I grieve for the Legislative Assembly of this Victorian Parliament because of the progressive loss of democratic procedures that are necessary to ensure responsible and accountable government. The removal of non-government business from the Legislative Assembly almost 20 years ago has seen a slow but sure removal of opportunities for opposition and crossbench members to hold the government accountable. Non-government business is an essential part of ensuring a responsible and representative Parliament in any Westminster system. Currently Victoria’s Legislative Assembly is the only lower house in Australia that does not provide meaningful opportunities for non-government members to move motions, progress bills or utilise a number of other procedures in the house. Non-government business would allow us to move motions on general debates and move motions to seek specific outcomes, motions seeking the ordering of the production of documents or the referral of a matter to an inquiry, to a standing or select committee or investigatory committee, disallowance motions under order 151, revocation motions, motions seeking to amend standing orders or to introduce sessional or temporary orders and motions to refer matters to the Ombudsman or take a petition into consideration. These are all things that ought to be a day-to-day part of the operation of this Legislative Assembly, and they are simply not.

I see members of Parliament in other houses throughout Australia who have the opportunity to do all of these things, and I really do grieve for the fact that we are so constrained and that the people of Victoria are so limited in the sort of representation that they can get because of what happens here in this Legislative Assembly. I have seen the member for Murray in New South Wales, Helen Dalton, walk into the Legislative Assembly in the New South Wales Parliament and introduce bills that will require members of Parliament to disclose their ownership of water—a really important topic. I have seen the upper house in New South Wales being able to do disallowance motions. These are things that we could be doing here in this house, but at the moment we are not able to. Failing to provide sufficient time for minority voices in the Legislative Assembly not only prevents the representation of large numbers of people but also denies a potential source of important legislation that members on this side of the house could introduce into Parliament and even perhaps have made into law.

Non-government business is an essential part of any legislature, and the fact that this vehicle does not exist here in Victoria is totally at odds with the operation of the Westminster system. It is a system of government laid out in the Victorian Constitution Act 1975, and it is built on the principle of responsible government. Responsible government requires a direct line of accountability from the executive to the Parliament and through the Parliament to the people. It is this line of accountability, characterised by the executive sitting in Parliament, to which it is accountable, which gives the Westminster system its democratic appeal and arguably its longevity. This is more important now than it has ever been. We have seen the denigration of democracy in so many places in recent years. The worldwide pandemic has brought about change such as we have never seen—things like the storming of the US Capitol building, the number of repressive regimes throughout the world growing in number, the failed nations around the world that we see growing in number every day and of course the lack of media diversity.

The ability for people to be able to be heard and to put their point of view in our regional communities, where regional media has almost disappeared from the landscape—there is no television anymore and no-one comes in and films what is happening in our communities. Channel 9 left a couple of years ago. The ABC had left before that. WIN TV is now just a single cameraman and one journalist in the region, and you are lucky to get one story up in a whole-of-state regional news service that goes for half an hour. This is devastating, and this is in an environment where Sky News is now beamed free to air across the whole of regional Australia. In Queensland 98 per cent of regional media is owned by News Corp. These are really fundamental issues that need to be aired, and we get very little opportunity to do anything about these sorts of things.

The Legislative Assembly is the place where government is formed. I mean, these are basic lessons that people know. However, its role has been decimated to such an extent that bills are rarely ever debated in full. Oppositions sit here with few numbers on the speaking list because they just do not see any point. There is just no opportunity to go into consideration in detail—such an important part of our processes in this house. This is where the ministers are, this is where the ministers introduce the bills, these are the ministers who know what the bills are about, and yet over a period of years we have seen the elimination in this house of consideration in detail. We are looking at a situation now where the upper house, the house of review, is doing the work that ought to be done here. It is quite extraordinary to consider that consideration in detail goes for hours up there but there is no minister responsible for the bill even in the house. They are not in that house. They are in this house, and this is where that business should be taking place. It is just a really concerning situation when you hear members of this house on the opposition side saying that they may oppose a bill—they may not like things in it—but they will let it go through and let the upper house deal with it. This is not the sort of debate we ought to have. It is not the quality of debate that this house requires.

