfill by 2030. These changes include extending the requirement for a responsible entity to prepare and submit a responsible entity risk, consequence and contingency plan from annually to every three years. In simple terms this means responsible entities like large thermal waste-to-energy services will no longer have to regularly report on risks of serious failures to the provision of their services and the actions that they are taking to minimise or prevent such risks. As I have spoken about many times in this place before, Victoria is set to become the waste energy capital of Australia. To reduce environmental oversight at this time beggars belief.

We are also deeply concerned about the change in this bill to abolish the Victorian Environmental Assessment Council and the Victorian Marine and Coastal Council. The Victorian Environmental Assessment Council is responsible for scientifically assessing environmental biodiversity and other values and threats in the immediate protection areas and state forests of eastern Victoria. While the functions of the commissioner for environmental sustainability are set to be expanded to capture some of the investigation and assessment functions being abolished, expertise will be lost and oversight weakened through reduced reporting obligations. The Victorian Marine and Coastal Council is the state’s peak advisory body on coastal and marine issues, providing expert stakeholder-informed independent advice on marine and coastal issues to the Minister for Environment. Disappointingly, unlike the Victorian Environmental Assessment Council, this bill does not make provisions for these functions to be done elsewhere. Again we see a cloak-and-dagger approach where cost cutting gets used as an excuse to remove or reduce government oversight, and it will be the mental health and environment sectors that suffer the most. For these reasons Legalise Cannabis Victoria cannot support this bill.

 Georgie CROZIER (Southern Metropolitan) (15:47): I rise to speak to the Entities Legislation Amendment (Consolidation and Other Matters) Bill 2025. As others have said, this bill does various things, but essentially it amends several pieces of legislation to implement part of the government’s response to the Independent Review of the Victorian Public Service, also known as the Silver review. That review was undertaken, and there were a number of recommendations made. This bill goes part way to looking at some of those recommendations. There are only a few areas that it is looking at, making savings of around $34 million, and that is over four years; that is an absolute drop in the ocean compared to the $15 billion of corruption that has lined the pockets of bikies and criminals with the cost blowouts of infrastructure projects in the Big Build. That has been highlighted for many weeks now. In fact it has been raised for many years what has been going on, yet the government has turned a blind eye. In particular the Premier has turned a blind eye to the corruption, and she has been caught out. She has been caught out even today, with Kevin Devlin calling her out, saying they were warned. I watched question time. She refused to answer those questions – ‘When were you first told? When did you know about it?’ She would not answer and sat down. It is an extraordinary disgrace. As I said, this bill only goes to $34 million of savings. That is two days of interest repayments – two days.

Richard Welch interjected.

Georgie CROZIER: As Mr Welch says, by the end of this week it will be over. That is all this bill delivers. This government, if they were fair dinkum, would actually look at what they were doing, stop the waste and mismanagement and hold a royal commission so we could get to the bottom of what has gone on so it does not happen again. It is the same with COVID. We should have had a royal commission into that, yet they are paying out $125 million to businesses that were affected. We were asking at the time in this house, when they shut down the other place, the Assembly, about support and the damage they were doing. We have had so many implications because of bad government decision-making, whether it is COVID or whether it is the Big Build. This government has been warned by the rating agencies ‘You are taking this state off a financial cliff’, and it is future generations that will be paying for that incredible debt. We are known as corruption central. We are known as the highest taxed state in the country, and people are really hurting. The government will use any excuse that they can, but this bill is a drop in the ocean.

