Ms PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) — My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Police. I am seeking an explanation or some information from the minister on the conduct of police in responding to some recent overdoses at the Inflation Nightclub. I was very sad to hear of the overdoses on 10 June. I am always appreciative of the police responding to these difficult situations, but I have to say that as I learned more about the incident I became more curious and concerned about the series of events.

The police and paramedics attended Inflation after staff called 000 alerting them to the overdose. The response was actually within 30 seconds, which was remarkable and fantastic, but four overdoses occurred at exactly the same time — not within a short time frame but at exactly the same time — which I have to say is very unusual. The four people were supposedly strangers and had never been to the club before. The club has a very strong, loyal patron base. It has been operating for 20 years, and they operate a Scantek system so that they know who comes into the club and who has been to the club before. They also have a strong membership base with a guest list. These were complete strangers who attended.

What was also unusual was that the media were there right at that time. The ambulance arrived, the people were taken into the ambulances, and patrons and security staff were moved out of the way for the media to film the patients, the victims, being loaded into the ambulances. These are all quite interesting coincidences to have played out. On the same night there were two overdoses on Little Bourke Street. The response time from the police was not as quick as it was at Inflation.

Security at Inflation also notified the police that they suspected a drug dealer was trying to enter the premises. The police appeared to be somewhat hesitant about talking to that person. They then did arrest that dealer, but they said to the media that that person was in no way linked to the overdoses. It was as if they knew who the dealer was already. This is all in light of the Inflation Nightclub owner suing the police for defamation. I am just asking if the minister could provide me with an explanation of these circumstances, which seem highly unusual.

The PRESIDENT — You are not really seeking an action when you just ask the minister to provide information to you. Can you reword it as an action?

Ms PATTEN — I ask the minister to look into this situation and provide me with some information as to what appears to be a series of unusual circumstances involving the police. The action I seek is for the minister to investigate what occurred on 10 June and provide me with details in response to this and to ask the police how these unusual circumstances occurred.

The PRESIDENT — It is still not there, but look, it is late.

REPLY:

The Victorian Government is extremely concerned about drug use and fatal overdoses that have occurred in night clubs and music festivals, which have resulted in many deaths and hospitalisations.

Victoria Police perform a difficult role in balancing the competing rights and interests of citizens while maintaining public order and security. I am informed that Victoria Police responded to a triple zero call at the Inflation nightclub. All calls for police assistance are treated seriously and police response times will vary depending on the urgency of the matter and available police in the area.

I can assure you that the Victorian Government is committed to reducing the harm to individuals and the broader community that results from drug use, and is continuing to develop new initiatives and invest substantial funds to tackle this problem.

Ms PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) — My adjournment matter today is directed to the Minister for Police. The action I am seeking from the minister is to review the evidence base underpinning roadside testing and to look at the policy and practice that is used to develop that roadside testing. This is as a result of looking at the recent Transport Accident Commission advertising campaign that shows a young driver whose driving was clearly not impaired but who tested positive when stopped for a roadside drug test. The justification for this was that even though the person may not feel impaired they could unknowingly be impaired. This is about having trace amounts of certain substances.

This is where it all seems to unravel, because when you look at the information that is available around these trace amounts of illicit substances that can be detected by roadside testing, it is completely inconsistent. In New South Wales they say if you had some cannabis in the last 12 hours, you may still be affected, in the Northern Territory it is 5 hours, in Western Australia it is 4 hours and in Victoria it is 24 hours, so there is an incredible inconsistency. When I looked to see where this evidence for the Victoria Police and Victorian drug driving policy came from, I found a submission that related back to a 2004 study by Professor Olaf Drummer from the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine. Professor Drummer said that it did not matter how much trace element there was and that a person would be affected by tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). What he also went on to say, which I thought was quite extraordinary, was that there was no significant link between opiates and driving. So heroin and driving seemed fine, but trace elements of THC did not.

Anyway, the action I am seeking is that we currently review the Drummer study and that we look at all of the other information and research that has been done around drug driving and testing for drugs in drivers around the world.

The PRESIDENT — Order! Rather than all of us doing that, the minister will do that.

Ms PATTEN — Yes. Let us ask the minister. That was the royal we.

