Wednesday, 23 September 2026

 Bev McARTHUR (Western Victoria) (14:24): I move:

That this house:

(1)   notes that the Council has afforded the government substantial time to comply with production of documents orders, and as at Tuesday 22 September 2026:

(a) 46 orders for the production of documents remain outstanding past their due date without any substantive response, other than claims of insufficient time;

(b) of the 1535 documents identified, 630 have been withheld in full;

(2)   requires the Leader of the Government to cause all documents required by the resolutions identified in paragraph (1), together with any returns required by standing orders 10.02 and 10.03, to be delivered to the Clerk by 9:30 am on Thursday 24 September 2026;

(3)   permits that, in the event that paragraph (2) is not complied with, the Council will, at the conclusion of formal business on Thursday 24 September 2026:

(a) give precedence for a non-government member to move, without leave, ‘That this house:

(i) finds the Leader of the Government guilty of a contempt of the Council for failing, on behalf of the government, to comply with resolutions of the Council requiring the production of documents;

(ii) suspends standing order 8.04(3) relating to statements by ministers for the remainder of the sitting day; and

(iii) refers the Leader of the Government to the Privileges Committee to consider further sanctions.’; and

(b) the question will be put forthwith and decided without amendment, adjournment or debate.

At the outset I would like to thank my crossbench colleagues for their work on this motion, which for reasons I will come to later, unites us as members of this chamber and Victorians privileged by our peers with the role of scrutinising our government. That is a role, a responsibility, which should go beyond our political differences, and I am grateful that we have acted in this spirit on the subject of this motion. I move this motion today because there comes a point when patience ceases to be a virtue. On the matter of this government’s attitude to documents motions, we have got to that point. This Council has been extremely patient, perhaps too patient. This is not the first time we have asked the government to respect orders for the production of documents, nor is it the second time. We have debated this problem repeatedly. We have issued orders, extended deadlines, considered sanctions and, importantly, we have given the government the opportunity to put its own house in order. Where has that patience got us?

As at Tuesday of this week, 46 orders for the production of documents remained outstanding beyond their due date without any substantive responses other than claims of insufficient time. The government itself has identified 1535 documents relevant to orders of this Council. Of those, 630 have been withheld in full. Extracting information from this government has become frustratingly like getting blood out of the proverbial stone. Importantly, this is not some administrative disagreement between the opposition and the government. These are not purely Liberal Party requests which the Labor Party has chosen for political reasons to ignore. They are specific, properly made orders of this Council.

Members across this chamber have different politics, different priorities and very different ideas about what documents ought to be produced, but once this house has resolved that documents should be produced, the order belongs to the Council. The government should not get to decide that a resolution of this house is merely an invitation – that is a disgraceful contempt – nor should it get to decide that an inconvenient order can be put at the bottom of some overflowing departmental in-tray until Parliament gives up and goes away. This is not us freelancing to fill time on Wednesdays. Scrutiny is the essential constitutional function of this chamber. We have real powers in this area. To let the government ride roughshod without passing a motion like today’s would, I think, be a dereliction of our duty.

We have been here before, as members may remember. In 2024 this Council dealt directly with the government’s continuing failure to comply with document orders. The house asserted its right to require production and contemplated serious sanctions. Rather than immediately imposing the harshest sanction available, we gave the government further opportunities to comply. We have done it again more recently. Earlier this year the house agreed to new procedures allowing the Department of Premier and Cabinet to seek variations to the scope and timing of document orders. That was another attempt to operate reasonably and practically. It recognised that genuinely large requests can create difficulties and gave the government a mechanism to raise those difficulties properly. Let nobody opposite pretend this motion has appeared from nowhere. We have listened, waited, compromised and extended deadlines, and still we have 46 overdue orders and countless more simply kicked into the long grass.

More than five years ago, during COVID, I stood in this chamber and spoke about this government’s addiction to secrecy. I said then that if you sow secrecy, you reap suspicion. It was true in 2021; it is even more true today. In my view, the way the Andrews government operated during COVID was a disgrace, and in important ways the attitude to scrutiny developed during that admittedly challenging time appears still to be with us. During the pandemic I made the point that transparency is not some optional extra to be dispensed with when the government finds it inconvenient. The more power government exercises, the greater its obligation to explain itself. The principle did not expire with the state of emergency. It is a very basic principle of democratic government. Government has enormous power. It taxes people and spends their money. It makes laws. It signs contracts. It employs armies of officials, acquires land and regulates businesses. It can profoundly alter people’s lives. The bargain is that government must answer for what it does, and Parliament, as we learn at school, is where the answering is supposed to happen. But under this Labor government, accountability has increasingly been treated not as an essential part of government but as an irritating obstacle to it.

Earlier this year I argued here that of all Labor’s failures, the failure of integrity matters most, because it poisons trust in everything else. I described the pattern then, and I make no apology for repeating it now, because the pattern has not changed. There is the systematic abuse of Parliament, treated as an administrative inconvenience; the contempt for parliamentary questions – the dodging, the deflecting and the non-answers; the failure to supply documents when they are properly ordered; the weaponisation of urgency procedures to ram major legislation through this place with the minimum possible scrutiny; an estimates process too often used to protect ministers instead of properly examining them; the collective amnesia and obfuscation we have seen at inquiries; the freedom-of-information system too often delaying, redacting and frustrating rather than informing; the politicisation of what should be a fearless and impartial public service; and over it all an extraordinary apparatus of media advisers and spin doctors whose job seems increasingly to be to manage the headline rather than reveal the truth.

This is not a collection of unrelated complaints, it is a style of governing. It is ingrained attitudes and essential beliefs. It is a culture of Labor and the government apparatus that they have shaped in their image. When scrutiny becomes uncomfortable, minimise it. If information is embarrassing, withhold it. Should Parliament ask questions, answer something else. When Parliament asks for documents, delay. When an inquiry asks who is responsible, suddenly nobody can remember. When legislation is politically urgent, compress scrutiny. When the facts are too awful, manage the message – or in other words, just lie about it – then tell Victorians, ‘There’s nothing to see here.’ We saw that approach again this year when extraordinary changes to electoral law were rushed through this Parliament with minimal scrutiny. I said at the time that the government wanted the legislation to suffer the minimum scrutiny possible.

Many of us on this side have also spoken repeatedly about grey corruption or soft corruption. I am not using that phrase here to allege that every withheld document contains evidence of criminality. That is not the point. Grey corruption is also about a culture in which power is exercised without proper accountability; where the lines between party, government and state become blurred; where institutions become less independent; where transparency is treated as a threat; and where the public is expected to simply trust those exercising power. That culture is corrosive even before anyone proves a criminal offence. As we all know, and as many of us have said, corruption does not begin and end with money in a suitcase or a brown paper bag. When standards are walked past often enough, tolerances change. What once would have been unacceptable becomes normal, and what once would have reliably caused outrage becomes another Friday afternoon media release. That is why these documents orders matter. Documents strip away the spin. They allow this Parliament, journalists, experts and ultimately the public to see the contemporaneous advice, the correspondence, the modelling, the warnings and the decisions – not a press release written six months later or a carefully selected talking point or the minister’s coached reconstruction of events. The documents are just facts.