Others have said, and Mr Welch very clearly pointed it out, exactly what the bill will do: streamline certain entities and look at residual functions and the like. I want to just address a couple of concerns around the mental health component that my colleague Emma Kealy highlighted in the other place. I just listened to the minister, and she does concede that they are listening and they are actually talking to people – finally – and amending the bill because they know they got it wrong. Well, they should have got it right in the first place. But no – they come in here and pretend all is well. Well, it is not well, it is not right, and they are really stuffing things up left, right and centre. What this bill does in relation to the mental health component is diminish the importance of lived experience, that being – for those of us that know – the mental illness and psychological distress of being a family member or carer responding to important mental health challenges, and it reverses the relationship between the Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission and the government. So really now the government will be sitting in judgement of the commission. That is what this bill is doing, amongst other things, and there are many issues around that. My colleague Emma Kealy in the other place raised the concerns of various stakeholders who have not been very complimentary of the government’s consultation or what they are doing in relation to the Mental Health Commissioner component. As we know, we had a royal commission into mental health, and this bill is effectively undermining some of those recommendations. I know that there will be questions in the committee, and I will ask those when we finally get to committee. I believe we are not going to committee today because the government has to adjourn it off because they are putting their own amendments because they did not get this bill right. Well, surprise, surprise – they are not getting much right at the moment, but by God, I am just hoping that Victorians get it right in November and vote this government out.

 Georgie PURCELL (Northern Victoria) (15:52): I rise to speak on the Entities Legislation Amendment (Consolidation and Other Matters) Bill 2025 and wish to indicate from the outset, like many others on the crossbench, that I will not be supporting this piece of legislation. This bill is the first part of the many legislative changes required for the government to acquit what they accepted from the Silver review into the Victorian public service. It is incredibly telling to see what this government will or will not do in relation to budget repair and the Silver review and reading those recommendations. I want to begin by recognising something really important that we need to remember as this bill surely passes the Parliament with the support of the opposition: people are going to lose their jobs because of this piece of legislation. There are going to be real-life impacts and repercussions, and it is really important that we all reflect on that and remember it.

Throughout this process, the government has repeatedly referred to many of these agencies – and, in doing so, public servants – as waste. That is incorrect. These are hardworking people who have dedicated their time and their energy to the public service, who will be profoundly impacted. I am a proud CPSU member myself, and I have engaged with a number of representatives of the union in the past, and workers that will be impacted by this legislation.

Let me be blunt: the only reason that these jobs are on the chopping block is because the government cannot balance its budget and has indeed misplaced its priorities. Everyone in this place knows that Victoria, compared to the rest of the country, is in an incredibly precarious budget position. What is evident here is that when the budget is tight, we know that agencies are hit first, and it is always those responsible for protecting our wildlife and habitat, it seems. We have already seen massive cuts to nature staff across the Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action, Parks Victoria and the Victorian Fisheries Authority, and this is exactly what we see in this bill as well, particularly with the abolition of the Victorian Environmental Assessment Council (VEAC) and the Victorian Marine and Coast Council. Abolishing the Marine and Coast Council leaves no independent body holding the government accountable on critical issues like coastal erosion, algal blooms and climate impacts on Victoria’s coasts. The council was also responsible for developing the marine and coastal strategy, with the next one being due next year.

For over 50 years VEAC has played a central role in our state’s environmental and land management framework as the agency responsible for the assessment of public land. Yes, those responsibilities will be moved over to the Commissioner for Environmental Sustainability, but it is still incredibly unclear how the tasks of a council of diverse experts are going to now be accomplished by one public servant. On that note, I will be supporting the Greens amendment to ensure the expertise of the council is not lost and that they can serve as an advisory body to that commissioner.

The abolition of the Victorian Environmental Assessment Council was not a recommendation of the review. The government are abolishing it because they no longer have an interest in expanding protected land in this state. Despite its well-respected status in history, we have seen the government unwind VEAC’s work several times in the last few years, so for many the move was not unexpected. This is also at a time when our biodiversity needs more protection and more oversight, not less. The latest Victorian state of the environment report found that our threatened species are in dire condition and are deteriorating. Of the 40 biodiversity indicators, over 80 per cent were assessed as poor or unknown. The inquiry into ecosystem decline in Victoria also found an alarming situation for our flora and fauna and major gaps in government policy. This is an inquiry which the government, in the last year of this term, still has not responded to, and it was an inquiry done in the last term of Parliament.