Ms PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) — My adjournment matter this evening is for the Minister for Health, Jill Hennessy, and the action I am seeking from her is that she consider ways that we can enable and encourage employers to allow employees to use a sick day to have a health day. This was raised by one of my constituents, who gave me some interesting figures, although they are national. Preventable illness among the Australian workforce costs the economy tens of billions of dollars each year. This includes presenteeism — working while sick. Bupa said in a 2017 study that presenteeism costs $34 billion, replacing a skilled staff member costs $20 000 to $50 000, lack of sleep costs $3 billion and oral disease costs $2 billion. Preventable illnesses cause more than three-quarters of all ill health and premature deaths, yet over 3 million Australians have not visited a general practitioner in the last 12 months.

Victoria has had great success with public awareness campaigns around health issues in the past, and what I am seeking is that we now call for and raise public action. What we want to do is encourage employers to allow their employees to use one of their statutory annual sick days to proactively see their GP or get some form of health check, whether it is a breast or prostate check or going to the dentist, and as a reward employees get the rest of the day off. My very imaginative constituent said, Previous Document’ChuckNext Hit a healthie — visit your GP, then go and have a fully sick day’.

Mrs Peulich — And the taxpayer pays.

Ms PATTEN — I am going to take up Mrs Peulich’s interjection. Look at the costs I just raised — we are paying over $10 billion now on preventable illnesses. We want to encourage employers to allow their employees to use one of their sick days to have a health day — to visit their doctor, to prevent unnecessary illnesses, to keep our workforce healthier and to keep them working. So I ask the minister to investigate ways that we can ‘chuck a healthie’.

REPLY:

The Andrews Labor Government recognises the important role that employers can play in the health of their workers. Being a health conscious workplace makes good business sense, and employers that actively support their workers’ health and wellbeing reap significant returns in terms of work performance and productivity.

Through the Department of Health and Human Services, the government is supporting programs like the Achievement Program and the Healthy Eating Advisory Service. These programs support Victorian businesses to improve the health of their workforce, by making the healthy choice the easy choice for employees.

The department is also working closely with the WorkHealth program, which is leading new investment in workplace mental health, and exploring innovative ways to improve mental health, safety and wellbeing.

Ms PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) — My adjournment is for the Minister for Mental Health, and the action I am seeking is for better triaging of mental health patients in emergency departments. In 2014 the former government established a psychiatric assessment and planning unit — a PAPU, as it is known — at the Maroondah Hospital to improve patient access and ease the demand on the emergency department (ED).

The four-bed unit provides fast access for approximately 400 patients per year to short-term specialist assessment and treatment for people experiencing acute mental illness, without requiring admission to an acute mental health inpatient bed, which we know are in very short supply. So for people with short-term mental health treatment needs such as drug-induced psychoses, medication overdoses or suicidal ideation or those in need of being assessed under the Mental Health Act 2014, the PAPU ensures faster access to appropriate care. It also helps to divert preventable admissions to acute mental health inpatient beds and generally makes the emergency department a calmer place. Importantly, as I said, this reduces demand on the emergency department by admitting people from the ED and improves patient flow through the ED by providing emergency department access beds to people who have an acute psychosis due to ice use, an overdose of prescription medication et cetera. This really is important, given the increasing instances of acute mental health presentations to emergency departments. Accordingly the action I seek of the government is that it expands this successful model across the state to reduce the increasing burden on our emergency departments.

Ms PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) — My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Agriculture. The matter I would like her to consider is strategies to allow a small amount of bait fish — pilchards and whitebait — to continue to be caught in Port Phillip Bay to supply the ever-growing number of recreational fishers in the bay. As we saw with the closure of commercial fishing in Port Phillip Bay, not only did that close down commercial fishing but it also closed down the fishers who were catching bait fish. Now, with the ever-growing number of recreational fishers and the government’s Target One Million for recreational fishers, one has to wonder where they are going to get the bait to continue fishing, because this was the only source of bait.

One way to resolve this would be to bring in imported bait, but that really does raise a whole bunch of environmental issues. We saw this recently in Queensland with the white spot disease on our prawn farms up there. In the 1990s we saw, sadly and with an unfortunate name, the sardine herpes outbreak that occurred in Victoria. This was an outbreak of a disease that was brought in by imported fish. Again, and much to my dismay, there was the devastation of the abalone market in Western Australia for the same reason — imported bait was being brought in.

As my colleagues the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party, who are not with me today, would know, local bait is best — if you are trying to catch local fish, you want to use local bait to do that.

Ms Symes interjected.

Ms PATTEN — Yes, it is true, isn’t it, Ms Symes? You need local bait to catch local fish. We know that fresh bait is best, but at the moment we have closed down all of the bait fisheries, with the exception of one, in Port Phillip Bay. That one uses a very sustainable form of fishing. It is not like the general netting. It is very small netting and it is a very small number of fish. The action I seek is for the minister to consider a way that we could continue to commercially fish some bait to supply to the ever-growing number of recreational fishers in Victoria and in Port Phillip Bay.