This motion is also deliberately measured. We could have proposed an immediate suspension of the Leader of the Government from the service of this Council. That sanction has been contemplated before. Instead, once again, the government is being given another chance to at least show willingness to deliver the documents, and the sanction proposed is modest. We are not proposing to expel anyone. We are not even proposing to suspend the leader from the service of the house. We propose to suspend ministers statements for the remainder of the sitting days – that is, tomorrow. Frankly, there is a certain justice in that. In fact I am sure those opposite might welcome the relief from ministers statements. We certainly would. A government which will not provide information demanded by this house should not expect an uninterrupted platform in question time to tell this house only the information it would prefer us to hear. If ministers will not submit to scrutiny, they should not assume an automatic right to use parliamentary time for government promotion. And because this problem is bigger than one sitting day, the motion would refer the Leader of the Government to the Privileges Committee to consider what further sanctions are appropriate. That is responsible, and for the reasons outlined above it is our duty not to let the situation pass without taking action, however symbolic.

Every member of this chamber should defend the powers of this chamber. If we allow one executive to ignore Parliament when it is inconvenient, we weaken Parliament for every government that follows. The standing orders are not decorations and the resolutions of this Council are not suggestions. Parliamentary scrutiny is not a favour bestowed on us by the executive, it is one of the fundamental safeguards of responsible government. The Labor government has been given every opportunity to recognise that. It has been warned, it has been given time, it has been given new procedures and it has even been given extensions. To return to what I said in this chamber in 2021, if you sow secrecy, you reap suspicion. Five years later Labor has sown secrecy on an industrial scale. It should hardly be surprised at the harvest. This motion says something very simple: enough is enough. Produce the documents, respect the Council and submit to scrutiny, or this Council must finally defend its own authority. I commend the motion to the house.

 Sarah MANSFIELD (Western Victoria) (14:40): I rise to speak on this motion, and the Greens will be supporting the motion today. I have contributed to debates on this topic I think more than any other during the last four years in Parliament – 14 times. That is not the number of times I have mentioned the failure to produce documents. There have been 14 different occasions when I have spoken on this issue, so I think there is a very high risk that I will repeat myself or plagiarise myself, because very little has changed over the last four years. Every time we debate this issue it is the same things that come up. The only thing that has changed is the length of the list of documents that we have outstanding, and that has continued to grow. Mrs McArthur has highlighted the number of outstanding documents that there currently are.

This is an issue that is clearly not going to be completely resolved this week. It is one that, unfortunately, has not been adequately addressed this term of Parliament. But I think this motion today is really important because we need to recognise that it has been a problem and indicate that there will need to be more work done on this and there will need to be a change in the next Parliament if we want to restore a little bit of faith in democracy and the functioning of the Parliament, which is what the Victorian people deserve.

As Mrs McArthur said, it is the right of the Parliament and the duty of the Parliament to apply scrutiny to the government of the day. One of the ways that we do that is by requesting documents that we believe are in the public interest. With these requests that we have put forward, we have tried to be very reasonable in most instances. We have been told time and again, ‘The scope is too wide. You’ve requested too many documents. It’s thousands, millions of documents that the departments would have to sift through, costing far too much money and wasting too much time.’ We repeatedly get told that there has not been enough time to source the documents that have been requested. We had another letter tabled yesterday saying they just had insufficient time for the last two documents. We were told time and time again that this was the problem, so we worked in good faith with the government – faith that they probably did not deserve to be given. But we went, ‘Okay. Look, you’ve said this is the problem. Let’s work together to find a solution.’ We amended the sessional orders – now it has been incorporated into the standing orders – to allow the government to come back to the mover of the motion and say, ‘Look, the scope is too wide. The timeline is too short. Can we discuss something more appropriate?’ That power has been there now for months – I am not aware of whether it has been used at all – yet we are still being met with responses that are exactly the same: ‘Sorry, there has been insufficient time.’ The government have not come to us and said, ‘No, we didn’t have enough time.’ They have got the power to do that now; that is what they asked for. They are not using that.

We really gave a lot of time and a lot of grace to the government on this issue, and I think there is very little reason, given the response that we have seen, that we can really continue to accept those excuses anymore. There is no excuse left. There is an option there to negotiate with parties about the nature of their documents and ask for something more reasonable, so I cannot help but think that that actually is not the reason, that there is not a good excuse for not wanting to release them. I think the government think, ‘If we just don’t produce them, no-one will notice, no-one will care.’ I do not know that that is true. We notice and we care, and I think the public has begun to notice and the public very much cares about this. Every person I raise this with is astounded that this is the case. They are outraged when they hear that this is what happens.

I think one of the further issues, though, that compounds this is the issue of the claims of executive privilege. Again, this is something we have debated many times in this place, but effectively the way the government use claims of privilege and their failure to follow standing orders effectively amounts to a continuation of the failure to produce documents, because almost every document that is eventually tabled here has extensive claims of privilege made over it. I can already anticipate the debate we are going to have in here from government members. We are going to get lectures about principles of the Westminster system and all sorts of fancy rhetorical pressure –

Members interjecting.

Sarah MANSFIELD: No, no, no – and I can anticipate the heckling in response. No-one has ever, ever questioned your right to claim privilege. What we have questioned is our ability to get some sort of independent assessment of whether that claim is appropriate. Claims of privilege started with this government; there is a lovely history of it in the first interim report on the Commonwealth Games inquiry. It is excellent. There is a whole chapter on executive privilege. The Attorney-General at the time, Martin Pakula, wrote back to this Parliament in response, I think, to a request for documents. They provided this extensive definition of ‘executive privilege’, and honestly, when you read it, it covers just about anything you could ever want. They say, ‘Everything is executive privilege if we want it to be.’ We compare this to New South Wales, where there is a very narrow definition of ‘executive privilege’, and it effectively just covers things that are essentially very much cabinet in confidence, not everything else.

Let us have a look at some of the examples of documents that have had privilege claimed over them: noise and dust and odour reports on some very obscure site that was considered for some part of the Commonwealth Games. That is admittedly a document I do not think anyone cared about, because it was not relevant to the request, but really? It was every single document – hundreds of documents. It was like it had just been put through a machine printing ‘Privilege’ over everything. It was absolutely ridiculous. New South Wales, though, has a very narrow definition of ‘privilege’. But let us put aside the definition of ‘privilege’; let us accept that the government’s definition is right, that they are always claiming it correctly and it is not too broad. The other problem is the failure to follow the standing orders of this place. I have read these standing orders so often I could almost recite them. It is in 10.03 –

Members interjecting.

