Melina BATH (Eastern Victoria) (11:31): Up there with our GPs, our teachers and our nurses, our vets and their practices are gold in communities, in particular in regional communities. I grew up on a farm, and I note the important and close working relationship my father had with our local vet. In fact I think Christmas gifts were exchanged in gratitude for the work that they did, and it still continues on in a great dairying community. Speaking as the lead speaker for the Liberals and the Nationals, this motion before us has merit. It is multisectional, and there really is not a great deal of time to go through each and every part, but I will get to the nub, which of course is e-scripts.
First of all, I want to bring some understanding and reflection into the house in relation to veterinarians. The opening part looks at their essential role in public health, animal welfare, biosecurity, agriculture and community wellbeing, and I certainly endorse those sentiments. But one of the things that we really see with vet clinics and veterinarians is that they provide an essential service while operating as a small private business. That is the business model overwhelmingly, unless they are employed by Agriculture Victoria, which is a different conversation. Some of that essential service, if we look to floods, if we look to bushfires or if we look to storms and the like, is for not only our livestock and our farm stock – cattle, sheep, goats et cetera – but our pets and our companion animals, which are very, very dear to all of us, and also our native fauna.
When we have droughts, bushfires and the like, we see our veterinarians come out and assist. Often there can be injured native species on the roads, and our vets are often contacted. Indeed, I had a vet live down my street for many years. There was a wildlife carer at one end and a vet at the other, and they were out volunteering their time – and we really respected that – on many, many occasions. If animals are brought in, they bear that cost for the community service in a private business model. I am just putting that on record.
Let us go to the nub of the issue, which is around e-prescriptions. Certainly the Liberals and Nationals will support sensible reforms that reduce unnecessary paperwork, improve access to veterinary medicines and make life easier not only for vets but for companion animal owners and farmers. As we are evolving, we need to evolve with the technologies, and we saw that certainly through COVID and the lockdowns with the digital technology that arose then and is used well now. But we should be clear about the problem we are solving. In terms of this particular issue, vets already do prescribe drugs, and indeed you can send them electronically to the pharmacy or you can take it into the pharmacy. It is going to be through a paper system, but that can work. Indeed I was speaking to a vet in my town only this morning to do a little bit of research, and she provided some context. The context is that of course large vet clinics often hold drugs and the like for stock, so it is not really going to be appropriate that you would use those digital forms and run off to the pharmacy for large stock items. Small animal clinics also are a dispensary in themselves. It is really important that as a small business, those vets have the opportunity to serve their client by providing the drug of choice and of need there and then. That is an important element. We do not want to remove that relationship between the vet, the animal and the carer, the owner of that animal. When I was speaking with the vet this morning she said, ‘Look, there might be some minimal savings in terms of time.’ She certainly was not opposed to it. It is not the panacea to all issues, but it can be one element.
Of course vets do prescribe human drugs, we will say, in terms of antibiotics or cortisone and the like. If they do run out in the clinic you can go into your pharmacist. Again, these are the good relationships that our local communities have between the veterinary clinic and our local dispensaries.
Digitising can work. Pharmacists do that work, and regional pet owners can potentially access more competitive prices. But in the regions you often have to travel, so the bargain you might be getting in one area might mean that you have to use your car on a bumpy road to get there. There can be genuine consumer choice increases and benefits.
In terms of livestock, e-prescriptions also have potential for farmers, but we should not pretend that this solves every problem in relation to livestock medicines. Livestock operations require quantities and logistics. They require freight and availability, and sometimes – as I have spoken about – the large volumes of material can actually be a practical barrier.
The Veterinary Practitioners Registration Board of Victoria requires a veterinary practice to ensure the owner and the animal relationship is established and maintained. It is, as I said, a really, really important one.
In short, on e-prescriptions, where there is a sound principle to this, where the vets have the ability to issue compliant prescriptions, where regional Victorians get a greater choice – of course I have been focusing on regional Victoria, but clearly we have amazing vets right across the state – where there is that more practical choice and where there is unnecessary paper handling, they will not revolutionise, but they will be another string to the bow. Also where clinical safeguards still remain, then this investigation, as is called for, into options to enable these reforms, including via gazetted and/or other methods, I think is sound practice.
There are a couple of other points I would just like to raise. A dear friend of mine is actually a practice manager of a vet group, and one of the things that she raised with me is that part of this whole service in our vet clinics is also about the tremendous vet nurses. Some of her concerns that she has raised are in relation to the quality of training in our vet nurse system. Of course you can be trained through a registered training organisation or through a TAFE. There seems to be a propensity – the sense that I get from her – that the TAFE sector needs to pull up its socks in terms of the quality of the graduates. Now, they are happy to take people who are qualified, who work and have the expertise, but they tend to actually have to go off to the RTOs and accept people who have gone through that training because our TAFE sector is not bringing the standard that should be there when a qualified vet nurse enters into a practice. I think that is really important.
The other issue that I would like to raise is that the Liberals and Nationals have just put the Planning and Environment Amendment (Agricultural Land and Food Security) Bill 2026 in this house, and we raised the very real factor that state gross product for our agricultural sector, food and fibre, is $22 billion annually. A very important part of that of course is livestock. Let us not be under any illusion that the role of the Animal Justice Party, if it went to its nth degree, would be to shut down our livestock farms. Whether it be dairy, beef or sheep, it would shut them down. In consideration of mental health, what would that then do to a whole sector of vets if that was brought to fruition? Let us not be under any illusions. We, the Liberals and Nationals, support vets, support our communities and support livestock industries as well.