Tuesday, 31 March 2026

 Ingrid STITT (Western Metropolitan – Minister for Mental Health, Minister for Ageing, Minister for Multicultural Affairs, Minister for Prevention of Family Violence) (17:29): I rise to speak on the Regulatory Legislation Amendment (Reform) Bill 2026 this afternoon. This bill seeks to make changes to various acts which will lead to many positives, such as better productivity benefits and much more. However, the government feels further amendment is necessary due to ongoing international events and the global fuel situation. As this chamber knows, the war in Iran has caused widespread concern about the availability and price of fuel across the country. Overall, the supply situation remains stable, with sufficient quantities of fuel being produced locally or arriving to meet normal demand. However, we are seeing shortages at some retail sites, particularly in regional areas of Victoria, and we must prepare should the situation worsen. To prepare, we must have access to reliable information that helps us understand how much fuel is available and where it is going. The Minister for Energy and Resources has significant powers under the Fuel Emergency Act 1977, including the power to direct fuel companies to provide necessary information. However, those powers are dependent on an emergency being formally declared. There are no interim powers that can help with contingency planning.

The proposed house amendments to the Fuel Emergency Act 1977 via the Regulatory Legislation Amendment (Reform) Bill will allow the Minister for Energy and Resources to compel the provision of critical information regarding Victorian liquid fuel stocks and movements before we reach an emergency situation. The amendments will improve access to accurate, comprehensive, consistent and up-to-date information from businesses that are involved in the supply and distribution of fuel. This will enable greater visibility of the current situation and improve planning and preparedness for any fuel emergency. The amendments have been designed with appropriate safeguards, including setting out specific circumstances in which information can be requested, how that information will be used and penalties for noncompliance. The amendment will bring Victoria into line with other jurisdictions, including New South Wales, Queensland and Tasmania. The proposed reforms will place Victoria in a better position to manage current and future fuel supply issues while continuing to work with the Commonwealth and other states on the national response. I now ask that the amendments in Minister Symes’s name be circulated.

To conclude, I commend the amendments to the chamber, and I ask all members to support their passage when we deal with the bill forthwith. I commend the bill to the house.

 Richard WELCH (North-Eastern Metropolitan) (17:33): I rise to speak on the Regulatory Legislation Amendment (Reform) Bill 2026. I will just acquit the new segment added to the bill on the fuel reporting. As you would know, this amendment change or addition only came through at 5 o’clock last night. We had a very brief bill briefing on it – not a great amount of time to scrutinise the purpose, intent and action of it. We understand that we are in a potentially serious situation, and we will be supporting those changes, but it has to be said that the case for it, at least in the extent of the bill briefing, was not fully made. It is not absolutely clear why these are required. Now, there was some sort of dissonance between ‘This is not urgent, but it is urgent; we probably won’t use it now, but we may need to use it now.’ In addition to being simply rushed, I do not think the case for it was clearly articulated, but we are not going to stand in the way of it. We understand that there may be reasons we are not aware of that this needs to happen as quickly as it does, and I think it is important that we support that.

In terms of the broader omnibus bill that it is, it has got ‘Reform’ in the title, which begs the obvious question: what is being reformed? I have read the bill, I have read the second-reading speech and I attended the bill briefing, and what I have found is that when you strip away the framing this is actually a statute revision exercise correcting cross-references, updating language and aligning processes and things that have already changed at a Commonwealth or agency level. That work is real and it needs to be done, but you would not classify it as reform; it is maintenance. Calling maintenance ‘reform’ is the kind of misnomer that this government have developed – to the point where I am not sure even they notice anymore the difference between maintenance and actual reform or what reform looks like, because you are hard-pressed to find a single genuine reform in a bill with ‘Reform’ in the title, which is part of the growing trend of casual misdirection becoming normalised. It is bad practice, it is lowering our standards and it should stop.

The coalition is not opposing this bill. There are things that are worth supporting – the spent conviction changes in particular are quite worthy – but we should not pretend the bill is something it is not. I will spend a little bit more time on some of those things. We do need reform, but we do not need branding exercises. In regard to spent convictions those amendments are genuinely useful. At the moment if you want to apply to have an old conviction spent, you have to first get a sealed copy of your application from the Magistrates’ Court and then separately email it to both the Attorney-General and the Chief Commissioner of Police, and that is a very convoluted process that is very likely to trip people up. Applications are routinely lodged incorrectly, and court registries have developed workarounds just to process them. The amendment formalises largely what apparently everyone is already doing informally and removes procedural obstacles for people who are trying to navigate this without a lawyer. For anyone trying to clear a historical conviction so that they can get a job or find a rental, that really matters, so we do support it.