When all the right mechanisms and procedures are operating in the Legislative Assembly it is an entirely different place. At the moment it looks like we are here just to rubber-stamp what the government does. Yes, the government has a very powerful majority, but there should be quality debate going on here. Members on this side should be able to introduce a bill and they should be able to have debate progressed on that bill. They should be able to take the opportunity to put in action all those things I read out before: to demand production of documents, to move motions, to refer an issue for inquiry by a standing committee. We do not get to do that. It is really a very concerning point that this Legislative Assembly now finds itself in, and it finds itself in this situation at a very critical time, at a time when the standards of democracy have to be fought for and have to be upheld.

It is the absolute duty of this government to hear what I am saying, to say yes to the motion that I stand up every Tuesday and seek leave to have debated, which is refused on every occasion. I have done that so many times. This is an opportunity that I have proposed to the house whereby we do not worry about having grievances and matters of public importance and we replace them with non-government business, which gives this side of the house the opportunity to decide what will be put up and what will be discussed during that time. We see it happen in the upper house all the time. It is not hard to figure out what needs to be done.

The issue of balancing time in Parliament devoted to government and non-government business has been inherited by this Parliament from preceding parliaments. In the Victorian Legislative Assembly the balance has varied, and it is fair to say we have never struck the right balance. The crucial reforms to the standing orders which effectively eliminated non-government business occurred between 1999 and 2004, and I dare say there are very few members left in this house who even have a memory of what it used to be like, of how those changes came about and how we now find ourselves in this very sorry situation. The sessional orders were introduced in November of 1999, and shortly after, the beginning of the 54th Parliament signalled a major overhaul to what was then non-government business. We all know what we have been left with. It is predominantly what we see now. We have got the matter of public importance (MPI) and the grievance debate. We see the quality of the matter of public importance. It is really a very poor quality debate where each side gets to put up a motion, and it is just a slamming procedure from each side to the other. It does not enable real business to be progressed in the house. It does not allow notices of motion—important notices of motion that often have many people behind them—to be put up and discussed by opposition or crossbenchers.

So these current methods we have at our disposal are simply not good enough. They do not enable the Parliament to run in a manner that it should. The time spent on, for instance, MPIs is shared with the other side. The grievance debate is shared with the other side. I just heard the previous speaker say that he does not usually do a grievance debate. He leaves grievances up to the other side of the house. Well, I wish that was true, but it is not. We share them. Everything is shared. Our time is very limited in terms of what we get to do and how often we get to speak.

I think an important issue that I would like to raise in this context, too, is just in relation to the current situation we find ourselves in, or perhaps going back to March last year in those early months when COVID was really just having its early impacts on our community. There was a proposal put that the government should create a cross-party committee, a COVID advisory committee of some sort. We had seen them established in New South Wales, New Zealand, and even the federal Parliament established such a committee. It would have been a perfect committee for the oversight of government business, but instead the government refused that opportunity. It simply enabled the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee to take on that role, a committee now chaired by a member of the government, something that used not to be the case. It used to not be done that way, but now that is the way it is done. It does bring down the value of committees at times in those situations, and it is a clear indication that the government is always controlling the agenda. This is not the way it should be.

The Western Australian Parliament currently is better situated. Opposition members in the Western Australian Parliament—there are six of them—they get a much better run at representing their communities than we do here in the Victorian Parliament. It is extraordinary. They have the capacity to do all of the things that this Legislative Assembly does not get the chance to do. We do not have meaningful opportunities to contribute and participate in the way we should.

Under the proposed changes that I keep trying to put to this Parliament, we would get rid of the matter of public importance and the grievance debate, and we would replace it with general business, and it would provide opportunities to utilise this time in a proportional way across all of us over this side of the house. It would be a more meaningful opportunity for people to be able to propose legislation, motions and matters for investigation that would enable their electorates to actually provide a level of representation that was much more meaningful, that had some depth and that would give them the sense that they were truly being represented, not having non-government business through the business program. It goes against the constitutional principle of responsible government. It goes against the precedent set by every other state in Australia.

I would just like to finish up with a quote from Sir John George Bourinot, one of our constitutional fathers:

The political party which controls the House at one time may be in a different position at another, and is equally interested with the minority in preserving the rules of the House in all their integrity.