Sarah MANSFIELD: I am short on time. I am not going to read these out, but I would really encourage every government member to actually read this, because I do not think, based on the arguments you have brought to this place on this subject every time, that you have actually read and understood this part of the –

Michael Galea interjected.

Sarah MANSFIELD: You have not read and understood. Well, these are the standing orders that this Parliament has agreed to. These are the rules of this place that we have agreed to follow. It works in New South Wales. They follow these rules. The mover of a motion is entitled, in the event that executive privilege claims are made, to view the documents and make a decision, ‘Is this reasonable or not?’ If there is a dispute, the Clerks can request that an independent legal expert, an arbiter, comes and assesses that claim about privilege, and a decision is made. Sometimes the application of privilege will be upheld, other times it will not. This happens all the time in New South Wales, and it works by and large. It seems the government’s New South Wales counterparts have started to pick up on the bad habits of their Victorian colleagues and have stopped playing ball and are now facing the consequences of that repeatedly, but by and large it has worked there.

At the heart of it, the reason why that needs to be there is that it is another check and balance on the government of the day. If you can just claim privilege – privilege that you have defined yourselves as well, you have created your own definition of ‘privilege’ – you can make your own claims and those claims can never be challenged. That just says to the Parliament and says to the people, ‘We don’t care. We get to make the rules. We get to decide everything.’ Ultimately, it is the public that loses out. Mrs McArthur spoke very well about why transparency is so important. I have said many times when this issue has come up that the government’s failure to act on these core integrity issues will eventually catch up with them, and I think what we have seen in recent times is exactly that. Ultimately, it is the Victorian people who lose out, but ultimately it is the Victorian people who will get to decide this November whether they think this is good enough.

 Ryan BATCHELOR (Southern Metropolitan) (14:50): We are back again talking about motions for the production of documents and the standing orders that support them in action. What we have from Mrs McArthur and the Liberal Party is a motion that amounts to a heartfelt determination to stop ministers making ministers statements on the last sitting day of the Parliament. I think there are some serious issues that we need to address in the course of the debate, but we are here in the Liberal Party’s last slot of general business before the state election, and the issue that is the most significant for the Liberal Party is facilitating a process to stop ministers making statements in the chamber tomorrow. That is what it is all about. It is not about more than that. This is all designed to set up a procedural mechanism to stop four ministers spending what – how long are ministers statements? Two minutes? So it will save us 8 minutes of debate. The blistering attack of Labor’s frontbench has scared the Liberal Party into retreat, and they have decided on a strategy that puts at the forefront of their political agenda stopping that blistering attack. We have got them on the run now, and they must be so glad that it is the last sitting week of Parliament if they are going to these lengths to stop these fantastic ministers.

Members interjecting.

The ACTING PRESIDENT (Jacinta Ermacora): Order! I would ask for a reduction in volume. I have to say my right ear is hearing a bit more than it would like to hear in terms of volume, so please just lower it.

Ryan BATCHELOR: I am an enthusiast for the words of the ministers of the Crown of this government, and I would like all of those ministers to have ample opportunity to say those words in the chamber. The Liberal Party clearly are too scared to hear from them. That is what this motion is about. I mean, we do accept that Minister Erdogan at the moment has a hoarse throat, but even with his reduced volume, you are running scared from him. The ministers will, we assume, as a result of the motion – we assume it is going to get support today, because if they had support for anything else, I am sure they would have moved something else. But they did not, so they cannot. So we have got this procedural wet lettuce that is being put in front of us.

It does come down to a substantive point, though, that what we are seeing from the opposition is an exercise in either, at best, cognitive dissonance in how they view and treat the public sector or breathtaking hypocrisy – one of the two. It is either cognitive dissonance or it is breathtaking hypocrisy, because on the one hand the Liberal Party criticise hardworking public servants trying to do their jobs. They say there are too many public servants. There are too many people employed in the Victorian public service, and they want to start sacking them. We know they want to start sacking them, because they have released a document that proposes $40 billion of cuts, and one of the things that is on their cuts list is the Victorian Government Solicitor’s Office, the VGSO. They think there are too many lawyers working for the state government, that there are too many people working in the Victorian Government Solicitor’s Office, and that is on the chopping block. I think they might privatise it, which probably speaks to the heart of what the Liberals are about, and that is cutting public services and privatising them.

What they do on the one hand is say, ‘We want to sack those public servants,’ but on the other hand they say, ‘They’re not doing enough work. They need to be doing more work.’ On the one hand they want to sack them all and on the other hand they want to get them to do more work. You cannot have it both ways. What we have are hardworking public servants whose task it is to review the requests for the production of documents made with stunning regularity by this chamber in volumes that in some instances have gone into the millions of documents, continually moved by the opposition – vast nets cast which would receive millions of documents. They then criticise those public servants whose job it is to work through them. They criticise those public servants doing their jobs, and they want to sack them. You cannot have it both ways. You cannot make all the requests that are detailed and voluminous and then criticise the public servants whose job it is to try and go through them all, because those public servants are doing a reasonable job, and that is to make sure that there is not material in those documents that have been requested and that would get produced to this chamber that contains things like personal information, that would do things like breach confidentiality, reveal legal advice, prejudice national security, prejudice public safety or prejudice law enforcement or legal proceedings.

Maybe the Liberal Party does not care about doing any of those things. Maybe the Liberal Party does not care about revealing confidential information, prejudicing public safety, prejudicing national security or putting at risk legal proceedings that are on foot. Maybe they do not care about that at all, because that is the natural consequence of what they are saying should be occurring here, which is that troves of documents should be handed over without anyone casting their eye over them to make sure that they do not contain information that could disrupt a police investigation, for example, or reveal someone’s personal information or reveal the deliberative processes of cabinet.

Dr Mansfield did make an impassioned contribution out of perhaps a sense of frustration with her perspective on the process, and I do acknowledge that. There is at the core of the argument here a fundamental tension between whether this Parliament, the government and the community think that the standing orders of the Legislative Council or the constitution of the state of Victoria has primacy in terms of a document. Quite clearly it is the contention of the executive that matters of executive privilege are to be determined by the executive, not under the standing orders of the Parliament and by the Parliament. That is a fundamental principle of the separation of powers that has existed as a bedrock feature of our democracy since it was established. That separation of powers is a cornerstone principle of democracy. What our constitution does is set out in very clear terms that it accepts the principles that existed in the House of Commons. I know Dr Mansfield does not like us talking about history, but it is incredibly important. Claims of Crown privilege and claims of executive privilege were determined by the executive. The standing orders are a product of the legislature, and they do not bind the executive. You cannot have an argument that undermines a basic tenet of our democracy and claim you are upholding our democracy; it does not work.

