Ms PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) (09:22): Pursuant to standing order 23.29, I lay on the table a report from the Legal and Social Issues Committee on the inquiry into the management of child sex offender information, including appendices and a minority report. I further present transcripts of evidence, and I move:
That the transcripts of evidence lie on the table and the report be published.
Motion agreed to.
Ms PATTEN: I move:
That the Council take note of this report.
I am very pleased to present this report on the inquiry into the management of child sex offender information in Victoria. I think certainly on sex offences and sex offenders there would not be a single person in this chamber that was not passionate about preventing and stopping them. So in looking at what we could do to improve this, what we could do to keep our community and in particular our children safer, we spoke to different organisations and we looked around the globe at other models of the maintenance and the register of child sex offender information. I think it should also be said here that these are not supposed to be punitive registers. These are registers to keep people safe. We heard loud and clear about that. We heard from organisations that what they wanted was public awareness and prevention, and this report makes a series of recommendations there.
It also makes a recommendation that the Victorian Law Reform Commission should consider how we might change the management of child sex offenders and the register in particular and whether there might be instances further to what we already disclose—instances where further disclosure of information would be warranted.
I think this was a very thoughtful inquiry. I suspect we probably heard things that we were not expecting to hear—things like that deceased people are maintained on the register. Now, we are not entirely sure why, but there is concern that this might skew some of the figures around child sex offenders and that register. So I was very pleased, and I think I certainly probably changed my position throughout this inquiry, which I think is something that is the work of committees and it is why we do these things. So I would particularly like to thank all of the people who contributed to this—people who told their stories as well, and we know that that is an incredibly powerful part of the committee process.
I would really like to thank the team that prepared this very comprehensive report—that would be the research team of Vivienne Bannan, Samantha Leahy and Anique Owen, with the administrative assistance of Justine Donohue, Sylvette Bassy, Christianne Andonovski and Rachel Pineda-Lyon, under the management of Lilian Topic and later Matthew Newington. I would like to really acknowledge the very hard work they did—again in lockdown—to produce this report, and I would like to thank all my committee colleagues for their really collaborative work on this report.
Fiona Patten MP
Leader of Reason
Member for Northern Metropolitan Region
Report tabled 7/9/21