Let us not forget about the long-awaited legislation that we are also yet to see. While this legislation has been rushed into this place abolishing important environmental measures, the government has only just responded to the independent review into the Wildlife Act 1975 – also announced in the last term of Parliament – more than four years after that report was delivered, with its most significant recommendations rejected. We are yet to even see a copy of the proposed bill with the amendments to the Wildlife Act, and I can guarantee you that it will not come in this Parliament – but we can rush through the abolition of important environmental protections and councils. We also know that the animal care and protection bill, which was committed to a decade ago and was said to be a priority of this government, and the public land act – two pieces of legislation that are ready to go – are wasting away on the Premier’s desk. Sitting week after sitting week, they do not make their way into this Parliament. It is perfectly clear that the bodies included in this bill are not being abolished because of budget concerns; they are hardly a drop in the ocean. They being abolished because this government just does not give a damn about our natural environment, and this should concern each and every Victorian because it affects each and every one of us.

What was a recommendation of Ms Silver, which the government is apparently not interested in pursuing, is a separation of regulatory and commercial functions of state racing bodies. I just want to make it really clear that Ms Silver recommended abolishing Greyhound Racing Victoria, which they chose not to do, but they have chosen to abolish a body that Ms Silver did not recommend that they abolish. If the government are looking for more ways to raise revenue and reduce costs, I can assure them that we on the crossbench, including my colleagues in the chamber right now, can give them plenty of ideas to do that. A wonderful place to start, which I have spoken about many times before, would be to end the subsidies that prop up the flailing greyhound racing industry, a move that would save over half a billion dollars over 10 years – half a billion dollars of taxpayers money. That is exactly why the Liberal government in Tasmania has chosen to end greyhound racing. They actually did not say they were going to ban greyhound racing; they said they would pull away taxpayer subsidies, and the industry said they cannot exist then. If that is not telling, I do not know what is. The Victorian government could pull taxpayer subsidies from the flailing greyhound racing industry. They could also stop giving money to the deadly jumps racing industry. We are the only state – the so-called progressive state – in the country that continues that activity.

I have not spoken about the eye-watering costs associated with allowing people to kill ducks in the name of recreation in our state, which I would note commences at 8 am tomorrow. On top of the associated costs of running the season, the government committed $14 million to ignore their own parliamentary inquiry, which recommended they ban it, and that select committee cost taxpayer money as well. I know that my colleague Ms Payne in the Legalise Cannabis Party has also offered up some good, commonsense solutions that would save the government money and also raise some revenue instead of abolishing these important environmental bodies, which we will go through in this bill today.

As many others have mentioned, this bill initially included changes to the Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission, reducing it from four commissioners to just one, with none of the leadership positions to be filled by people who have been affected by mental health challenges. We all know how important lived experience is when it comes to mental health management and reform and policy. The commission itself has taken the rare step to publicly call this out, describing the government’s proposal as ‘at odds with the recommendations of the royal commission’. Advocates and those working within the mental health sector have described things as only getting worse since the royal commission. This is at a time where our mental health system is under more pressure than ever, and those working within it feel unheard and they feel unsupported.

I want to congratulate the government for managing to unite the rest of the entire Parliament against these changes, and I want to thank the opposition and the Greens in particular for their work on ensuring not only that the commission will not be weakened but that we may finally see real powers to request data and information.

Obviously the government has come to the table today and produced some house amendments that land in a place where these reforms that were initially incredibly concerning will no longer take place, and I am really pleased to see that happen. But it is another really important reminder of having us in here listen to those advocates, those communities and those stakeholders to ensure that we get it right, because we should absolutely be getting it right when it comes to our mental health system and our mental health commission. In saying that, while I am pleased about those changes I will ultimately not be supporting this piece of legislation, and I want to send my solidarity and support to the many public service workers across Victoria who will ultimately be impacted by the passage of this bill today.