It is time that this matter was brought forward into the Parliament, that it was debated, that parliamentary reform take place in this Victorian Parliament to restore to the Legislative Assembly the role that it rightfully should have.

I rise to make a brief contribution on the Judicial Proceedings Reports Amendment Bill 2021. The bill will amend the primary act to provide that the publication prohibition in section 4, which makes it an offence to publish details likely to identify a person as a victim of a sexual assault or sexual offence or even of an alleged offence, ceases upon the death of that person. This means that families of deceased victims and others, including media, will be able to legally publish details that identify the deceased person as a victim of sexual offending.

The bill also creates a new pathway to allow people who are close to a deceased sexual offence victim, such as a family member, to apply for a court order restricting or prohibiting the publication of identifying details about the deceased victim, and this will be known as a victim privacy order. These amendments recognise that there are those in the community who feel very strongly about these issues, and it is important to publicly talk about the sexual offences committed against loved ones, especially when they have died. For some families, sharing their stories can be part of the healing process, it can assist with their ability to grieve and it honours the memory of the loved one who has experienced profound trauma and violence. On the other hand, there are those who consider the protection of the victim’s privacy to be the paramount consideration and that it should be absolute, and these people would totally oppose any publication of the details of their loved one’s offence. So we have got two very strongly held views on these issues.

The bill, which came before this house last November, proceeded with amendments that made it easier for victim-survivors to speak publicly about their experience and control when and how their stories were published by others. However, to deal with the publication and identification of deceased victims remained problematic, and the government was very clear that it needed to do more work and consultation with advocacy groups and families before bringing forward the final amendments which are here today. And in the meantime it proposed that there had to be an application to the court to be able to allow that publication to occur. When I spoke on this bill last November, I acknowledged the fact that this is a very sensitive area and that there are very strongly held views about the issues at play. I paid my respects to all of those who have suffered from the extreme trauma of sexual assault and of course to the families of deceased victims. I know of families in my own electorate who have been devastated by circumstances such as this. I am pleased that this bill has been brought back in circumstances where more consultation has taken place and there has been more consideration of the issues. I specifically asked the Attorney-General when I spoke on this bill last November not to forget our regional areas in that consultation process, and as difficult as it has been with the many lockdowns we have had since last November, I am pleased to say that I am assured that quite broad consultation has taken place. And I know that it has locally in Shepparton and that indeed the Goulburn Valley Centre Against Sexual Assault were engaged along with a number of Aboriginal organisations in the broader community.

We are living in a time where women are standing up for themselves and each other against sexual assault and harassment, and this legislation is really timely. While there will always be divergent views, we are in a time when the public interest calls for openness and accountability, and this bill is one way of providing for it. In my 35 years as a practising family lawyer in the Shepparton region, many of those were as an independent children’s lawyer, and it is fair to say that you never become hardened to the stories of sexual assault that occur not only within the broader community but also within families. Family law was one of the places where that was so often highlighted, along with the Children’s Court in this state, where often some of the most horrendous stories are indeed told. I would like to just say that the Goulburn Valley Centre Against Sexual Assault has been there in Shepparton through all those years of my practising as a lawyer. They are still there, and they provide a remarkable service to the community and to victims. Often they are the hidden people. You do not know who goes through those doors, you do not know what stories are being told—but I do. I know what work they do to counsel and assist and help people through the court processes as they are going on and then to heal as they move onto that next stage. Organisations like this are just so essential, and I am pleased to see that there are now more and more organisations engaged with helping victims work through these really unbelievable times that they do suffer.

There is no doubt that times change. I seem to recall when the Goulburn Valley Centre Against Sexual Assault was first established it was like an amazing thing. Even the name itself seemed like, ‘Gosh, what a thing, to have an organisation like that’, but here we are. We know and we now acknowledge the horrendous behaviour that does occur in society and the terrible crimes that have been committed against women and children. This bill facilitates a way forward for people to help them deal with the issues that they face at that time, and accordingly I commend the bill to the house.

I am pleased to rise to speak on the budget reply motion. It seems like a long time ago that the budget was announced here in Parliament, and yet it is not that long. The fact that we had two budgets last year also disorients us a bit I think in terms of what is happening and how our communities are getting along.

