Wednesday, 23 September 2026

 Wendy LOVELL (Northern Victoria) (19:06): Representing the people of Northern Victoria Region, and before that North Eastern Province, in the Victorian Parliament has been the greatest privilege of my life. I thank the Liberal Party for having the faith in me to serve six consecutive terms and my constituents for electing me six times. I was first elected on 30 November 2002, 24 years ago. On that day I won a seat for the Liberal Party that we had never held before, and my election was very much against the tide for that election. When I think back to that night it seems a very long time ago, and 24 years is a long time, but I have been so busy and so happy doing what I do that it also seems as if that time has just flown. I stand here 24 years later as the longest serving female in the history of the Victorian Legislative Council and the third-longest serving female in the history of the Victorian Parliament. I am also the longest serving Deputy President of the Legislative Council and the second-longest serving Liberal female in the Victorian state Parliament. None of these were milestones that I set out to achieve. In fact I thought I would be lucky to serve a single term, because after I was elected the Labor government announced that they would make changes to the upper house, and one of those options was to abolish it.

I want to particularly thank those people who were there from the start, who helped to get me elected to this place. Thank you to Ian Carson and Peter Clarke, who were the state president and state vice-president at the time. If it was not for the two of you taking me out for a coffee and a very serious conversation after a Friday morning state executive meeting, I would never have put up my hand. Your belief in me, along with the encouragement I was getting from my local community, gave me the confidence to stand. At first, I saw standing as a valuable experience, but I never truly believed I would win. Perhaps that is what drove me to campaign so hard. I won my seat through sheer hard work, doorknocking until my feet bled. I have often joked that I had a different set of bandaids for every pair of shoes I owned. But it was no joke, it was actually true.

I will also be forever indebted to the assistance I received from my very dear friend the then member for Murray Sharman Stone, the then member for Benambra Tony Plowman and the then member for Indi Sophie Panopoulos. I want to pay tribute to a group of local Liberals who will forever be very special to me. We call ourselves Team Murray because these are the Liberals who initially came together to assist Sharman to win the seat of Murray in 1996: Bill and Gwen Parsons, Barry and Lorraine Smith, Del and Gerald Brown, Lou and Doc Brown, John Taig, Rob and Doug Watson, Annie Donaldson, Gail and Willem Van Zeist, Dougie Stone and Bill Hunter. Team Murray are far more than party volunteers. They are my friends, my advisers and my constant source of support.

Bill Hunter holds a special place in my story. It was Bill who encouraged me to attend a Young Liberals meeting when I was just 15 years old. As a result, I joined the Liberal Party on my 16th birthday. That one simple conversation helped set the course of my life.

I also want to thank all those people who have served in positions on my electorate council but particularly those who have held the position of chair: Barry Smith, Bill Parsons, John Lithgow and Brad Hearn. I also extend my thanks to our long-serving secretary Tony Schneider, to my Liberal family, to my branch members and to the dynamic women who make up our local women’s sections. I will be forever indebted to you for your encouragement and support and for being my eyes and ears throughout the extremely large electorate of Northern Victoria Region.

To my parliamentary colleagues, I thank all of you for your support and friendship. Politics takes us all away from our families, but this is especially true for those of us from regional Victoria, and often our colleagues are our family away from home. Some of my happiest memories of Parliament are of the years I shared an office with my two dear friends David Koch and John Vogels. There are plenty of good stories I could tell you about that office, but it is probably better that I do not.

To those who have led our party over the past 24 years – Robert Doyle, Ted Baillieu, Denis Napthine, Matthew Guy, Michael O’Brien, John Pesutto, Brad Battin and Jess Wilson – I thank you for your support but also for your tireless efforts on behalf of the Liberal Party. Being the leader of a political party is never an easy job.

I was fortunate to be given portfolio responsibilities from my very first day as a member, and I have held positions ever since, including as a shadow minister for multiple portfolios, Minister for Housing and Minister for Children and Early Childhood Development, and in the Legislative Council as Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party, Deputy Leader of the Government, Deputy Leader of the Opposition, leader of opposition business, manager of government business, opposition whip and Deputy President.