 Sarah MANSFIELD (Western Victoria) (16:02): I rise to speak on the Entities Legislation Amendment (Consolidation and Other Matters) Bill 2025, and I just want to start by endorsing the words of my colleague Mr Puglielli. I obviously agree with the position he has put, and he has made it very clear that we will not be supporting this bill. However, despite that, I do want to make some particular mention of areas in this bill that we have concerns about, starting with mental health. I know my colleagues here that we have just heard from across all sides have flagged some of the serious problems in this bill with the changes to the mental health entities. I really want to thank all of those who reached out to us with respect to the changes this bill as proposed was to make, from people with lived experience and their representative groups, to current and former members of the affected entities, health professionals and unions. A whole range of concerns have been raised by those who reached out, and despite this being a space where there are often very different views, their concerns were remarkably consistent.

Firstly, the loss of legislated lived-experience requirements in these entities was of serious concern. One of the key outcomes of the royal commission was a recognition of the need for lived-experience representation through the whole mental health system from the front lines to leadership roles, and the immediate steps taken by this government were really significant in this respect. There should be recognition for that, but we know that there was a lot more work to do to embed lived experience in our system. There still is a huge amount of work to go to ensure that this workforce is well supported and genuinely included. The signal that this bill sends in its current form, unamended, is that the government is walking back on that commitment at the very time we need to be building on what has been started.

A reduction in the number of commissioners and the functions of the commission was also something of significant concern to a number of the people who have reached out to us. A commission with real teeth would be able to provide robust oversight of the system and make recommendations to the government about how these issues could be addressed. This was one of the key reasons that the commission was established in the first place. The changes that are potentially being made by this bill, again, unamended, would really walk back on that mission.

Even prior to the changes that were raised in this bill we had received consistent feedback from the sector that the commission was being hampered in their ability to undertake their legislated role due to a lack of resourcing and access to the data they need to do their job properly. So with respect to some of these concerns about mental health, we have proposed a number of amendments, which we will be reviewing in light of other amendments that have been put out, including the government’s house amendments. But I would ask if our amendments could be circulated now, please. Firstly, we have amendments that are seeking to reintroduce a legislated requirement for some of the board positions on the collaborative centre to be filled by people with lived experience or carers of those with lived experience, which is again going back to that recognition of the importance of this finding of the royal commission around the need for lived-experience representation and leadership. While I appreciate that there is always the potential for lived experience to be included in some of these roles, I think it is really important that we signal the need for that by legislating it to make sure that there are dedicated places for people with lived experience on these bodies. Secondly, we have amendments that retain the data collection provisions of the Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission in the Mental Health and Wellbeing Act 2022 and strengthen the requirements for data sharing, which again go to addressing that concern around the potentially diminished role of the Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission that has occurred through the changes made in this entities bill but also seek to strengthen its ability to oversee the health system by being able to obtain the data it needs to do its job well, which, as I said, is something that has long been raised as a real restriction on their ability to do their job properly.

We understand that there are amendments from the opposition and house amendments from the government, and we will look over those closely before deciding our final position on them. I welcome the fact that the government have engaged on this constructively and have seen that they need to make some changes to this bill. Ultimately our objective here is to ensure that our mental health system is being left stronger by any changes, not weaker. If this is not the case, it is more evidence that this government are walking back from their commitment to reforms following that landmark royal commission. There have been promises around jobs, housing support, reforms to ensure a health-led response by emergency services, infrastructure, the mental health hubs, regional boards and lived experience, and so many of these things have failed to materialise – great promises and great intentions that were not realised or backed with the resourcing or commitment to reform that so many had hoped would occur. There was real momentum and hope in the mental health sector immediately following the royal commission, and this government gave every indication at the time that they were committed to reform.

