I am pleased to rise and make a contribution on the Education and Training Reform Amendment (Protection of School Communities) Bill 2021. The purpose of the bill is to amend the principal act to provide orders prohibiting or regulating certain conduct on school premises or in school-related places in order to protect members of school communities from harmful, threatening or abusive behaviour and also to provide for civil penalties for the enforcement of those orders and to make a range of other minor amendments. It is worth noting that a member of a school community means a student enrolled at the school, a parent of a student enrolled at the school, a staff member of the school or a person who might otherwise be affected if they are in a school-related environment.

It is salutary to note that over a period of time we have seen more and more incidents of violence and unrest within schools, whether it be violence from students or violence towards school staff. While most parents will behave in a civilised manner and, dare I say, a normal manner at the school gate when they are dropping off their children and when they are corresponding with their children’s teachers or other school staff, a national well being survey by the Australian Catholic University and Deakin University found that school principals were subject to increased bullying, physical violence, threats of violence, slander and sexual and verbal harassment in the last 10 years. It showed four in 10 principals had been subject to violence at work in the past year. This is really concerning data. It is so unacceptable that teachers and school staff should be placed in a situation where they are the victims of this sort of behaviour, the sort of behaviour that this bill is seeking to prohibit. Nevertheless we have heard stories directly from people, and I recall just recently when this bill was in the newspapers a teacher being interviewed and talking about her two doors: one that is the front door, where most people enter, but one that is a back door, where she may need to escape from and where indeed she has had to escape from when a very angry parent might be coming through and pushing their way through, past reception and into her office. That is a really high level of aggression, and it creates a lot of fear in people. I think that is just an example of the sort of thing this bill will address.

Just in the last day or so I have heard the chief executive officer at Goulburn Valley Health asking people to just take a deep breath and not be so angry when they are showing up to the vaccination centre. Now, it is not many of them, but it is extraordinary how people will make a target of someone else because of their frustration, their anger or their current emotional state, and it is simply not acceptable. I applaud these new ads that I have just seen recently on television about workplaces: this is someone’s workplace and treat them with respect. It is only recently that I have noticed these, and I assume they are quite new. It really brings home to you that capacity perhaps we all have for irritation at times. It reminds you that people are actually behind that counter doing their job and trying to do it to the best of their ability, whether it be vaccinating someone or looking after your child in a school. This is just so incredibly important. So I would like to just shout out to all those people who are in vaccination centres at the moment doing an incredible job with thousands and thousands of people, Shepparton not the least but even many bigger hubs where they are working hard and long hours and doing the best they can.

I think one of the things that is not talked about a lot is people’s capacity for self-regulation. Self-regulation is something that is generally learned in the first 12 months of life, and it comes when a baby is crying and a mother soothes the baby and the baby learns to regulate its behaviour because it has had a reaction that is a positive reaction and is a soothing reaction and it can internalise that and moderate its behaviour in response to that. I think there is a lot to be learned from the fact that the early years are so often the most critical, the most important, and where a lot of the best behaviours and the most thoughtful behaviours can be learned.

This bill does not seek to replace the role of the police. The police will still be involved where they are required, but it is just another tool in the toolkit for schools and teachers to be able to take action where they deem it is required. It applies to all schools; it is not just the state school system but it applies to all schools across the state, and I think that is important to note. Education is a very important topic to me, and I dare say that education has never been talked about in my electorate, and particularly in Shepparton, as much as it has in recent years. In 2016 I did my grievance debate on the poor state of education in my community. We had four high schools all operating at a level below the state average. We had low aspiration, low attendance and often poor outcomes and many children leaving school without a pathway to the future, whatever that might be. The Shepparton Education Plan was introduced by the government in 2017 and it is across all levels of education, but the government took the view that the secondary schools had to be attended to first—that you could not simply leave them in the state they were in. After a long period of consultation—some say not long enough and not deep enough, but I have to say I was a party to much of that consultation that took place with school councils, parents groups, students and a lot of student feedback, community members and a community advisory group—a decision was made to amalgamate the four schools. Then the question was: would it be all on one campus or would it be two campuses? It has led to some community disharmony. A small group of parents who did not see this as the best way to do things raised a number of issues, and then unfortunately they set up a Facebook page called ‘Stop the super-school’. The school got labelled the super-school—it is actually the Greater Shepparton Secondary College. It is an amalgamation of four schools that have come together that have had a lot of issues in the past. Unfortunately this year we have seen the front page of the Herald Sun with ‘Super-school fear’ on it, highlighting incidents of student violence against each other.