The payment technology update replacing ‘cheque’ references with technology-neutral language is commonsense housekeeping, given the Commonwealth’s cheque phase-out. The Competition Policy Reform (Victoria) Act 1995 alignment with the 2024 intergovernmental agreement needs doing. Fixing the cross-referencing error in the Local Government Act 2020 needed to happen eventually, and updating ‘chairman’ to gender-neutral language is reasonable and long overdue. As to the reintroduction of a two-year cooling-off period preventing a former councillor from being appointed CEO of their own council – that was apparently lost somewhere in the transition from the 1989 act to the 2020 act; it should not have been – it is good that it is going back in. None of that is controversial and none of that requires wider debate, in our view. We think that is good work; we support it.

But there are other elements. As to the Circular Economy (Waste Reduction and Recycling) Act 2021 amendment, this bill marks the 13th time the circular economy act has been amended – 13 times in four years; that is roughly once every three and a half months. It is a circular economy in and of itself. I shudder to think how much money has been spent on administering 13 different changes in that time. No-one can pretend that every legislative act emerges perfectly from the drafting process, which would not be realistic, but 13 amendments in four years tells you that something more structural than normal bedding-in processes is at work here. It suggests that the act was never fully ready and has been in a state of rolling correction ever since. Every time the regulated entities think they understand their obligations, something or someone comes back in to revise them. Businesses, particularly, plan around regulatory frameworks and need – and rightfully expect – certainty. When the law keeps shifting under their feet, even for minor reasons, it adds friction, it adds legal review time, it adds caution and it adds distraction.

We talk about reducing red tape. There are a lot of conversations about the need to reduce red tape, but this is exactly how red tape accumulates – through the constant churn of getting things wrong and then fixing them over and over again. I will also note the EPA exemption application change. During the briefing the officials repeatedly described this as a ‘stop-the-clock mechanism’, with the idea being that if the EPA needs more information within the 28-day determination window, it can pause and resume rather than be forced into a premature refusal. Maybe, but some might say, ‘Well, maybe the EPA should just hit the deadline.’ I do not see many in the private sector getting this kind of flexibility when dealing with their customers or regulatory bodies. But in any case, the bill does not actually include the words ‘stop the clock’. What it does is remove the 28-day deadline and replace it with an indefinite longer period. How much longer? Not specified – there is no upper limit. There is no deadline at all. What that means in practice is that exemption applicants – we are talking about businesses seeking exemptions, for instance, from landfill fees – move from a clear statutory expectation of 28 days to an open-ended wait while the EPA takes as long as it determines to be reasonable. From an applicant’s perspective, a business’s perspective or anyone else’s, that is a pretty meaningful change and a great detriment to their ability to manage these processes, because you used to know when you would get an answer; now you do not, and in fact it is indefinite. I understand that an arbitrary deadline was producing perverse outcomes, but the solution was a structured extension mechanism with clear timeframes, not the removal of the deadline framework altogether. That is a ridiculous cop-out by both the government and the managers. Whoever approved this as a solution should be pulled up on this. This is not just bad procedurally, this is bad culturally, because it is going to induce its own bad practices. When you remove the deadline you remove accountability that comes with it. This matters particularly because it feeds into something I have raised in this house before – a pattern of statutory agencies quietly accumulating discretion at the expense of the people and the voters that they regulate.

We are going to move two amendments, and I would ask that they be distributed now, if I could.

The first amendment we will move is about clause 20, which removes the requirement that a notice be displayed on land subject to a land management cooperative agreement. The minister’s justification was this was causing landowners stress, safety and wellbeing issues. At the bill briefing the shadow minister asked for examples. One was provided – just one example – for why this would be necessary. When you understand what that example actually was, the justification starts to look a bit different. A landholder had entered into agreement with the government where they received financial compensation in exchange for allowing their land to be used as native vegetation offset to facilitate a wind farm nearby. The local community, by seeing the notice displayed on the land, worked out that this arrangement existed, which is probably what you would think was the purpose of the sign. That is the whole story. The community found out that there was a financial deal done to facilitate a wind farm near their homes, and the government’s response to that episode is to remove the mechanism that told them.