I understand that COVID then happened and it was a huge disruption to our health system, but whether that was a legitimate diversion of resources or a convenient distraction, the reforms essentially stopped. We hear time and again concerns that things like the mental health levy, which is meant to be supporting the reform program, are just being used to keep acute services barely running and are often swallowed up by broader area health services. The reforms are needed more than ever. This is a system under significant strain and workforce concerns are growing. In our acute settings consumers and workers are in increasingly dangerous, outdated and unsuitable facilities. There is increasing complexity in the workload, there is lack of investment in drug and alcohol rehabilitation units, there is lack of appropriate housing and support for people with complex needs and there is ever-growing demand due to failure to invest in community-based supports, which means wards are overcrowded and inadequately staffed. Recruitment and retention of staff in these circumstances then becomes increasingly difficult, and we have a vicious cycle.

Reform is never done, but we should at least be making progress. Sadly, none of the issues that led to the royal commission in the first place have gone away. Unless there is a renewed commitment by the government to resume reform efforts, we risk this becoming yet another royal commission report that joins the ranks of those becoming dusty on a shelf and that we pull out intermittently to remind whoever is in power that they knew what needed to change but have not acted.

I move now to the environmental cuts. Ms Purcell and Ms Payne have touched on these, but I just want to add to what they have said. With respect to a lot of the changes in this bill, we have requested to meet with the Minister for Environment on multiple occasions, but we did not get a response to that. We have significant concerns about the changes to a range of environmental entities. This bill is going to abolish the Victorian Environmental Assessment Council, or VEAC; the independent Victorian Marine and Coastal Council, VMCC; the independent Mine Land Rehabilitation Authority, MLRA; and Recycling Victoria, with some select functions from VEAC and MLRA to be rolled into the Commissioner for Environmental Sustainability Victoria and the Environment Protection Authority Victoria. This comes as the government seeks to cut another 350 jobs from the Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action (DEECA) and dismantle other government bodies, such as Sustainability Victoria and the Victorian Fisheries Authority. This is at a time of accelerating climate and biodiversity loss in Victoria.

We share major stakeholder concerns that this bill will irreparably weaken environmental protections and strip expert, frank and fearless voices from our governance framework. The Victorian National Parks Association, the Wilderness Society, Environmental Justice Australia and the Victorian Protected Areas Council have warned that dismantling VEAC and VMCC will leave Victoria without the expert guidance and community input it desperately needs, making it easier for short-term political pressure to override long-term protection. We are concerned that VEAC’s work delivering independent, science-based advice on the protection and management of public land cannot be replicated by the office of the commissioner in the same way. The bill also creates logistical issues by removing a mandatory duty for departments to act in accordance with government-accepted recommendations, leaving hundreds of areas identified by VEAC for investigation in limbo.

Removing the VMCC will leave Victoria with no dedicated voice to hold the government accountable on things like coastal erosion, algal blooms, gas decommissioning, oil spills and climate impacts on Victoria’s coasts. We understand it would create logistical issues. To quote Dr Geoff Wescott, spokesperson for the Victorian Protected Areas Council:

A new Marine and Coastal Strategy is due next year and the very body that has historically had carriage of this critical implementation report has just been removed. Its disappearance risks gutting the entire Marine and Coastal Act.

Abolishing the MLRA would remove an independent, trusted local voice before the Latrobe Valley even begins the long process of rehabilitating the three declared brown coal mines. By rolling Recycling Victoria into the EPA, the government risks stretching the EPA even thinner while enfeebling Recycling Victoria’s core purpose to oversee the waste, recycling and resource recovery sector while supporting the development of a circular economy. The government plans to cut another 350 jobs from DEECA, which will reportedly target Solar Victoria, Agriculture Victoria, the First Peoples group and bushfire and forest services. They also plan to abolish Sustainability Victoria, as I have mentioned, which we understand does not require legislation. There have also been a long series of cuts and restructures across DEECA over the past three years, specifically to Parks Victoria, the Victorian Fisheries Authority and biodiversity, bushfire and forest services. There are plans to merge the VFA and the Game Management Authority into a single regulator. Their investigations into abolishing the National Parks Advisory Council, the Scientific Advisory Committee, the Gippsland Lakes Coordinating Committee and the Reference Areas Advisory Committee are underway, as far as we understand. There are a whole host of other entities with key roles in overseeing the management and protection of the environment in Victoria that are facing either complete abolition or severe cuts. Then finally, Labor also plans to transfer 22 positions from Parks Victoria to the Great Ocean Road Coast and Parks Authority.