I have just one last thing, because Mr Galea can keep going. There are a lot of references to what goes on in New South Wales, and I have got to say that some of my good friends are from New South Wales and some of them are even members of the New South Wales Legislative Council. But not for one moment do I take their existence and their practice as being something that we should slavishly endorse in all circumstances. This motion is not really about the substance. It is just a stunt. On the last opportunity the Liberals have to do something of substance before the state election, they have chosen to do a stunt that is all about stopping our ministers from spending 8 minutes in the chamber tomorrow talking about the achievements of this government. I mean, really, could they not have come up with something better?

 Evan MULHOLLAND (Northern Metropolitan) (15:00): I rise to speak on this excellent motion by my colleague Mrs McArthur on documents motions and the way they have operated in this place. I was fortunate enough to be on a Council inquiry into this very topic where we examined all of these issues regarding documents motions. We certainly looked at the New South Wales experience regarding documents motions which seems to have worked a lot better. I agree with Dr Mansfield in that I believe executive privilege is being claimed to the nth degree as a blocker for any sensitive information that the government wants to cover up.

Think of it this way: an individual Victorian citizen has more power through the information commissioner, VCAT and the courts to appeal a claim of executive privilege than this chamber of Parliament. I know, because I have had claims of executive privilege for certain sections of documents that have ended up being overturned through a 12-month or 1½-year process through the information commissioner. The information commissioner orders the release of the documents in full. Then what happens is that I get served a notice as a respondent to appear in VCAT because the government wants to continue to block those documents. Then I am forced to front up to VCAT while the government tries to, at a directions hearing, delay and delay and delay until I am finally successful. Sometimes we even have to go to a higher court. I know my colleague Mr Davis has dealt with this on many occasions. Individual citizens can also do that and have. They currently have more avenues for appeal on sensitive documents than the Legislative Council. I am not sure we have got the balance right there.

The approach of this government, and we have all seen it in this chamber, is to send a letter from the Attorney-General saying, ‘There’s quite a few documents here’ or ‘We need more time to process this,’ and then we never hear back. They never come back to the chamber saying, ‘We’ve had more time and we’ve followed up and we’ve found these documents.’ List after list after list, as far back as 2023. Ms Crozier has a motion on staff shortages in the public health system – very topical today, as we saw from question time. It would be good to get that document from 2023. Dr Mansfield had a production of documents motion on the Hydrogen Energy Supply Chain project in April 2023. We have got Mr Davis on gas and electricity supplies. We even have a former member, Dr Ratnam, on the redevelopment of high-rise public housing sites. Ms Purcell is still waiting, and is going to be waiting quite a while, for the kangaroo harvest management plan. Document after document after document.

Of course we have several others. Dr Ratnam’s successor, Ms Gray-Barberio, has one on the Upfield rail line study, a study that they completed in about 2017, I believe. Then they went and did another study, or another study is in progress, this year. Surely the public should be informed of what the previous study says before you go out and announce, ‘Hey, look, we’re being seen to do something again about the Upfield line. We’re not going to release the previous study but we are funding a new study, which we are under no obligation to ever release to you, ever.’ It is treating the chamber with contempt, and that is why this motion calls out the Leader of the Government, as the representative of the government, as being guilty of contempt of the Council for failing on behalf of the government to comply with resolutions of the Council.

There is just a ridiculous amount of motions for documents that have not been provided, from members from across the chamber too, including Mr Davis, Dr Mansfield and me. I had one on the Suburban Rail Loop Authority. Those documents might have uncovered that this government had been charging a secret tax on all Victorians and that they had known about it since 2024. They probably claimed privilege on that. In fact I think that is one of those ones where we got a letter from the Attorney-General saying, ‘The government needs more time to consider this and couldn’t possibly give it to you within the timeframe,’ and that is the end of the message, and then we just never hear anything again. They just set and forget. That is treating this chamber with absolute and utter contempt.

There are documents motions from Ms Purcell on the Great Outdoors Taskforce and from Ms Gray-Barberio on early childhood education – a very important topic at that time in which the childcare sector was seeing some horrific things going on, and it made national news. Mrs McArthur had a production of documents motion on a four-bin waste and recycling system. I do not believe those documents were ever received. Mr Davis had one on corruption in the construction industry. I hope that all those documents are being sent over to the royal commission as we speak. Mrs McArthur had one on the container deposit scheme. Mr Ettershank had one on his favourite topic – not cannabis but waste-to-energy cap licences. Rikkie-Lee Tyrrell had one on Victorian roads. Ms Purcell had another one on proposed animal care and protection legislation. Mr Limbrick had one on market research for a machete prohibition campaign. I had one on ISIS brides, which we never saw. Ms Crozier had one on pharmacy-initiated supply of the contraceptive pill. Mr Puglielli had one on rental controls. There is another one for Mr Ettershank, and I know this is his very, very favourite topic: a sustainable data centre action plan. Have we received that one? I am willing to bet that we have not received that one at all. They are countless.

I am not going to forget my friend Mr Welch, who of course is still waiting on his Box Hill brickworks site documents; they have not been received, nor have Mrs McArthur’s western Victoria business bushfire recovery grant program documents. I do not think we have ever received those. I had another one on the rail improvement charge for the Suburban Rail Loop. Do you reckon the government is going to release that one? Do we think – maybe? We know the Australian Financial Review had some documents, because the Australian Financial Review revealed it had viewed a cabinet minute that noted the rail improvement charge – noted the secret tax. I will give you a bit of a peek behind the curtain. What happens with cabinet minutes like that is that the department or an adviser or a secretary will walk through the department’s view on a particular cabinet minute and make them aware of it, so they were all aware of it and did not say a thing. So not only did they hold this chamber in contempt, they held each and every Victorian in contempt by applying a secret tax on public transport fares and not telling them about it. I almost forgot that Mr Bourman also had a production of documents motion on seasonal changes to the 2023 duck-hunting season – an important topic. I wonder if they will release it. I very much doubt it.

So I am supporting this motion. I am calling on all members to respect the rights and privileges of this chamber to hold the government of the day, regardless of party, to account, to support this motion and to actually stand up for accountability. The Premier says integrity is not optional. They have got an opportunity right now to show that it is not optional, because for the three and a half years that these documents motions have been in place, this government has treated integrity as very much optional.

 David ETTERSHANK (Western Metropolitan) (15:10): What a pleasure it is to get up and speak in support of Mrs McArthur’s motion relating to the government’s non-production of documents and confirm that – surprise, surprise – we will be supporting this motion, albeit the punishment to be meted out to the government is, I believe, the parliamentary equivalent of being hit with a limp lettuce leaf. But it is better than nothing.

