Melina BATH (Eastern Victoria) (14:41): I am pleased to rise to make a brief contribution on the Entities Legislation Amendment (Consolidation and Other Matters) Bill 2025. In doing so I note that this is an omnibus bill. It is a little bit from column A and a bit from column B. It has elements of recommendations from the Silver review and then elements of the government’s own thought process. Of course the Silver review found that the Victorian public sector was overly complex, fragmented and top-heavy, comprising more than 500 entities and thousands of boards and committees, leading to duplication, slow decision-making and high indirect costs. You do not have to be Einstein, particularly living in regional Victoria, to know that working with government departments and government bureaucracies – and some of the aforementioned are in the entities bill – can create all sorts of hassles, all sorts of frustrations and all sorts of impediments, and often not good outcomes, not only for regional people but also for the environment, which is one of my interests, and also in terms of mental health and issues related to that.
I just want to put on record today in this house the work that my shadow minister Emma Kealy has done in the mental health space. I know that she has been a fierce advocate for mental health and indeed the recommendations of the royal commission, noting that the government was seeking to reduce the number of mental health commissioners down to one and that we have heard in the other house and in this house that through sector feedback there will be some house amendments. It is an interesting thing that house amendments have come through after this government had consultation with the sector, but they were not in the initial bill that was produced in 2025 to adopt the recommendations from the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System about lived experience. So in one sense in drafting this bill it disregarded them; it sought to diminish them. The government has then gone out for consultation, not before the bill was introduced but during the bill process between the lower house and the upper house, and it is now looking to do house amendments. Again I put on record Emma Kealy’s fierce advocacy in this space. We have amendments that we are bringing from the royal commission’s philosophy about lived experience – we have a balanced approach to that – and in a sense the government has walked back on its decision.
That being said, I think that the Liberals and Nationals are predisposed to support anything that supports better mental health while still streamlining bureaucracy in other areas. To go to some of these areas, let me just give you a quick walk-through of the entities bill. It amends the Circular Economy (Waste Reduction and Recycling) Act 2021 to abolish the head of Recycling Victoria – that is a true form of recycling. It repeals the Victorian Environmental Assessment Council Act 2001 to abolish VEAC, and I will have plenty more to say on that one. It abolishes the Victorian Marine and Coastal Council, and the government would tell us that that is because much of that work is done. Again there is other commentary around that, which I am happy to explore. It abolishes the Mine Land Rehabilitation Authority. That was really established in full in my electorate when we saw the closure of the Hazelwood power station, and people have various views on the mine rehabilitation authority. In one way it can be reabsorbed back into the department; in another way there are some significant issues that need to be of acute focus for government in relation to mine rehabilitation.
I want to put on record my thanks to Professor Rae Mackay, who was the initial mine rehabilitation commissioner. He came here from overseas, from England, to provide his expertise. He has spent a lifetime moving around the world in mine rehabilitation and geology and geography. All of those intricacies are beyond me, but he has taken it upon himself to provide some very good scope and detail. Some of his comments were that there has been a lot of good material prepared by the authority and that that still needs to be available into the future, not only for government and internal department use but also for public transparency, so I will be putting that on the record during committee of the whole. The website, he suggests, also contains material that should be maintained at least for the near future to have that transparency and good information for people.
Part of the whole idea around mine rehabilitation is that it comes back to being safe and sustainable. But also the mine is very close of course to the townships of Morwell and Churchill and Traralgon as well as buffering up against the Loy Yang area. People have an acute interest in this in my electorate, and they want assurance that government not only is doing the right thing but has the right plan for mine rehabilitation. It does not need to be off-the-shelf overall, it needs to be bespoke for our area and our mines. They are very deep mines; they are very big mines. I am just putting on record my thanks to, as I said, Professor Mackay and other associated people that have worked there. But we need to ensure that the good work that is being done is not lost in the traffic.