Ms PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) — My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Public Transport, and the action I seek from the minister is to appoint an expert panel to assess the viability of Victoria’s public transport privatisation model. It is kind of interesting that we are calling it privatisation, yet we seem to spend billions and billions of dollars on privatisation. I understand we have probably spent about $10 billion on contractors for the privatisation of our public transport. I am suggesting that an expert panel could provide insight into a better practice of contracting.

We have seen Dr John Stone, a senior lecturer in urban planning at the University of Melbourne, explain that currently incentive payments are based on five factors. Three of those are secret, and the other two are customer satisfaction plus reliability and performance. That is all very well, except that they are self-assessed. So the private companies — and foreign governments partly own those private companies — are self-assessing whether they have done a good job. They are coming back to the government saying, ‘I’ve done a brilliant job. Pay me my subsidies and my bonuses’.

I think an expert panel would be best placed to provide some advice on this and improve what is a pretty high-quality service but also make it affordable for both governments and users. I also note that currently we collect money but we collect less than 24 per cent of our public transport expenditure, and this seems like something that could be remedied. I would like to see an expert panel introduced into the mix so we could leverage the public transport expertise in our state. An expert panel would be a very efficient way to do that.

See below for the answer to adjournment question

Ms PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) — My adjournment matter is somewhat urgent. It is for the Premier, and it comes from a young member of my electorate. He is very concerned about the safe travels of Santa across Victoria in late December. The weather is clearly becoming more unpredictable because of the effects of climate change. As a result we are seeing hotter days, storms coming from nowhere — it is like Mongolian soup sticks out there sometimes — and a threat of both bushfires and floods. My young constituent is very worried that it is getting harder for Santa to plan his trip throughout Victoria on Christmas Eve due to these volatile weather conditions. I have even heard that there are reported cases of reindeer having hayfever, which I am most disturbed about.

I note that in Northern Metropolitan Region we have two major offices of the Bureau of Meteorology, one in Docklands and one on Truck City Drive in Campbellfield. The action I am seeking — and I think this is really for the Premier — is that the government liaise with both the Bureau of Meteorology and Victoria’s air traffic controllers to ensure that Santa is receiving up-to-date meteorological and proper flight information as he travels across the state on the night of the 24th and the early morning of the 25th of December. My young constituent would be very pleased to hear if the Premier could ensure that he is in contact with Santa and the meteorological departments are providing adequate information.

Mr Finn — On a point of order, Acting President, I urge you to rule that matter out of order. That is clearly a federal matter, as we are talking here about both meteorological aspects and aviation. They are clearly federal matters, and this house is no place for discussion about them.

Mrs Peulich — On the same point of order, Acting President, while I concur with my parliamentary colleague Mr Finn, I would also like to raise the point that I do not believe it is an appropriate matter to be raised by the Sex Party.

The ACTING PRESIDENT (Mr Melhem) — Order! You can tell it is the festive season — that it is Christmas — already!

Ms Patten — On the point of order, Acting President, I would have to say that I hope the Premier would have consideration for, and I believe that he should have consideration for, the safe travels of Santa in the state of Victoria. While this may be federal airspace, I would like to think that the Premier would take an interest in the safe travels of Santa. I would have to say that the matter Mrs Peulich raised is not a point of order. Why would the Sex Party not like Santa or Christmas?

Mrs Peulich — You do not like anything to do with religion.

Ms Patten — I love Christmas, and I do think that it is a lovely celebration of family. It has nothing to do — —

The ACTING PRESIDENT (Mr Melhem) — Order! I think we have had enough debate on the matter. While I do not believe it would fall under the pure jurisdiction of an adjournment matter, I think now it has been fairly debated. As it is in Hansard, it will be referred to the Premier, but my understanding is that Santa has the ability to travel under all conditions anyway — sun, rain or whatever weather — so he does not need any help.

Ms Patten — On the point of order, Acting President, I would have to say that I hope the Premier would have consideration for, and I believe that he should have consideration for, the safe travels of Santa in the state of Victoria. While this may be federal airspace, I would like to think that the Premier would take an interest in the safe travels of Santa. I would have to say that the matter Mrs Peulich raised is not a point of order. Why would the Sex Party not like Santa or Christmas?

REPLY:

I thank the Member for bringing this important matter to my attention.