Over the course of the Parliament, as has been said by multiple speakers, we have seen so many frustrated production of documents requests. Mr Mulholland, I thank you for your encyclopedic listing of the multiple offences against democracy and transparency. I think we have got a situation at this point in time where only Mr Limbrick has been successful in getting one out. I think that is pretty much where we are at. Isn’t that in and of itself just an utter condemnation of the democratic process? This is a house of review – you know this better than me, as most of you have been here a lot longer than I have – and that is based on transparency, which apparently is now no longer optional. This is just absolutely – and I do not want to confuse people with legal terminology – flipping the bird at democracy. This is just utter disrespect for this chamber and for these processes.

As we have discussed already, we have had arguments about cabinet in confidence, which kind of reminded me of an episode of TheHollowmen, or it might have been Utopia, where he is showing school students through the Parliament and he says, ‘This is the cabinet room.’ And a woman walks through and she has got a big cart full of documents, and he says, ‘So, tell us, what are you doing?’ And she says, ‘Oh, I don’t think I want to.’ He says, ‘No, come on, tell us. The students all want to know.’ And she says, ‘Well, I’m wheeling it through the cabinet room so that we can claim cabinet in confidence.’ There is that moment where comedy and reality meet each other, and it is far more insightful, I think, than any of us can actually say in this place, but this is what it is like. There is this sense of surrealism. On the one hand they are saying, ‘Trust us. We’re the government. We’re doing the right thing.’ Then on the other hand, we say, ‘Well, perhaps you could just substantiate that and then we’d all be in our comfort zone’ – and I want to come back to that theme. We have had cabinet in confidence, and we have had executive privilege. I am still not quite sure what that is, but I know it got thrown at us in the context of the housing towers. I will come back to that one as well. And then of course we have had commercial in confidence. It is a sort of multilayered approach to obfuscation that has proven largely impenetrable.

I do not know about you, but I really, really enjoyed Ms Shing’s contribution last night. I thought it was brilliant. I was so glad that I was not speaking the same night she was, because she is so articulate. I appreciate that happened because of sad circumstances, but it was so good. She talked about all the good things the government has done. I think that was probably really good advice to the Premier about not walking away from the history of the party, but I am not going to go into that space, because obviously that is a fight within Labor that I do not need to buy into. If we think back to some very memorable moments with Ms Shing – and I know we are not meant to have props here – I seem to recall that we saw that green book of the Suburban Rail Loop so many times, and I must admit she would wave it around and I would wonder, ‘One slip and it’s going to take out Mr Mulholland.’ And she would say, ‘It’s $35 billion. It’s $35 billion. What’s wrong with people? Can you not understand it?’ So we asked for the substantiation of that, didn’t we? We said, ‘Can we get some current cost plans, because that’s premised on something that is almost seven years old.’ Now what we know is that the reason they are not going to release it is because in 2020 they were advised by the Department of Treasury and Finance that in fact it was – even then, pre COVID – already $2.5 billion over budget. So you start to understand why maybe these things are best, from a government’s perspective, not put into the light. Of course we did not need to see that business plan, but that SRL thing is a perfect example of obfuscation. I mean, yes, infrastructure is great, but it says a lot about priorities; it says ‘opportunity cost’. And when you actually expose the truth and you know the real cost, then that argument becomes all the more compelling. I can understand why the government would not want to have that.

We also made a document request for the most basic information on housing. I know there were people that put in other documents motions and the government said there were thousands of documents. We only asked the government, in the case of either Flemington or North Melbourne, to give us the cost plan, give us the building conditions report and give us the decanting schedule – in other words, how residents would be moved out and how they would be relocated or brought back. That is very simple, with minimal photocopying; we would even accept it in electronic form, for Ms Terpstra, who seems to think we need to have it on paper – but I will come back to that. That was rejected.

What was very interesting was that the business case was rejected as being cabinet in confidence. Then we saw the inner Melbourne legal service, in litigation to protect the residents, ask for that document in the court, and the government said, ‘We don’t have a business case.’ Putting aside the extraordinary proposition that you would be entering into multimillion-dollar transactions to demolish and rebuild housing without a business case, it made a lie of what we were told through that documents motion. I guess that, to my mind, was a pretty good indication of the lack of respect.

I would, having been invited by Mr Mulholland, just like to talk briefly about the history of The Sustainable Data Centre Action Plan. We asked for this informally in October of last year – a year ago – and we were told, ‘Be with you in a couple of weeks.’ We did not get it and asked for it of the minister in November: ‘Oh, just buffing it. We’ll get back to you’ – nothing. We came to February and, ‘Oh, it’s not going to be a public document. It’s only now for internal use.’ That is despite the fact that it has been advertised as, ‘This is so that everyone can have confidence in how the system’s going to work.’ Then we had the documents motion in May, and we were told that it was too big a document and that there was not time to prepare it. Then the night before last I read about it in the Age. It has been bloody well released, and it was not even tabled in this chamber, it was tabled to the Age. I think that might be instructive, because this was too big a document to be able to prepare in time: it is 17 pages.

Tom McIntosh interjected.

David ETTERSHANK: Can I say, Mr McIntosh, it is a very generous layout, with plenty of white space. I think the point was made that it may not have been so small had the government not contracted out the editing task to Belinda Dennett and the Data Centres Australia organisation – putting that aside. I mean, can you get much more bankrupt politically when that is the sort of thing we are dealing with?

I can still remember Ms Terpstra vividly telling this chamber – she was the only person to respond to that documents motion – ‘You should be using recycled bong water to cool the data centres.’ It caused enormous entertainment amongst my members. But I mean, seriously, talk about – I will not use the expression that is coming to my mind. But it is pretty poor. We have reached that point in the democratic cycle where you cannot just say, ‘Trust me,’ because that has evaporated. You need to put up the documents. And here we are, with a day and a half left in school and a huge number of unmet requests for the provision of documents. I just have to say it is really, really disappointing that this is what it has come to. And with that, I will leave it.

 Michael GALEA (South-Eastern Metropolitan) (15:21): Well, it is indeed the last sitting week of the year, and I am delighted to be in a position where I am rising to make a contribution on a motion that has been put forward by Mrs McArthur once again. Ridiculous motion though it is, I am still pleased to speak on it. Reflecting back, I do believe that in the first full week of this parliamentary term I responded to one of your motions, and I believe in that motion you invited me to the races. It is an invitation that I am yet to take up, but I look forward to doing so sometime once we get a bit busier, perhaps after the end of November.

This motion does go to a fair few important topics, but they are topics that, as Dr Mansfield mentioned, we have discussed, frankly, ad nauseam in this chamber. We can trace its origin all the way back to the inclusion of short-form documents motions in our parliamentary debate earlier in the term. This as-usual shambolic flourish of Mr Davis led to a deeply dysfunctional model, using the chamber’s time. He did not do as we recommended – take it to the Procedure Committee first so it could actually be a functional and effective part of the way we do things – instead ramming these short-form documents motions in despite our recommendation to do it in a proper and considered way. And what did that do? It led to various issues. The third debate slot was being cut off on an almost weekly basis. Then he tried to fix it, and that had another error, and then he tried to fix it again. The conclusion of this debate will make a grand, whopping total of 6 hours that the Liberals have spent on these types of things, fixing up their own issues and, frankly, wasting their time on pathetic stunts – like, seriously, 8 minutes less of ministers statements on a single parliamentary sitting day – wow. It is, frankly, a joke that they seek to use what precious time we all have in this place to debate such things and propose such a ludicrous sanction.