I would like to start by focusing more on my electorate and how it has fared through budgets and of course through the current pandemic. I think the context of this last budget has been quite different. During 2020 there was certainly a very significant push to keep the economy on track, to fund major projects and to fund many other projects that were shovel-ready, with a view to keeping the economy going, keeping people in employment and dealing with what was really the great unknown. This budget, the 2021–22 budget, is really a more modest budget. It seems to me that there are not as many blue-sky projects but it is really a case of government holding the fort. Even though there is very considerable expenditure in it, it is more about providing somewhat of a backbone to keep our communities together. Many of our communities have felt very isolated during the last 16 or 18 months since the pandemic started, and I think those lockdown periods, when we see deserted streets, deserted communities, have a real impact certainly on people’s mental health but also on their sense of wellbeing, on their capacity to really understand how they might cope going forward, whether it be financially or in their businesses and the like.

It has been very pleasing coming from a rural community to see that in 2020 we had good rains after several years of very dry weather and really worrying drought, and so that rain last year and again this year has seen excellent cropping and it has seen the dairy industry doing really well. That has been an incredible boost for our agricultural and horticultural communities, and in particular in my district. So amongst what has been a very stressful time there are businesses that have really thrived and done well and others that are always at the mercy of the elements that have also done well.

My electorate has been the welcome recipient of a number of budget spends, with close to $1 billion being spent over the last seven years since I have been representing the Shepparton district. It has been an investment that we never saw before, and it has been an investment that was really needed. The investment has been spent on essential infrastructure—things like rail, health, education and agricultural aspects as well. In relation to rail we have had something like $356 million invested by the Victorian state government, and that was for stages 1 and 2. And then we saw a deal struck with the federal government whereby another $320 million was invested that will see nine V/Locity trains a day travelling between Melbourne and Shepparton—something that many of us would never have imagined when we came to Melbourne on an old rickety train at 6 o’clock in the morning, many in our pyjamas, to demonstrate on the steps of Parliament just to show how much we wanted something done about rail in our region. It has been a great boost to have increased services already—to know that these better, faster services are well on their way and that the works are underway now.

In health we have also seen stage 2 of Goulburn Valley Health built, a five-storey tower at the north end of the city which is really quite astounding. It is providing services now that were rehoused from really just a patchwork of other buildings and other departments around what was becoming quite a shabby hospital. A new emergency department, a new special care nursery, a new paediatric ward, new theatres, new wards for patients—these things all make the city of Shepparton in itself a much better place to live and to work.

One of the recently funded projects was the Arcadia fish hatchery. Now, this is a project whereby the government has decided to spend $7 million to house a fish hatchery on 170 acres of a property just south of Shepparton. It will be a huge fish hatchery that will breed Murray cod and silver perch—all those species that are so important to our iconic Goulburn River and of course the Murray River. Stocking our rivers on a regular basis is something we have to do, and it is great news for the Shepparton district that that has been located so close to Shepparton—and not only that, there is funding now for tourism aspects to go with it. I think we might one day see a huge Murray cod at the front gate of the fish hatchery. Who knows?

There is an opportunity as you head into Shepparton to visit something like the fish hatchery or the new Shepparton Art Museum, which is just astounding but has not yet been formally opened; it will be later in the year. We have got the new fire station in Shepparton that the fire services have recently moved into, and you then see the vista of the new hospital building. So Shepparton in recent years has really come ahead. Of course it is not just about Shepparton; it is about the servicing that we do in a regional city like Shepparton to the whole broader region: up to the Murray and further south towards Nagambie. All these towns and communities benefit from the regional city that they are closest to, where most of their services are provided.