I will also tell the chamber what happened when the shadow minister tried to obtain a copy of that very agreement. She has a right to it under section 80 of the act. She was told to attend the Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action’s offices, and then told a copy could not be provided because linking the agreement to a specific project might exacerbate community sentiment. A government department declined to perform its own statutory duty on the grounds that if it did, the community might find out something the community had a legal right to know. Eventually this was addressed by obtaining access moments before Parliament sat, with departmental officials and a ministerial representative present. I will leave it to members to draw their own conclusions about what that says about this government’s relationship with transparency.

The government argues that the information will still be available in the Government Gazette and on its website. But I would ask any member in this chamber: how many of your constituents monitor the government gazettes for updates on land management agreements in their neighbourhood? The gazette is a legitimate instrument of public record, but it is not how most Victorians find out what is happening on the land next to them. The notice on the land works because it is visible. People who live nearby see it without having to know where to look. Replace it with a website entry that people have to know exists in order to search for it in the first place, and you have the appearance of public availability without the substance. That is basically the distinction between formal transparency and actual transparency operating in practice. So the coalition will move an amendment to retain the notice requirement.

The second amendment goes to clause 34, which removes the mandatory obligation on arbiters to refer serious misconduct matters involving local councillors to the chief municipal inspector. No reason has been given for this change – not in the second reading speech and not in the bill briefing. It just appeared in the bill. An accountability safeguard covering things like substantial fines, suspension and disqualification from elections has been made discretionary, with no explanation provided. When we cannot establish why a change is being made – and it is a little bit like the fuel issue – and when what is being changed is a mandatory referral for serious misconduct matters, the default position has to be that we should probably leave it alone until we do know and until there is a proper explanation. That would be the judicious thing to do. We will move to retain the mandatory obligation, and we leave it to the government to explain why it is not necessary.

I want to address something broader, because I think in the real world, ‘reform’ in this bill’s title is worth pushing back on. In business you learn that language that does not correspond to reality is dangerous, not purely because of abstract principles but because decisions get made on the basis of what things are called. If your books say you are profitable when you are not, and you make investments you cannot afford, and you do not see the wall until you hit it – the same logic applies here. If the government calls this regulatory reform and the broader public conversation accepts that framing, then there is no political pressure to do the actual work that is required – the actual, genuine reform. The box gets ticked and the harder problems stay unaddressed, and the harder problems are quite serious. Gross state product is currently at a negative 0.1 per cent growth per capita. The Property Council has recorded a 53 per cent reduction in global institutional investment in Victoria since 2022. The Business Council of Australia has consistently rated Victoria as the worst jurisdiction in the country to do business. Our per capita state product is shrinking, not growing. The net state debt is currently at $160.9 billion, and under the government’s debt management process it is going to go up to $190 billion and further. It has increased by $10 billion in the last six months alone. Interest repayments are running at close to a million dollars an hour and will be running in a couple of years at $10 billion a year.

I am not raising those figures for effect; I am raising them because they explain why naming this bill matters. A state with those numbers needs reform that actually shifts regulatory costs, actually restores investment incentives and confidence and actually grows our productive base so commercial and industrial land tax is not draining the working capital from businesses that they need to invest and hire. Payroll tax remains a structural tax on employment, planning approvals move at a pace that adds cost to every housing development and then the government of course adds taxes on top of those planning requirements and makes housing development uneconomic. None of this is in the bill, but I point it out because it is conspicuous by its absence, particularly in a bill labelled ‘reform’. I understand why this bill was never meant to address any of that. It is a compilation of statute corrections, and that is fine. But a government that titles it as ‘reform’ and then promotes it as a contribution to economic productivity when its own officials cannot provide any evidence of that has either stopped believing in the distinction between language and reality or has decided that the public will not notice. I guess both possibilities are there.

The coalition supports the spent convictions amendments. We support the routine corrections this bill makes, and we will not oppose it. We have moved two amendments, but what I would ask the government to consider, as we are in an election year, is whether Victoria’s business men and women, tradies, young people looking for work and families trying to stay in the state need a government that talks about reform or one that actually does it. The differences are profound. You can feel it in the business forecasts. You can feel it if you talk to any business owner and operator. You can feel it in the investment figures. You can feel it in the fact that we are not creating businesses that employ people. The other day we mentioned in this place that the only category of business growth is the category of businesses that employ no people; every other category of employing businesses has shrunk in the last year according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Victoria used to be a capital of competing hard for capital and talent, and we can be that again, but not by calling maintenance ‘reform’ and hoping no-one notices.

 Lee TARLAMIS (South-Eastern Metropolitan) (17:51): I move:

That debate on this bill be adjourned until the next day of meeting.

Motion agreed to and debate adjourned until next day of meeting.