There are a few things to go through here. Indeed, at a previous time when we had to discuss these sessional and standing orders, the government put forward very sensible reforms and variations to those standing orders. We have seen in some cases short-form requests for documents that have been anything but short and have seen in some cases thousands or tens of thousands – and in at least one case more than a million – documents subject to those requests. We have got that variation in now, but surprisingly we have not seen it actually used once by the Liberal Party. We have not seen any sort of engagement from them on getting the documents, because as Mr Batchelor said, it is not about getting documents for them. I agree that for some of the crossbenchers it may well be, but for the Liberal Party, who have put these things in place, we have a system in place, and they do not even use that system for the variations. All they want to do is come in here and complain and complain and complain.

It is all the more staggering and all the more belies what they are saying that these documents have to go through a process that is appropriate and proper – and I will come back to executive privilege in a moment – and that is done through the Victorian Government Solicitor’s Office (VGSO), which is one of the many dozens of agencies that the Victorian Liberal Party have explicitly said they will cut back if they are elected to government. I believe there were, in the last term that the Liberals were in government, around six documents motions, of which they could not even acquit more than three. We now have two every single sitting week, and the Liberal Party are going into the election saying they are going to cut from the Victorian Government Solicitor’s Office. That shows that they have no intention of honouring what they are saying if they are elected. They would actually be cutting back on the resources that could provide any of this work. So when they come in and scream about this, we know that they are hollow words. If they are going to cut from the very body whose job it is to process these requests, we know that their words are worth two-fifths of bugger-all. That is exactly what we would get from the Liberal Party and that is exactly what would happen if they were in a position of power or even in a One Nation coalition come the end of the year, because that is what they have said they would cut from. You do not get to cut from the agency whose job it is to actually process these claims and say that you would do it better, because the actions that you have proposed – no doubt to fill the $40 billion black hole in your estimates – would mean seeing even less of these claims processed. Never mind the number of documents, never mind anything of the millions or thousands, you would not be able to process any if you were to cut back essential work from the Victorian Government Solicitor’s Office.

Executive privilege has been discussed. Again, this does feel rather like deja vu. As I have spoken about extensively before in this place and indeed as is very well articulated and put out in the report that Mr Mulholland referred to and the minority report of government members on the select committee into the Commonwealth Games, there is a very, very clear constitutional basis for the exercise of executive privilege in the state of Victoria. The constitution outlines that the powers to determine any sort of privilege are based on those of the House of Commons of the United Kingdom as they were on 21 July 1855. In those privileges in the House of Commons at that time it is very explicitly clear that – they then referred to it as Crown privilege and not executive privilege – Crown privilege is to be determined by the Crown. That is, executive privilege is to be determined by the executive. That is the constitutional position. Any parliament, any chamber, can come and set its own standing orders. We had a debate just a couple of weeks ago about the new standing and sessional orders for the next term. That is our role, but it is not our right just to simply vote to avoid the constitution, not without going through a proper change to the constitution itself. We are not free as parliamentarians to simply disregard the constitution because it is not convenient or it does not suit our argument on any given day. It is entirely disingenuous to say that any sort of standing order that this house chooses to apply from time to time should override that most fundamental, basic document, which sets out governance and democracy in this state.

Dr Mansfield raised the New South Wales equivalent as well. We have had this argument raised. I am not sure where he is today, but Mr Davis has several times talked about the Egan v Chadwick and the Egan v Willis cases in New South Wales, saying that the decisions of the Supreme Court of New South Wales should therefore have a direct impact on Victoria, never mind – and I appreciate the comments of Mr Batchelor noting this – that we are our own state and we should not necessarily blindly follow what happens in another jurisdiction. More so than that, it is actually explicitly different, because the constitutional basis under which Egan v Chadwick was applied in New South Wales is completely different. We do have the authoritative text of the constitution of this state, which has been written by Mr Greg Taylor. It is a document that is available to members in this place. I have got a copy in my office. It is something I consult from time to time. This is not my copy, but it is a very well worn, used one, and it outlines this specifically and in detail. On page 277 Mr Taylor, the acknowledged expert on constitutional law in Victoria, says:

In Egan v Chadwick the Supreme Court of New South Wales held that public interest immunity would permit the non-production of Cabinet documents, but this was under the law of privilege applicable in New South Wales, which is materially different –

materially different –

from that applicable in Victoria as the Parliament of New South Wales does not have the powers of the House of Commons as at 1855 (or any other date).

The widely acknowledged expert on our state’s constitution has explicitly said in the definitive work on our constitution that the New South Wales equivalent is not a relevant principle in Victoria because the fundamental basis of the New South Wales constitution does not rely on the same thing that the Victorian one does. To dismiss that and say ‘Oh, well, that should apply to Victoria too’ just shows the intellectual vacuity of those opposite. Indeed when they are going to cut from that very important body, from the VGSO, we know that they have no intention of honouring documents requests if they are elected.

Whilst I have got a far better source today, this is nothing that we have not discussed before. As Dr Mansfield said and as I said earlier in my contribution today, we have had this discussion many, many times. In fact it is in the minority report that Mr McIntosh, Ms Ermacora and I put forward 18 months ago on the Commonwealth Games inquiry. It is a very good report, and I certainly commend it to members, including the sections on executive privilege. Flicking through it before I saw discussion – again, more Liberal lies and propaganda and rubbish – saying that Victoria’s international reputation as a major events host had been irreparably damaged. We noted in this minority report that Victoria had, since that time, acquired the NFL rights, and indeed we saw just a few weeks ago what a profound thing that is. The Liberal Party could not even simply speak in favour of that.

 Renee HEATH (Eastern Victoria) (15:31): I rise to support this motion. It has been a very, very interesting debate. There have been a few speakers talk about how they can wriggle their way out of this accountability, but not many have spoken about why it is that a Parliament can demand documents. The reason that they can is because it is a fundamental constitutional principle of executive accountability about making sure that the government is accountable to the people and that the Parliament actually represents the people. When you are failing to give the honest truth to parliamentarians and the Parliament in here, by extension you are failing the people of Victoria that put us here. This is an extremely important principle. Under the Westminster system of democracy – and I notice Mr Galea did not mention this at all – the government does not rule with absolute power. That is why we have the right to request these documents, because the government answers directly to the Parliament, which represents the people. In other words, when the government fails the Parliament, the government fails the people. That is as simple as it is. But the Andrews, Allan and now Carroll Labor governments have slowly chipped away at the bedrock of our democracy. They have slowly chipped away at that. They are slowly undermining the values that underpin our democracy, and one of those is accountability and another one is transparency.