We are seriously concerned about what this says about this government’s priorities when it comes to the environment. It is clear once again that the Labor government does not prioritise or value environmental protection in this state. While we are opposing all of the changes that are before us here, we have put forward an amendment with respect to VEAC. The reason we have done this is, given that this bill is likely to pass with or without our support, we feel that this is a sensible amendment that everyone in this chamber should be able to get behind. I would ask the Clerks to please circulate that amendment now, if it has not already been. I will speak in more detail to this amendment during the committee stage of the bill, but once again I just want to say that for weeks the Greens have tried and failed to meet with the environment minister to discuss these concerns and discuss this amendment that we have put forward. We have gone out and met with stakeholders about what changes, if any, could be made to salvage this attack on environmental agencies. Specifically, we would like to thank Matt Ruchel and Felicity Brooke at the Victorian National Parks Authority as well as Dr Geoff Wescott at the Victorian Protected Areas Council. To be clear, those groups and the Greens oppose this bill entirely, and we believe that a biodiversity crisis demands these agencies be grown, not abolished.

I will leave my contribution there, and as I said, I will speak in more detail to what our amendments do with respect to VEAC. I would encourage all members to have a look at those amendments and really ask that you consider supporting them; I think they are very straightforward amendments that will actually, in all likelihood, save the government money, if that is indeed their objective with the changes that they are making in this bill, but we also believe that they will deliver some positive outcomes for our environment.

 Nick McGOWAN (North-Eastern Metropolitan) (16:16): I would just like to echo the sentiments in the chamber today of members Ms Purcell, Ms Payne and Dr Mansfield. We have just heard from Dr Mansfield a list of concerns that not only the Greens but any number of members of this place have with respect to this – what would you call it? – smorgasbord of changes to different pieces of legislation. It is representative of a government in its final throes. I predict that is exactly what it is, because it is not orderly and in very many respects it is ad hoc, knee jerk, ill conceived and poorly thought through. Nonetheless we will continue to observe this government do what it does. It will have the public believe one of two things: either they have a recipe for success that they have now stumbled upon – it has taken them some time, but that is what they have got – or, as has already been said today by members Purcell and Payne and Dr Mansfield, all these organisations and bodies simply were failing the job they had. Now, if that was the case, then who was administering those functions? Who was administering those bodies, and why didn’t they act sooner? The truth is there is a great deal of work to do here, and the truth is also, as has been said and pointed out quite plainly, that at precisely the time that our environment needs support the most, this government seems to be putting its tail between its legs and running at a great pace. That is a very sad thing for the state of Victoria, I would propose to those opposite.

Nonetheless we will see with the passage of time where they land on this. But it is disappointing, to say the least, that the approach by this government has been to largely ignore the views of the experts and consider themselves the experts. We have seen this recently, as has been said, in terms of the marine officers. It is just one small example where the solution of those opposite is simply to withdraw services entirely and hope that somehow the whole industry will regulate itself and the environment will be self-protected and so forth. This is simply a fairy tale, and if those opposite think that those in the sector who are concerned about environmental issues and also those who are active in the environmental space are not watching and noticing, they certainly are. In this case, the government and their credentials appear in tatters because of the steps they are now making.

 Lee TARLAMIS (South-Eastern Metropolitan) (16:19): I move:

That debate on this bill be adjourned until later this day.

Motion agreed to and debate adjourned until later this day.