That said, the abolition of VEAC is something that is of great interest to me. I note that some of the great people who I have had the honour of working with over time – the BUGU, Bush Users Group United; the Prospectors and Miners Association of Victoria; the horse riders; the trail riders; the four-wheel drivers; the list could be long – fought very hard to oppose the position that VEAC recommended to government in relation to the closure of the Wombat State Forest into national park. That is not because we want to pillage and plunder – that is far from the truth – but because we believe that active management of our public estate is the best way to go. VEAC over its course, during operations and looking into the Central West Investigation, disregarded over 66 per cent of the responses, the submissions. It ignored them and went in its own direction, and I believe, sadly, over time – VEAC was set up in 2001 – it has become politicised, and we have heard from the Ombudsman that the public sector has been politicised. I am concerned that the planning and recommendations to government were not based on sound science but were based on this ideology, and indeed the closure of this is not something that I will lament. If the government in the last 11 years had been focused on more boots on the ground, keeping pests and weeds down and ensuring that public access was maintained while also ensuring that they were properly monitoring threatened species and ensuring that bushfire mitigation – and I could go on on that for hours – was adhered to, then we would have been protecting our state parks and national parks far better. So I do not believe that the closure of VEAC will be any great loss.
There are indeed other entities. It is almost a parallel process that has been going on. The Commissioner for Environmental Sustainability Victoria provides independent advice, supposedly. I say that because I do not think it has had enough teeth and enough funding directed to it in terms of auditing and monitoring. It certainly has produced a state of the forests report, and if you go down through that state of the forests report there is great concern about what government is not doing. My argument would be that we certainly need good communication, we certainly need good advice and we certainly need more boots on the ground out in our state forests and national parks. We do not need more suits giving ideological advice. With that said, I would always implore the government to put a greater focus on devolving the work of the suits in Melbourne and sending them out to the regions where they can actually look after the forests. This means focusing on doing the work – taking down pests, controlling pests, getting rid of weeds that are choking out and threatening our native flora and fauna. It has been 11 years that this government has been in office, and we are seeing more degraded forests and misused land.
I have given my commentary on the Mine Land Rehabilitation Authority and VEAC. Moving on, I just want to spend a little bit of time on the Essential Services Commission. I know my colleague Mr Welch thoroughly interrogated that, but I have had phone calls from Rural Councils Victoria and from the chair of Rural Councils Victoria, who are very concerned about the reduction of the role of the Essential Services Commission and removing the requirement for the ESC to provide advice when setting council rate caps, shifting fare settings and powers to the minister and replacing those reviews with ministerial-directed reviews. These increase that ministerial discretion, and I think they diminish that oversight. The Essential Services Commission does have a role. Rate capping is a blessing and a curse, depending on where you sit. I know it came in in 2015. It provides certainty for councils, but with a state government, an Allan government, that is cost shifting onto our local councils all the time, it is providing a harder and harder arena in which councils do business. But the Essential Services Commission certainly has a role to play, and I think it is warranted. I know we will move those amendments in relation to that, and I thank Mr Welch. Also, as I said, we have amendments in relation to the Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission. I am very supportive of those.
What we know is that after 11 years in government we now have a government that is looking to have ‘reforms’ in relation to about $36 million of savings over four years and about $9 million annual savings. Well, when you look at what this government has spent on budget overruns and allegedly $15 billion on corruption in the CFMEU, this is just, in effect, rats and mice. In this case we think it is better to support some measures of cost cutting. It is a bit from column A, a bit from column B, some from the government’s own mindset and some from the Silver review. We are very concerned that this government continues to blow out budgets and create such distress in our communities where vital services – police, teachers, nurses, hospitals, schools – are dilapidated or not developed because of government blowouts.
I am just going to circulate some amendments in the name of my colleague Richard Welch, and I will do that on behalf of him and the Liberals and Nationals now. I have acquitted my role and responsibilities there. Finally, the bill is better than nothing and we will not be opposing it, but we want to see these amendments that we will put get through.