I can tell you that in the years of 2018 and 2019, the two years before those schools were amalgamated into one on three campuses, there were 33 police attendances at the schools. So there has been this big effort to try and blame the super-school as being the cause of a whole range of issues, but it is simply inaccurate. It is wrong, but what has come out of that is a real focus on trying to deal with a lot of the aberrant behaviour that has existed in the schools. It has been excellent to see the Minister for Multicultural Affairs appointing a committee within our own town to look at the incredible diversity and multicultural issues that we have, all of which come together in a school environment and create a lot of challenges. That has been very welcomed. It is addressing issues that have been raised around racism within the school that allegedly lead to some violence.

The principals have been very supportive of all of this. And I have to just say that one of the principals who resigned last year—who was there for two years—became the victim of incredible online bullying from this particular Facebook page. It is really very disheartening to think that an individual is subject to that when they are just doing their job. I think we often expect it, because we are politicians and we are the target of it, and certainly I know I was the recipient of a great deal of that. And unfortunately there were people in the community who chose to highlight the negativity, to promote it and to talk about it endlessly rather than providing the sort of support and affirmation that teachers and principals were really looking for. So I want to say thank you to all the teachers across my region who have worked so hard for their students. They have put the future of their students at the forefront of what they are thinking and what they are doing. And, yes, change comes very hard, but what has been an incredibly difficult journey in 2020 and still is, here in 2021, has been made much better by the absolute dedication of those teachers.

I rise to make a contribution on the State Taxation and Mental Health Acts Amendment Bill 2021. This bill makes amendments to a range of other pieces of legislation. The bill is described by the government as supporting Victoria’s economic recovery, achieving budget revenue, providing some tax relief measures and introducing a mental health and wellbeing levy, which is to be implemented via the payroll surcharge on large employers. While we are hearing the government lauding this budget, we are hearing others who are criticising it as being a very heavy taxing budget that is not going to be welcomed in a number of areas.

The regional community of Shepparton district, which I represent, is like many others across Victoria and no doubt Melbourne as well, where we have seen for many years that mental health services have been crying out for an uplift in the sorts of services available to people. I know that there are very few families in Victoria where mental health has not been an issue at some level, where the family has not been touched by someone—whether it be a family member or someone close to them—who has not been able to access the services they have needed. When the royal commission report was tabled at the exhibition building earlier this year, we heard from two people who recounted their very personal experiences with the mental health system. Both those people were from country communities. One was a farmer and one was a young woman from a community very nearby to my own. Both had been very badly let down by the mental health system as it stands.

I, like many others in this place will have had, have had many people come through my electorate office doors distressed, upset—desperate—trying to access some sort of service for someone having a psychotic breakdown, someone drug affected or someone suffering from severe depression, or people whose daughter is suffering from severe postnatal depression. These sorts of things are absolutely terrifying to a family when they are occurring, and if the only place you can go is an emergency department, where you may have to wait a very long time and ultimately be sent out the door to the car park—as was described by those two people at the launching of the royal commission report—then we are not doing things well enough.

It is, I think, really exacerbated in regional areas by the lack of trained workforce availability. There are many shopfronts and places along the main streets of country towns where people can go to perhaps have a talk about how they are feeling and maybe get a referral, but to get a referral to someone who can provide that sort of therapeutic assistance, provide the treatment that they may need, other than drugs, is incredibly difficult. They simply do not exist. Those who do exist have very long waiting lists, and often people are required to travel to the city to try and find them. We know that even here in metropolitan Melbourne where, generally speaking, I would say most services are readily available to people, mental health services are not—and have not been for a very long time.