The fish hatchery also has set up a training course in conjunction with TAFE to ensure that we have a large Indigenous group of young people employed at the fish hatchery. It was great to see in this year’s budget $10.7 million go to GOTAFE for their Goulburn Murray Trades Skills Centre redevelopment. More apprentices and students will go on to fill skilled roles in our own community. I think we all know and have heard constantly how difficult it is to recruit skilled people to come to country and regional areas, so educating them as our own homegrown students is really something that is needed and that we aim to do. A lot of the processes are now in place as a result of the Shepparton Education Plan: TAFE, La Trobe University and the Melbourne University rural medical school. All these things are part of the story that will see us be able to provide a lot of that depth of educated people that any community needs. It was excellent to just see La Trobe’s recent graduation of their nursing course. Fifty per cent of those student nurses were employed by Goulburn Valley Health in Shepparton—a great strike rate on any view of it, I would have thought.

Along with the budget we also received a $6.4 million announcement for Queensland fruit fly control in the Goulburn Valley, Sunraysia and the Yarra Valley. Fruit fly is a scourge that you may not all know about, but when you cut open a piece of fruit and see what is inside when it has been infected by fruit fly it is really horrible. It has a very significant economic impact on our orchards around Shepparton. We produce the pears, the peaches and the apples for most of Australia, and the impact of fruit fly on horticulture in our region has been severe.

Interestingly, most of the fruit fly is found in our urban areas, so a lot of this program is about getting people in the urban areas to address the fact that their tomato bushes in the veggie garden, their lemon trees, their pomegranate trees—whatever they have got—are actually seeding fruit fly. A lot of it is about teaching the urban communities about what is going on, because the farmers know about it and they are doing their own work because it is such a huge financial investment for them.

The Verney Road special school received $1 million by way of funding to start looking at its future. It is the main school in Shepparton for children with special needs, children with autism. It is incredibly crowded, and a refurbishment or a full redevelopment is overdue. Work is now well underway following that announcement being made to look at what the future will hold. With the Shepparton Education Plan underway there is real opportunity to start thinking about what we can do for young people in our region who are in mainstream schools but who are not being educated because the education system does not cater to their needs. Very often that is young people with autism. It is a spectrum, as we know, and there is such a huge range of young people who are not being catered to but who sit there not knowing what is going on sometimes.

I am very keen to see this study of special needs in our region look at not just those who are already identified as having special needs but those who are already in mainstream schools and not being catered for. The inquiry conducted by the Family and Community Development Committee of this Parliament when they did a study into autism recommended that there should be an autism school in a regional area, and I say Shepparton is the place that that should be, because we are presently rolling out the Shepparton Education Plan with the full support of the government, which has invested over $140 million in education in Shepparton. There is a real opportunity to do a wraparound of all the needs of all young people, to see that everyone is included in the opportunity to get an education, with that view to actually having a pathway, whatever that might be, when they leave school.

There were many other budget announcements that our community will benefit from although not directed directly to projects in the region. The $200 million School Mental Health Fund will be very welcome. We have projects in our region such as the neighbourhood schools project that will be looking for funding under this stream of funding that has been made available for multidisciplinary teams that can work and identify with children who have suffered significant trauma and provide early therapeutic intervention so that those children have a chance of moving forward.

We will receive a share of the $148 million for the regional Victorian Academy of Teaching and Leadership. Shepparton has been identified as one of the six sites for that, and already applications are being taken for the first round of students. I am very hopeful that teachers in our region will look to upskilling and taking on new qualifications through that process.

There is $23 million over the next four years for continuing court programs. We have a drug treatment court that will come to Shepparton gradually, and that has proved successful in other places. We want to see reoffending reduced in our communities. There is support for vulnerable families. There is money for improved bus services, and of all the things that Shepparton needs at the moment one is a review of bus services. Our town has expanded, and there are many areas now to the north and south of Shepparton that are not being serviced by buses in the way we would like them to be.

It has been a good budget for Shepparton in a sense, but over the longer term we have seen a real investment that will provide returns to our community in a way that it has been calling out for for so long. It had been neglected for a long time, and we have seen investment in those major areas that really impact people’s lives. Health, education, public transport—all these things really matter.

We are a community that is very dependent on water and irrigation, and we are now at a time when we are seeing opportunity for huge investment in energy. We have over 60 solar farm applications proposed, underway or being considered across the Goulburn Valley region, which is really astounding, and I think we have not thought through as a community—as a government even—a strategy as to where these projects would be, where they would be best utilised and the competition between irrigation, land and energy. There are some really big issues that do need to be looked at as we go forward. I commend the budget.