As always at this time of year, the necessary steps are taken to ensure safe passage of Santa and his sleigh.

When it comes to the environment, Victoria is definitely not on the naughty list. We are leading the nation when it comes to tackling climate change.

Have a safe and happy Christmas.

Ms PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) — My question is for the minister representing the Minister for Health, Minister Mikakos. Publicly funded abortion services are deteriorating across the state, causing women to travel long distances for private care that costs hundreds of dollars. Leading women’s health researchers are urging the government to make abortion services mandatory at some regional hospitals in response to concerns about reduced access to surgical abortion raised by doctors, nurses and clinic managers. How is the government addressing this issue, which is placing women’s health and wellbeing at risk?

Ms PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) — Thank you, Minister, for that response, and I look forward to a further response from the Minister for Health. RU486 is available in many countries and plays an important role in women’s health internationally. It is widely used in China, New Zealand, the United States, Canada, the UK, Vietnam and most European countries, but Australia is being viewed as lagging behind in this area. In responding to this deterioration of available services, will the minister’s strategy include an expansion of training and support for GPs to administer RU486 to Victorian women?

Ms PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) — My adjournment matter is directed to the Minister for Agriculture, Ms Pulford. I am requesting that the minister look into taking action against Riverside Meats abattoir after seeing the shocking acts of animal cruelty at that facility. More than 170 hours of footage were provided to the regulator, PrimeSafe. I saw a few minutes of it, and it really was just horrific, with calves being beaten and stun guns being used. What really struck me was the joy and laughter coming from the staff members who were doing this. It was really quite horrific. In the short bits I watched I saw agonising deaths. It was really quite appalling. The only action that I can see has been taken so far is that the four staff involved were moved to other duties in the abattoir.

I know that this is a family business and that they have been running it for decades. I have no doubt that they actually have a great respect for animals, but this was not the correct action to take. Not only that, but this is the second time in three years that animal cruelty allegations have been raised against Riverside. Dr Charles Milne, from PrimeSafe and Victoria’s chief vet, has also said there was evidence of systematic cruelty and that there was no question in his mind that the level of welfare abuse that was occurring must have been known to management.

Again, I understand that this is a family business, but the culture has got to change and attitudes have got to change. My parents owned a family farm in their retirement, and we knew the names of every single animal we ate. Despite the chief vet’s damning views in the media, the minister has come out to say that there is absolutely no power for her to act on this allegation of animal abuse, and I am sure the minister was being quite genuine in that. However, we had a look — and we do not do this often — at the Meat Industry Act 1993. Section 46(1) of the act says that PrimeSafe:

… must exercise its powers and perform its functions under the act … subject to any specific written directions given by the minister in relation to a matter …

A condition of any licence is that a person must be a fit and proper person to hold that licence. Victorians want assurances that their animals are not being tortured and abused, so I ask the minister to use the powers already in the act to direct PrimeSafe to consider withholding Riverside abattoir’s licence.

Ms Patten (Northern Metropolitan) — My adjournment matter is about an urgent call for action from the Minister for Women in helping to save a unique part of Victorian women’s history. Heritage Victoria notified me and Sophie Paterson, whose grandfather raised the funds to build the Princess Mary Club, last week that they had tragically approved the demolition of this unique building. This building was designed by the renowned Melbourne architect Alec Eggleston and is a significant building in itself, but it is its social significance that is so important.

Just to recap, the Princess Mary Club was built in 1926 with funds raised by the Nicholas family to provide safe and secure accommodation for women entering the workforce. It is a rare monument to women in the workplace, their rights and the opportunities that suffrage has brought. It provided safe and secure accommodation for the growing number of women who were also seeking a tertiary education in Victoria. This building marks a significant time in history, particularly for women, and it is one of a kind.

Heritage Victoria said that it was too expensive to restore and that that is why it agreed to allow it to be demolished, but this is due to the fact that the Wesley Church has neglected it for 10 years. It seems that this horrible precedent is basically rewarding Wesley Church for neglecting a heritage building. The Nicholas family have told me that there are three commercial companies who are interested in restoring the building and are well aware of the costs.

This also sets a very bad precedent for other philanthropic families to not bother to give money to charities, because those charities may change the purpose of their donations at some later stage. There are so many bad outcomes here, and I strongly believe that this is a really bad thing for our community.

As it is White Ribbon Day we should remember the extraordinary work that the Princess Mary Club did in providing safe and secure accommodation for thousands of Victorian women over the last century. I am urging the Minister for Women to intervene to save the Princess Mary Club as a very important part of Victorian women’s history.