The change that is required is really massive, and it will come at a great cost. The levy was hinted at when the royal commission was being talked about over the period of the last few years, and here we have it in this piece of legislation. It is being targeted at large businesses with payrolls of $10 million or more. I guess they are easy targets in a lot of ways. We saw some of these big businesses do incredibly well during the COVID pandemic—I am talking about some of the very large ones—where they received JobKeeper. They had never had business booming better, and they decided to keep JobKeeper. Very few handed it back. Some did; others just passed it on to their shareholders as dividends. It has made them somewhat unpopular, that sort of behaviour during a worldwide pandemic, and I think in some ways that has set them up to be a target. It is a bit out of left field to impose this sort of tax on a particular area, but generally speaking and in other cases where levies have been implemented they have often been on higher income earners.

To that extent I would refer to the fact that back in around 2000 a levy was introduced called the East Timor levy, and that was a levy imposed on higher income earners for the purpose of partially offsetting Australia’s defence costs in East Timor. Again, a flood recovery levy in 2010–11 in Queensland—the flood recovery levy was a temporary reconstruction tax on people earning over $50 000 to fund the reconstruction of Queensland following those dreadful floods that we saw. And of course we all live with the Medicare levy surcharge. That is really designed to encourage people to take out private patient hospital cover and use the private hospital system to reduce the burden on Medicare. So it is not that this is something entirely new. Levies have been introduced before where they have been absolutely seen as necessary to fund a particular service. One would hope that in the state of Victoria a levy like this will not be required on an ongoing basis but that there will be the funds raised to be able to make a very significant difference to mending what we know to be a broken system.

We have heard from the Treasurer that the budget has been lauded by Berry Street and the Early Learning and Care Council of Australia. The Victorian Chamber of Commerce and Industry has said it succeeds in areas of job creation, addressing skills gaps, powering innovation and manufacturing. He has gone on to say that Equity Economics believes that ultimately business will benefit from the budget and that Standard & Poor’s describe it as making the state well placed to begin its fiscal repair in coming years. There is no doubt, though, that others will be very unhappy with aspects of these property taxes because of the impact they believe that will occur in relation to them—the increases in stamp duty, land tax and the like.

Offering concessions on land transfers to alleviate the glut of vacant newly built properties that we have here in the City of Melbourne is a practical sort of initiative. It supports the construction industry and may help more people to buy their own homes if they care to live in the inner city. In Shepparton, however, we have quite a different set of circumstances. We have seen more and more people over the last 12 months seeking to move to regional areas, and in our district it is almost impossible to buy a home. If you put your house on the market, it will be sold within a week, if not, two weeks. And of course rentals are scarce beyond all belief at every level—at the high end, at the low end—and homelessness is now being exacerbated more than ever. So there is no glut of housing in the regions. Every day you can pick up a newspaper that will talk about the fact that the regions are suffering from a lack of housing, lack of rental, lack of being able to purchase and a massive skills shortage. We are seeing that reflected in so many ways.

I can see that time is getting away from me. I just wanted to add how very disappointed I am that universities have been a target of this $10 million-plus business payroll tax initiative. I heard the Treasurer yesterday describing the very ample funding that was targeted towards universities. During last year in particular there were a whole range of initiatives, and they were very large ones and very generous and no doubt they have continued to some extent, particularly when it comes to research in relation to COVID-related matters. But universities are a pivotal part of our communities. They have really suffered, dramatically suffered, as a result of foreign students not coming into our communities. In regional areas they are the heartbeat of what makes us tick. La Trobe University and the Melbourne rural school of health associated with Goulburn Valley Health are really pivotal to our communities. I would certainly say that if there has not been a lot of consultation done on some of this legislation, and I believe that is the case, then universities should be looked at very closely because they are so important in every community and they are really the heartbeat of all our knowledge, research and development. I would urge the government to take that up.

Members Statement: The school climate strike took place last Friday, and I was delighted to see a whole lot of young people in Shepparton raise their voices in the mall. Not only are they making changes themselves as well as raising awareness of climate change, they will be the decision-makers of the future, and I am pleased that we are in safe hands with such passion to address and adapt to the biggest issue facing the worldwide population today.