I will be forever grateful to Ted Baillieu and Denis Napthine, who bestowed upon me the great honour of serving in their cabinets as the Minister for Housing and Minister for Children and Early Childhood Development. As Minister for Housing I inherited a portfolio in crisis. The waiting list had blown out to 41,212 families. The Auditor-General tabled a report that stated that more than 10,000 of the department’s properties were uninhabitable due to Labor’s lack of investment in maintenance. In my first briefing with the secretary I was advised that the Office of Housing would be trading insolvent by the end of March. Turning the department around was like turning the Titanic, but fortunately we managed to avoid the iceberg.

We went on to do some very good work in my four years as minister. We stabilised the budget, cleaned up drug activity on the inner-city high-rise estates, invested in maintenance to save some of the homes and commenced the redevelopment of entire estates, including New Norlane in Greater Geelong and Olympia, the former Olympic village in Heidelberg West, at little or no cost to the state. We built around 8300 new homes, upgraded a further 8150 and reduced the waiting list to 34,320, a reduction of 6892 families. In comparison, there are now 58,021 families languishing on Labor’s ever-growing waiting list, an increase of 23,701 families. Of even greater concern has been the blowout of the priority waiting list from 9625 to 33,253, an increase of 23,628 families under Labor. These are some of our state’s most vulnerable families: those who are escaping domestic violence, who are homeless, who are living with a disability or who have a special housing need.

My proudest achievement in the housing portfolio would have to be the Education First Youth Foyers. The foyers are 40-room student accommodation style apartments for homeless youth. They are co-located with TAFE and provide subsidised housing and counselling services to young people who, due to unstable housing, are disengaging with education. In return, the young people commit to a mutual obligation to participate in education, training or work. I built three youth foyers in Shepparton, Broadmeadows and Glen Waverley, and I worked with Richard Wynne, the minister who replaced me, to get a commitment for two more in Wodonga and Wangaratta, both in my electorate. Around 1200 young people have benefited from support in a youth foyer since we opened the first one in 2013, and incredibly 89 per cent of them have left the program engaged in further education, employment, or both. I have also heard of more than a dozen students from the Shepparton youth foyer who have now gone on to purchase their own homes. Taking a young person from couch surfing and disengagement from education to completing their studies, building a career and purchasing a home is life-changing for the individual and saves governments millions over that person’s lifetime. The foyer program is good Liberal policy because it focuses on investing in people to ensure they can build better lives rather than just providing a handout and keeping people welfare dependent. I am incredibly proud to have written the policy for the Education First Youth Foyers and to have seen them through to delivering real results.

In the early childhood portfolio I was proud to lead the sector through a period where we invested in children, educators and new facilities. We provided record funding for grants to expand or build hundreds of kindergartens and integrated early education and care centres. We commenced building integrated children’s centres on primary school sites to provide a one-stop shop for families and better transitions for children. We also provided record funding to train new educators and for existing educators to improve their qualifications. We invested in children by increasing the hours children attended kindergarten programs, and during my term as minister more than 97 per cent of four-year-olds participated in kindergarten, which was a record for our state. We also increased the participation of Indigenous children in four-year-old kindergarten from 57 per cent to 95 per cent and commenced free three-year-old kindergarten for Indigenous children and children known to child protection. Later in my term as minister I had the opportunity to guide the rollout of improved services right across the nation as the chair of the ministerial council during a period when the national laws brought the rest of the country up to Victoria’s standards.

If I had to sum up my career as a local member in six issues, they would be: bushfires, drought, floods, water policy, a health service crisis and potholes. Natural disasters have been a constant throughout my career, beginning with the millennium drought and its impact on our primary producers. I have never taken a break over summer due to bushfires, with major fires occurring in 2003, 2006, 2009, 2015, 2016, 2019–20 and 2026. The bushfires were interspaced with floods in 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2022. And if there was a summer without a fire or a flood, a storm would wipe out our fruit crops. Potholes have of course been the biggest issue regional Victoria has had to deal with over the past four years, but water policy has been the issue that has affected our region the most. We have had our fair share of debate and change, including green papers, white papers, the Living Murray, the unbundling of water and land and the Murray–Darling Basin plan.

