Wednesday, 23 September 2026

 Ryan BATCHELOR (Southern Metropolitan) (17:12): I rise to make a brief statement today on the Department of Parliamentary Services annual report tabled last year, mainly to offer some thanks to those who have helped me in particular and us collectively in our endeavours in the last four years. To the clerks, table office, attendants, catering staff, security staff, cleaners, member services and library: everything you do makes our life easier.

I particularly want to spend a bit more time talking about the committee work and particularly thanking the committee staff who have supported our efforts in the last four years. I have been a member of two standing committees, a joint committee and two select committees, and I have acted as chair of a couple of them. My staff totalled it up, and we think there have been 22 inquiries, nearly 4500 pages of reports and nearly 100 days of public hearings in the last four years that I have had the absolute privilege of participating in. I want to thank, firstly, all of those who have provided evidence to those inquiries. The inquiries do not work without people coming forward, giving us submissions and providing us with evidence, but more importantly, they do not work without ordinary Victorians telling their stories – and we heard some exceptionally harrowing stories across the course of those inquiries.

There were a couple of highlights for me of the inquiries in the last four years. I think the Legal and Social Issues inquiry into our state education system was exceptionally important. It showed us quite clearly that evidence-based teaching practices – explicit teaching, structured and synthetic phonics delivery – in our schools work and that we should back evidence-based teaching in our schools. Funding is a means, not an end, and improving the outcomes of education for the students who we require to go to school is what we should be spending that additional money on. That, to me, was an exceptionally important inquiry.

The two inquiries that I participated in and chaired parts of – the inquiry into the 2022 flooding event and the inquiry into the 2026 summer fires – heard some harrowing stories of people affected by natural disasters in this state. We know that natural disasters are becoming more intense and more frequent, and our community resilience is tested, so I want to thank everyone for that. Also, from the Integrity and Oversight Committee’s point of view – I spent four years on the IOC, and we did some important policy work – the monitoring and oversight work that we did on a regular basis with the integrity agencies should not go unremarked upon, particularly the way we pursued IBAC’s handling, or poor handling, of police-perpetrated family violence. To me, that yielded the most significant thing that occurred in committee work in this Parliament, and that was an apology from our anti-corruption agency over the way they treated victim-survivors of police-perpetrated family violence. Seeing that was exceptionally significant.

I thank all the committee staff: the managers of the Environment and Planning Committee Kieran Crowe most recently and Lilian Topic before him; the Legal and Social Issues Committee’s Patrick O’Brien, who managed that committee; the Integrity and Oversight Committee’s Sean Coley and the team, who were always, always magnificent in what they did; and the select committees, both of which were managed by Matt Newington. I want to thank you all for the exceptional work that you did and the effort you put into making us look like we knew what we were doing and enabled us to ask good questions. I think the reports that we produced were exceptionally valuable and hopefully have delivered some positive outcomes for the people of Victoria.