You can make light of it all you want, you really can, but these values of democracy are values that people all over the world die for. If you come in here and you think you can just cover up things, I am telling you that is an absolute contempt of not only the people of Victoria but democracies in general.

Michael Galea: On a point of order, Acting President, sorry, it is an outrageous assertion to say that by following the laws of this state we are undermining democracy. I ask Dr Heath to reconsider that before she continues her contribution.

The ACTING PRESIDENT (Gaelle Broad): It is not a point of order, but I will take that as a comment, thank you, Mr Galea.

Renee HEATH: The government is funded by public money, and the laws that we create in this place affect everyone in the Victorian population – everyone. This Parliament has an inherent right, not only a right but also a responsibility, to request those documents, because do you know what, that is where scrutiny happens. That is where we get to scrutinise how money is spent and how people are treated. This is because truth actually matters and transparency matters. In Westminster systems, like these are based off, a government usually controls the lower house, like they do here. The government has an absolute majority in the lower house. That is why every single private members bill that goes in gets treated with complete contempt and just gets chucked out, because this government has the numbers and does not even have to consider what the Parliament brings to it. That is the reality. But in the upper house – in the Senate or the Legislative Council – things are generally a little bit different. You do not have the absolute power, so therefore what happens is – and it is by design; it is an important check and balance which keeps Western democracies and civilisations accountable and safe – it is the Parliament that is requesting those documents. To undermine that is quite frankly extremely dangerous.

Under this government we have seen secret taxes. We have seen issues referred to inquiries. I was on one, the housing inquiry. The question was whether we should demolish 44 housing towers. In order to get to the bottom of this and get to the answer this house – not the opposition, because it is not the opposition that can request documents, because we do not have the numbers; it is the whole chamber – requested 158 documents. Do you know how many this government gave? Twelve documents. It was eye-opening for me. I sat there as we spent thousands and thousands and thousands of taxpayer dollars to try to get to the bottom of why we were demolishing thousands and thousands of Victorian homes. Do you know what we got? ‘Sorry, that’s under executive privilege.’ ‘Sorry, we can’t answer that question.’ I tell you what, it is not democracies that operate in secrecy, dictatorships do. There are other abusive forms of governments that do. They operate in secrecy. I am not saying you are that, but I am saying you are flirting very closely with the line on a lot of these principles.

It is not the opposition that can just go and say, ‘We want these documents.’ We have to convince the house. It has to be the crossbench, and it has to be the opposition. There are some very important reasons as to why this happens, why this is allowed and why this is encouraged. The first is to check against an abuse of power. That is an underlying principle of democracies. The fact that this Premier was one of the people that just slipped in a secret tax that nobody knew about on public transport – never told the Victorian people that they were being taxed – I believe is an abuse of power. I really do. Another reason is to challenge policy claims. There are different ways you can get information. One is requesting documents in here; we have all seen how well that goes. Another one is inquiries. We all saw how well that went with the housing inquiry. Another is freedom-of-information requests. Years ago, when I heard that violent and high-risk offenders were getting over a year off their sentences because they were inconvenienced during COVID, I requested some freedom-of-information documents. This is why we need the truth, not just to take the word of people, because the Minister for Corrections at the time said in this letter, dated 16 October 2024, in relation to emergency management days:

Pandemic related rules for the application of EMD’s ended in … 2023. EMDs are now being used very rarely …

I thought, ‘Well, that’s good. They ended in 2023.’ However, when I finally, after 18 months of fighting, got the freedom-of-information request approved and got the document, that was completely false. He could have made a mistake and got it wrong. If he did, he made the mistake 17,579 times, because that is how many were granted since that date that we know of. I said, ‘You said they stopped in 2023.’ That is what we were hearing. This is on official government letterhead. It is literally the response to the petition. It is literally there. Yet guess what, the documents, when I received them, told a completely different story. We went back again. After the latest lot of documents I thought maybe it was a mistake. Did they finish doing it in 2023 and, oops, slipped up over 17,000 times? That would raise some questions there, but regardless – so I kept asking about it. Then I got this other one, which took me over 18 months to get. The last lot of documents showed in the last 16-month period, for that reason that they said ended in 2023, there were 512 days.

We need to know the truth, because that is an underpinning of democracy. Another reason that we need these documents, which is a bedrock of the foundation of accountability and transparency, is to form a functional alternate government. One thing we are worried about is we keep finding more and more debt, we keep finding more and more alleged corruption, we keep finding out about more and more taxes. When we come to government, it is going to be worrying what we find. There has to be some honesty that comes back into Spring Street, if you ask me. The first thing that you can do is at least honour the standing orders and produce documents when you are given orders.

Mr Batchelor, unbelievably, gave us a sort of a sermon about what we think and what we feel. I am not too interested in that. What I am interested in is facts. What I am interested in is how much debt people are in, why their houses are being demolished and what information the government has that it is hiding. To close, when a government becomes so arrogant that they believe they are above the rules, they are not just withholding information from us and the Parliament and they are not just failing the Parliament, they are failing the Victorian people.

 David LIMBRICK (South-Eastern Metropolitan) (15:41): I am going to keep this brief and straight to the point. This Parliament makes the laws of the state, and the Parliament itself has its own rules in the standing orders. I think that if we are going to be making the rules of the state, then we should at least follow our own standing orders. Unfortunately, the government is simply ignoring the standing orders of the Parliament in relation to the production of documents.

The government has a right to claim executive privilege, and I do not dispute that. The government has a right to claim executive privilege, and as has been pointed out by the government, this is a longstanding tradition imported from the UK. But this house has rules for dealing with that claim of executive privilege if it is to be disputed. What is meant to happen is that if the government claims executive privilege on documents, they are meant to be given in confidence to the mover of the documents motion, and then that person who moved the motion has the ability to challenge the government’s claim of executive privilege. If that challenge is to go ahead, then the Parliament can appoint an arbiter, and that arbiter will decide whether or not the claim of executive privilege is valid or not. That is how it is meant to work. I have been here almost eight years now, and I have never once seen an arbiter appointed despite many claims of executive privilege. It is not because this mechanism does not work. If we look at the New South Wales Parliament, we know they routinely have this sort of thing happen, and they appoint an arbiter and they go through this challenge process in the New South Wales Parliament. But we do not do that here: the government simply say, ‘We claim executive privilege,’ and then the whole process dies. This is not how our Parliament is meant to work. This is not how the standing orders are meant to work.

I have been concerned for some time that there are no consequences for the government when they do this. What the motion today is doing is providing some consequence. Personally, I think that the consequence is a very mild little tap on the wrist, but nevertheless what this motion is really saying is that when the government chooses to ignore the standing orders of Parliament, Parliament is saying that this is wrong and there is a consequence for that. I think that that is important, and that is why I am supporting this motion.