On a local level there have been many projects that I am proud to have played a part in delivering, including, but certainly not limited to, the GenesisCare radiotherapy service in Shepparton; investment in hospitals in Shepparton, Echuca, Wangaratta, Benalla, Kilmore and Seymour; the Echuca–Moama bridge; the widening of the Peter Ross-Edwards Causeway; reinforcement of the Eildon Dam wall; the suicide barriers on the Melrose Drive overpass in Wodonga; the Annie North women’s refuge in Bendigo; and the Liberals’ election commitment to duplicate Donnybrook Road from the Hume Freeway to Epping Road.

Of course some of the most important work we do we cannot actually talk about, and that is the work we do to assist individual constituents, and our office has helped thousands over the years. But I do want to tell one story of a family that I helped very early on in my career. This family had a young boy called Matthew. He was 10 and he was autistic. Matthew had an IQ of I think about 72. It was just above the cut-off level for attending a special developmental school, which meant he was in mainstream school. Matthew’s long-term outlook in life had been such that they had told his parents that he could learn to read and write and that he could probably get a drivers licence but would never hold down a long-term job. But because Matthew became violent when he became frustrated, every school they enrolled Matthew in had a ‘no reading or writing’ policy for Matthew. That meant he was not even going to fulfil his limited potential. They had worked with many MPs before they met me and had had no result for Matthew. I worked with the Department of Education, with the minister and with the special developmental school in his home town, and we got Matthew dual enrolled in the developmental school and mainstream school. His mother wrote to me at Christmas time that year to say that he had actually written her a note that was three sentences long. She said, ‘You have no idea what a difference you have made to my son’s life.’ That was my first real win for an individual, and it has always stuck with me. It was something that blew me away: that as MPs we could make such a difference to a person’s life. I am only sorry that that help did not come until Matthew was 10. He should have had that help from his early developmental years.

Some of the best fun I have had in my career I have shared with David Davis. Together we led the coalition in the Legislative Council from January 2008 to December 2014. During that time we were both part of Ted Baillieu’s leadership team that led our party into government. As leader and deputy leader of the government we did not lose a single division in the upper house. Together we have run campaigns that have resulted in real benefits to local communities in Northern Victoria, starting with the Rochester hospital. In January 2005 the Bracks government announced their intention to close the operating theatres and acute services at Rochester. Over several weeks we ran a campaign that involved a public meeting with almost 2000 attendees, relentless WIN TV and press articles and parliamentary pressure. Within weeks we had turned that decision around, and the government was forced to invest in a rebuild of the hospital.

The new Bendigo Hospital is another of David’s and my achievements. I worked with doctors, nurses and the Bendigo Weekly to run a campaign of horror stories about the old hospital, which pressured the Brumby government to come up with their plan to build a smaller hospital over two sites that would have needed to be replaced today. As Shadow Minister for Health, David worked with local medical professionals to establish exactly what was needed to service the Bendigo community. It required an extra $102 million on top of what Labor’s small hospital would cost, which was provided by Ted Baillieu as an election commitment. Not only did we build a world-class hospital and an integrated cancer centre on a single site with 372 acute inpatient beds, 72 same-day acute beds, an 80-bed mental health unit, a five-bed mother-and-baby unit, a 25-bed maternity unit, 11 operating theatres, a multimodality medical imaging department and a regional integrated cancer centre with four radiotherapy bunkers and capacity to expand to six, but we also delivered, on top of that, a 100-place childcare centre, a wellness centre, a 128-bed hotel, an atrium and a cafe, a two-level link bridge over Arnold Street, a helipad, a multideck 1350-vehicle car park, 15 short-stay accommodation units and a conference facility, together with significant infrastructure and landscaping upgrades. What was Jacinta Allan’s reaction to the Liberals’ bigger and better Bendigo Hospital? She said, ‘It’s too big. We don’t need a hospital that big.’ Jacinta Allan is the only MP I have ever known to argue her community deserved less when it came to health services. But now that it is a success, she wants to claim it.

Another really important local achievement that I owe thanks to a colleague for is saving SPC. As many of you would remember, in February 2014 there was a real chance that Coca-Cola would close SPC. Sharman Stone was on the case federally, but unfortunately her pleas were falling on deaf ears. I was getting much the same reaction from the departments and some ministers, who brushed me off saying it was the commercial decision of a company. It was only after I went to the Premier, Denis Napthine, and pleaded the case on behalf of Shepparton that things started to move. Later that day, I got a call from Denis’s chief of staff to say, ‘We have a flight booked for early tomorrow morning. Can you organise meetings with fruit growers, the council and SPC management, because Denis wants to see for himself how serious the situation is.’ Denis committed to return to Shepparton within a week with his decision. He then had the department put together a package worth $100 million, including $22 million from the government and $78 million in a commitment from SPC that saved an iconic business and hundreds of jobs in my community.

Throughout my parliamentary career I have been driven by several enduring priorities: stronger regional communities, better infrastructure, improved health services, quality education, support for vulnerable people, water security and opportunities for future generations to live and work in regional Victoria. I hope I have done my region proud.

In a few weeks I will pass the baton to Steve Brooks. Steve is my hand-picked replacement, and I thank the party preselectors for also choosing Steve. I am delighted that he will lead the coalition ticket along with Gaelle Broad. It is not often, as a member of Parliament, that you actually get to choose your own time to depart and you get to choose your own successor; fortunately, I have managed to do both.

To my electorate office staff Tamara Kirkby, Rob Loring and Claire Coates and others who have worked in my office over the years, thank you for everything. It is a great comfort to an MP to have good staff and be confident that constituents are getting first-class service. But most of all, I thank you for putting up with me.

To my ministerial staff – Anna Cronin, Alicia Byrne, Matthew Malone, Melonie Yurovich, Bridie Allanadale, Lucy Sinclair, Amanda Redman, Tim Rose, Alysha Murphy, Brenda Segal, Sarah Brown and my driver Peter ‘Henry’ Lawson – thank you for being an amazing team. Your hard work delivered real benefits for children and families in Victoria.

To the department staff, particularly the then director of housing Arthur Rogers, deputy secretary of early education Sonya Sharp, our departmental liaison officers Kerrie Moss and Stuart Cardell and the secretaries of the departments Richard Bolt and Gill Callister, thank you for everything you did to support our agenda. Together, we improved services in Victoria. I also want to acknowledge Shayne Graham, who died suddenly at the age of 37. Shayne was a much-loved member of our departmental team, and his death broke all our hearts.

To the staff of the Parliament, including the clerks, attendants, papers office staff, committee staff, Hansard, the library, security and PSOs, the catering staff, the cleaners and the gardeners, thank you for everything you have done to support my work as a member in this place. I particularly enjoyed working closely with Robert, Anne, Richard, Keir, Sally, Vivienne and Annemarie as Deputy President over the last eight years.

Finally, I want to thank my family: Louise, Gary, Doc, Nanna, Maddie and my four beautiful nephews Rodney, Sam, Kane and Jake. Politics demands sacrifices not only from those who are elected but also from the people who love them. You have given your encouragement, your patience and your understanding over many years. None of this would have been possible without you, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart. And boys, beware, because the fun aunty will now have a lot more time on her hands for all sorts of activities, including interstate footy matches to support our beloved Tigers.

I am committed to working hard for Northern Victoria and the Liberal Party right up to the closing of the polls, because there has never been an election more important to the future of our state and the future of all Victorians. I wish Jess Wilson, my colleagues and all our candidates the best of luck, because our state desperately needs a fresh start with a team that is ready to govern.

It has been an honour and a privilege to serve this Parliament, the Liberal Party and, most importantly, the people of northern Victoria.

Members applauded.

Sitting suspended 7:30 pm until 7:51 pm.