 Sonja TERPSTRA (North-Eastern Metropolitan) (15:44): I am going to have to be brief, because I only have about 5 minutes on the clock. I want to quickly address some points. I rise to speak on this motion in regard to documents. The thing I want to point out is that we have reprised this debate before in this Parliament; the only difference with this motion is there is a consequence for the Leader of the Government. The chamber would do well to remember that when we debated this matter before it was agreed by the chamber that the Procedure Committee would review the process around documents motions. The Procedure Committee met; members of the Procedure Committee include Dr Mansfield and Mr Mulholland. In any event, the committee unanimously agreed to adopt a process, and the process was that if a documents motion was made in this chamber and the government said, ‘Look, there’s heaps of documents,’ there could be an interactive process between the government and that member to try and narrow down the scope of the documents motion so they could actually get the documents that they were after.

I am advised that nobody on the opposition benches has actually made use of that new process – nobody. I believe there might have been one attempt to access that process, perhaps by a crossbencher, but that was abandoned. For all the work and the inquiry that the Procedures Committee did in regard to this matter, nobody has used it. So it is quite a trite thing to hear those opposite then criticise and attack this government about how we are not allowing documents motions. Again, it is not us that sit there and view documents, it is the Victorian Government Solicitor’s Office, which we know those opposite have said they will cut.

So again, it is quite hypocritical to hear those opposite continue to condemn the government. We acted in good faith. We had a Procedures Committee meeting, we heard from representatives of the New South Wales government and their clerks about how they deal with documents motions and we arrived at an agreed process that – again, I will reiterate – nobody has used. It really is disappointing that those opposite want to criticise the government. Make use of that process, and if the process does not work, then by all means bring it back to the house and let us have a debate around that. I am not sure what the Procedures Committee was bothering to meet for and unanimously agree upon if the process was not going to be used.

The government will oppose this motion, because the thing about suspending Minister Symes for the remainder of the sitting day and then referring her to the Privileges Committee is really just an eleventh-hour political stunt and a waste of this chamber’s time. I put it back onto the chamber and those in this chamber, particularly those, like I said, who were on that committee. Dr Mansfield was on that committee and so was Mr Mulholland. It was a unanimous approach that was taken to arrive at a process where people could say, ‘All right. Well, you’ve got a million documents in scope. Do you really want a million documents?’ and ‘No, I don’t. I’m actually particularly after these documents.’ So it is very disappointing that nobody has used this.

I will just reiterate the points that Mr Galea made around Westminster tradition. Those opposite do not want to acknowledge that. It would be very interesting to see what their response would be if they were ever to win government. I am sure it would automatically reverse straightaway. But again, this is just a pathetic attack on the government for no good purpose. We went in good faith, had a conversation and those opposite agreed, as did the crossbench, about a process. Why has it not been used? That would be my point to those in this chamber. If you have used the process and it has not delivered to you what you were after, sure, then criticise that process. So that is why –

Richard Welch interjected.

Sonja TERPSTRA: No, but there was an iterative process where you all agreed to this. It is something that the Procedures Committee then tabled in this house. Again, criticise the process if you have used it and it has not worked, but you have not used it. There has been no attempt to use that process. That is why this shows that this is nothing more than a stunt, and again, it is just disappointing.

I have got 44 seconds on the clock. Again, I will just reiterate that the government will be opposing this motion, because it is simply a pathetic stunt. Like I said, use the process that everyone agreed to. Do not come in here and say we are not doing anything and we are hiding stuff, because it is simply untrue, particularly when we have delivered a process that none of you have used. With that, I will conclude my remarks.

 Bev McARTHUR (Western Victoria) (15:49): I am sure everybody should absolutely be supporting this motion, because if you believe that transparency in government and accountability in government are important, then clearly you should provide the information that this Parliament, this chamber, has asked for on numerous occasions. I thank Dr Mansfield, Mr Batchelor, Mr Mulholland, Mr Ettershank, Mr Galea, Dr Heath, Mr Limbrick and Ms Terpstra for their contributions. I am struck by one thing that Mr Batchelor said when he referred to how we now treat the public sector. I say to Mr Batchelor: your treatment of the public of Victoria, the people of Victoria, is absolutely contemptuous.

You have no regard for the democratic process, you have no regard for proper due process, and not only have you treated this chamber with contempt, but in doing so you have treated the people of Victoria with contempt. You come up with ridiculous excuses every time: cabinet in confidence, commercial in confidence, too much information required, not enough time – every excuse under the sun to obfuscate and to not assist the process of this chamber. When documents motions are properly asked for, properly dealt with, properly debated, you fail to deliver them. It is a bit like the COVID Coate inquiry, in which we constantly heard in the evidence from the government, ‘I do not recall’ or ‘I don’t do emails.’ This is the same thing. We have heard the story about how we have not engaged in the process; well, until you tell us you are not going to give us a document, we cannot engage in the process. It takes forever to find out that you are not even going to deliver a document, and there are so many documents that you have not delivered. The Liberal–National parties had 28; the AJP, the Animal Justice Party, six; the Greens, six; Legalise Cannabis Victoria, six; the Libertarian Party, four; and One Nation, one. It is extraordinary that on no occasion are you prepared to deliver the documents that are properly called for. One particular document that I called for was the John Merritt review of infrastructure worksites. It is a hidden document that goes completely to the proposition that $15 billion has gone down the gurgler here in Victoria, courtesy of the CFMEU corruption. But that is an important document, and you cannot even deliver it.

The mind boggles at the fact that this government can treat everybody with such disdain. It beggars belief that you think you can get away with this and that the people of Victoria will not hold you accountable. Well, I am very confident that they will hold you accountable on 28 November, because they have had enough of the lack of truth and honesty in this government, the lack of proper process, the waste, the corruption and the totally inappropriate way you deal with how you deliver government. We have legislation coming into this house where we are asked to pass it when most of the detail of the legislation comes forth in regulation at some later stage, which is often found to be totally egregious and not anything that anybody could have agreed to in the chamber when the debate on a bill was occurring. In the committee stages of dealing with bills in this house, the inability of ministers to answer questions in detail about the legislation is next level, but the production of documents is the most important issue that we can deal with – other than going to the Supreme Court or VCAT to get them, and that takes, as Dr Heath and Mr Mullholland have said, months, if not years. So the sanction is against the Leader of the House to be referred to the Privileges Committee, and the sanction is against the ministers who are not going to be able to deliver their statements for tomorrow. Yes, it may be insufficient, but it does send a message –

The ACTING PRESIDENT (Gaelle Broad): Thank you, Mrs McArthur. Your time has expired.

Business interrupted pursuant to sessional orders.

Council divided on motion: