Ms PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) (12:28): I present the transcripts of evidence and 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 the report.

It is a nice coincidence that the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee report on its inquiry into COVID-19 was tabled as well today. The Legal and Social Issues Committee inquiry into contact tracing and testing we adopted within six weeks. We were asked to inquire into this on 28 October, and we reported on 10 December. I would like to say that I was grateful for the many organisations, including the department, who were so quick in responding to our requests for information, for data and for experiences. We heard from many members of the community. We held three public hearings. It was a very interesting process. There was no doubt that what we found was that the system was completely overwhelmed and that in many places it failed us. When I say ‘failed’, people died. Families spent this Christmas mourning the loss of people. But what we were able to do was look very much at the current system and how it is working and what has changed.

I am certainly very grateful to Professor Alan Finkel, who provided us with some of his assessments.

He gave us some direction into what a top-class system of contact tracing and testing should look like, and I think we can be relatively confident that that system is in place now, that we are seeing test results returning within 24 hours, that we are seeing close contacts contacted within 48 hours. But this is not just the work of governments and the work of organisations. This is the work of Victorians as well—the very hard work of Victorians. But we did hear that the government was late to the table with a digital data system; that our centralised health system has not assisted us in the rollout, particularly in regional areas; that we did not take advantage of some of our public health networks and some of our GP networks when we could have, and I think that was especially and crucially important when we were looking at our CALD communities. I think we saw some real failures, but I think we have also seen that some considerable changes have been made to our systems in Victoria.

I would also like to acknowledge that our Victorian health workers, both at the front line and in the contact tracing, were working around the clock, 24/7, throughout 2020. It was an extraordinarily difficult situation, and sometimes they did not have the tools they needed. I would also particularly like to thank the Parliamentary Budget Officer of the Parliament, Mr Anthony Close, who for the first time I think actually provided a parliamentary committee with some detailed budget advice as to how the money was spent and where the money went. I think that really assisted us in our deliberations.

This is not over, and as we have just heard from the announcement this morning from the Premier and the Minister for Health, we are going to see further requests for further extensions of our state of emergency—or we will see legislation come before this house for debate about this. COVID is not over. We are seeing what is happening across the world, also we are seeing what is happening in Perth and around here, so this is not over. We need to continue to monitor the situation. We have made a series of recommendations around how we think we can keep monitoring our systems to ensure that they are fit for purpose and ensure that they are meeting the needs of what we are now learning to be an ever-changing pandemic, and we will have to be nimble in our response to that.

Finally, I would really like to thank the team in the Council standing committees office, who worked so hard on this inquiry and turned it around so quickly: our inquiry officer, Caitlin Connally; our research assistants, Meagan Murphy and Holly McLean; Justine Donohue and Cat Smith for administrative assistance; and of course the unflappable committee manager, Lilian Topic. I would also like to thank all of the members of the committee who really came forward and worked respectfully and openly. We took this on professionally and diligently. I commend the report to the house.

Fiona Patten MP
Leader of Reason
Member for Northern Metropolitan Region
Statement on reports 2/2/21

Ms PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) (12:22:502:): I too would like to just make some quick comments about the SARC Alert Digest No.1 of 2021, and I completely concur with Mrs McArthur. The Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities is upheld by the role that the Scrutiny of Acts and Regulations Committee plays.

It an absolutely crucial part of the act and of the reason we have the Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities. The courts can do very little, as we heard in the briefing that we had yesterday. The courts can do very little to address any breaches of the charter.

SARC is actually one of the only places where concerns about breaches or infringements to that charter can be properly investigated and explored. So for ministers not to respond to what I think are very reasonable requests for further information—and, as we know, it is not like they have to say, ‘Yes, it’s compatible’.

Legislation passes this place all of the time that is not compatible with the charter, but we explain why it is justifiable—and to not explain that, I think, is very disappointing. It has great impact on the charter itself, and we cannot actually have faith in that act because we have lost some faith in the process because our ministers are not responding to the committee.

Fiona Patten MP
Leader of Reason
Member for Northern Metropolitan Region
Statement on reports 2/2/21

Ms PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) (15:58): I rise to speak to the Appropriation (2020–21) Bill 2020, and in doing so I would like to respond to the state budget. This year has been quite a year. It has been one of grief, isolation and emotional and economic hardship but also of collective resilience, and it is a year that has been described as unprecedented on an unprecedented number of occasions. So fittingly this is a pretty unprecedented budget.

Never before have we seen stimulus on this scale, but equally never before have we had the opportunity to benefit from record-breaking low interest rates and hopefully jolt the Victorian economy back to life. It is an aggressive program of borrowing and spending, but I believe with good reason. It is a strategy that leading economists and the governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia have endorsed and a path that is being walked, although perhaps a little less stridently, by our federal government and many other jurisdictions here and abroad. It is reasonable that the government is using its balance sheet to protect the balance sheets of Victorian households and small businesses. In my view it is a sound strategy, given the proximity of a vaccine—and the chief health officer told us just this week that he expects a vaccine to be available in Victoria in March 2021. But as we speak, the vaccine is being made available and being administered across the UK and across Canada, and we know for sure that a vaccine will be a trampoline for our economy.

Noting of course that our national economy has emerged from recession, and as Australian states less affected by COVID are already bouncing back, I am pretty confident that we will be right behind them as we move out of our own COVID restrictions. I honestly think that there is genuine cause for optimism, but it does not mean that it is going to be easy. The City of Melbourne, in my electorate, faces particular challenges, with our city offices having been empty for so long and to remain at reduced capacity for the foreseeable future. I genuinely feel for all of those ancillary businesses—the cafes, the restaurants, the shops and the bars—that are so reliant on a busy and bustling city full of workers. If we are not careful, Melbourne could lose its character, its heartbeat, and I urge this government to do everything they can to protect it, to protect the heartbeat of our city. There is $17 million in the budget for Save Our Scene. That is the kind of investment we are looking for, and I thank the government for that start.

This is a budget that delivers on many of my budget submissions and many Reason policies. In February this year the Parliament debated my bill to extend the out-of-home care leaving age to 21, and I was extremely pleased to see that in this budget the government has delivered on the promise they made at the time to fund this important change for vulnerable children in this state. Eleven thousand young Victorians live in out-of-home care because they are at risk of harm or neglect in their homes. Most of these kids are in foster care, but without the funding delivered in this budget they would have left their care at the age of 18. That is around 800 young people every year, and while 85 per cent of 18 to 21-year-olds in Victoria are still living at home with either one or both parents, our foster kids, who are vulnerable and may have already experienced significant trauma in their young lives, had to go it alone. It is no surprise that within 12 months of leaving care 50 per cent of our care leavers were homeless, in jail or unemployed. Those statistics change markedly if you extend the care-leaving age to 21, and that is what the budget delivers—$75 million to extend the Home Stretch program. I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate Paul McDonald from Anglicare in particular for his hard work in this space. This is a win for reasoned, evidence-based policy, and I am pleased that I have played some role in changing the lives of so many young people.

In October I am sure I was not alone but I was publicly very disappointed in the federal budget in that it failed women and, as my colleague Ms Watt pointed out, women were most affected by COVID, more affected than our male colleagues, but then if you take that down to, as Ms Watt very eloquently put and recognised, particularly young women. At the time of the federal budget we called on the Victorian Treasurer to pick up those pieces because women carried this country through the first stage of the pandemic. It was our teachers, our nurses, our aged-care professionals.

It is why in our budget submission we called it a caring budget. We focused on women, with priorities around social housing, community mental health, family violence and alcohol and other drug specialists, and this budget has delivered in many of those areas—$250 million for women, including $150 million for wage subsidies for over 6000 women, at least one-third of whom are 45 and older. We know that older women are the fastest growing cohort of people experiencing homelessness, so this is so important. That leads onto the $5.3 billion to be spent on building 12 000 new public housing homes in the next four years, 1000 of which will be reserved for Indigenous Australians, 1000 for victims of family violence and 2000 for people with mental illness.

This is a huge but necessary investment and, as many speakers before have said, well overdue. As the chair of the homelessness inquiry, I know that the public housing waitlists are somewhere around 100 000, so we know we have got more work to do. But this is a good start, and it is the first time we have seen this type of investment in social housing for a very long time.

I would like to reiterate some of the points that my colleague Mr Meddick made, also linked to homelessness and housing affordability. I thank Prosper Australia for providing these statistics. It found that 69 000 properties were likely to be vacant in Victoria. Of these, 24 000 properties consumed zero litres of water per day on average over a 12-month period. So they are either very dirty and very dehydrated people, or those houses are empty. I suspect it is the latter. Now, we instituted a vacant residential property tax. I remember debating it in this house. I understand that only 587 properties in Victoria have been declared vacant, yet we see 24 000 properties have used zero water for 12 months. So I would suggest to the Treasurer and to Treasury that there is significant lost revenue available here and if the enforcement mechanisms were improved, we may in fact incentivise a whole lot of rental stock back onto the market.

I was also thrilled to see the government adopt a unique policy of Reason’s that we had pushed for in 2018, and that was to fund startups in exchange for an equity share. It is a win-win that makes so much more sense than just giving away grants. The prospect of a return on investment that could be used to grow other Victorian startups and small businesses is something that just makes so much sense to me. This is the government literally investing in small businesses, and hopefully recouping some benefit from the success of those businesses. This is where we will find the next Victorian unicorn.

There is almost $800 million for clean power and a further $1.6 billion to build renewable energy hubs across the state, with $108 million to help Victoria prepare for other clean energy projects, including an offshore wind generator. It is forward-looking investment. It is what we should be doing and it is what we must be doing. We need to address the existential threat of climate change. The forecasts are compelling and frightening, the scenarios are devastating. We cannot forget for a second that the most important question of our time is how to restore a safe climate, and we have to do it now. This will be a fast transition to zero emissions. This budget assists us in doing that.

Spending more than $8 billion in regional Victoria is positive, and I know my colleague in the lower house Ms Cupper has been successfully lobbying the government for nearly $150 million in projects across Mildura and the Mallee. There are, however, some missed opportunities too. Despite investments in mental health, loneliness has been neglected again. We know from Harvard University that the health outcomes of social isolation and loneliness are worse than obesity and have the same impact on mortality as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. COVID lockdowns can only have magnified the issue for so many Victorians, and we just cannot keep ignoring this fact. I would also have welcomed greater spending on early intervention around mental health. I do acknowledge that the government has invested substantially in alcohol and other drug services. We are seeing more treatment beds being built not just in metro but also in regional areas. We will see a second injecting room opened. That again will assist people who often also have combined mental health issues to find a path to recovery and find a path back to families, back to community and back to health.

I believe that we have missed an opportunity to measure wellbeing. Assessing wellbeing by reference to overall income measures like the gross state product, or GSP, is a proxy measurement at best. We saw that New Zealand has taken on a wellbeing budget and the formal Treasury framework for assessing wellbeing impacts in decision-making known as the living standards framework. This is said to embody decades of domestic and international evidence on wellbeing. Sure, we measure GSP, but we do not measure if the economic activity is actually improving our lives. ‘This budget will increase our wellbeing’. Will it? I do not know. We do not measure it. I would like to measure how much it is improving our wellbeing. We say it is. The rhetoric from the government says it is—and I actually sincerely hope it will. Certainly, when you look at some of the innovations and the spends, I have no doubt that it will. But we should be measuring that. Next year we should be saying how well this budget did to help the wellbeing of all Victorians.

We can also learn from the way in which we have had to adapt during COVID and keep the good that has come from the experience, and nothing has been more obvious than in the way we can work more flexibly. We have known for a long time that the majority of Australian employees would have preferred greater flexibility, but uptake has been hindered by unclear workplace policies, the expectation that productivity or workplace culture would be diminished and gendered perceptions of flexible work as predominantly for women. But COVID-19 and the accompanying lockdown have forced a change to the normal way of work. Flexible work has been rapidly adopted and in doing so has demonstrated that the barriers to widespread flexibility have been largely those of an inflexible culture.

There have been so many benefits. Flexible work arrangements can distribute peak-hour traffic across a longer period of time and reduce congestion on roads and public transport systems. A 30 per cent increase in teleworking could reduce the average number of daily commuters from 550 000 to 394 000 a day, and congestion has a number of implications for emission production, commuter wellbeing, productivity, costs and employment and accessibility. Congested traffic increases the production of carbon emissions, obviously. Reducing congestion can therefore assist the Victorian government’s goal to reach net zero emissions by 2050. The average time Australians spend travelling to and from work each day is 4½ hours and has lengthened 23 per cent since 2002. The variability in the length of travel increases lateness, stress and absenteeism and negatively impacts on productivity. Congestion cost Australia $16.5 billion in 2015. This includes time impact, pollution and operating costs. Compared to the other major Australian cities, Melbourne’s average speeds have experienced the largest decline and Melbourne recorded the worst road variability in Australia. Congestion is expected to cost Melburnians an extra $1700 per person per year by 2030.

The obvious benefit to business of course is reduced overheads and reduced operating costs. If half your workforce is working from home on any given day, then conceivably your business might only require half the workspace. The caveat of course is that only applies to certain sectors, but this certainly could be a game changer. COVID-19 has challenged the normal model of work and has shown that we can do things differently. If the drop-off in traffic that we would ordinarily see during school holidays, for example, became permanent, then it might be that we could save millions on new road infrastructure, for example. It gives me some cause to think that we could do things more sensibly and more reasonably.

Finally, I think it is an opportune time to remind this government that Colorado, a state very similar in size to Victoria, generates over $200 million a year in tax revenue by taxing and regulating cannabis. In addition, decriminalisation alone would release pressure on the criminal justice system and save something in the order of $80 million a year in law and order costs.

With these points made, I note that as leader of the Reason Party it is not my prerogative to interfere with supply. I lend my support to this bill, as does my colleague Ms Cupper in the other house, and I commend the bill to the house.

Fiona Patten MP
Leader of Reason
Member for Northern Metropolitan Region
Second reading speech 10/12/20

Ms PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) (14:58): There is a slight feeling of groundhog day because I think when we started this motion earlier this year I spoke after Ms Terpstra did. I would just like to start by congratulating Ms Terpstra and Mr Finn on successfully quitting tobacco and successfully quitting smoking. As both of you attest, it is not easy. It is incredibly difficult, and this is why this motion is important. This is why: we can look at providing every tool to stop someone dying from lung cancer. As Ms Terpstra mentioned, she has a very personal connection with that, and many of us would have a friend or a family member who has died from smoking-related diseases. In fact it is, as this motion puts it, one of the biggest killers. It kills hundreds of thousands of people in Australia every year. So we should be doing everything that we can to stop that, to reduce that, and we know that we are not. We are not because we are refusing to accept the science around vaping. We are refusing to accept the science around tobacco harm reduction.

People say, ‘We’re not entirely sure. There’s not been enough evidence’. I have just been reading—and I was actually very privileged to write the foreword for—the Global State of Tobacco Harm Reduction 2020. In this report it shows that actually there have been about 6000 studies done on vaping. We know the science. We know that, yes, it is not entirely safe, but neither is aspirin and neither are vitamin D tablets. In fact there is probably nothing in this world that is 100 per cent absolutely safe, but what we do know is that they are far safer than smoking. We do know that these do not affect your lungs in the same way as smoking does. We do know that smokers who use vaping as a form of quitting or reducing the number of cigarettes that they have are very successful—far more successful than patches, far more successful than chewing gum and I would possibly even say more successful than hypnotherapy.

Vaping has proven to be extremely successful in assisting people to reduce the harms of tobacco smoking; there is no doubt. I know the previous speaker, Ms Terpstra, has a good interest in Japan. Japan has cut its rates of smoking by 32 per cent since the introduction of heat-not-burn tobacco and vaping—32 per cent. Guess how much Victoria has reduced its smoking rates in the same time? It is 1 per cent. We actually had a goal to be, I think, down to 5 per cent smoking rates by the year 2010. All right, we did not hit that—failed. Let us set it for 2020—failed again. In fact our smoking rates have remained stagnant in Australia and in Victoria for years now.

What we actually saw during COVID, probably for the first time in 50 years, was an increase in smoking in Victoria. Those stats will come out in just a few weeks, but they will show that there has actually been an increase in smoking rates in Victoria since COVID and during COVID. That is incredibly alarming, and we know that it actually affects our low-income and most disadvantaged people. If you pick the five most disadvantaged postcodes in Victoria, that is where you will find the highest level of smoking. So this motion is very important in that.

I know Ms Terpstra talked about the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare and the household survey, but because we do not assist people to access this very, very good and safer treatment for reducing or quitting smoking, we do not enable people to do that. In New Zealand they are looking towards zero smoking. They are looking to be a smoke-free country by 2030, and they are on track. Do you know what they are using? They are using vapes. They are using e-cigarettes. They are using these nicotine devices where you do not smoke, and they are finding incredible success. They did this really interesting study with some Maori women. These were Maori women in a very disadvantaged part of the North Island of New Zealand. These women were struggling to pay for their tobacco and food for the table, and quite often they were skipping meals to ensure that their children had food and that they could maintain their addiction.

In that case the New Zealand health department ran a pilot where they offered them vapes, and 50 per cent of them stopped smoking—50 per cent. You do not see those types of quit rates anywhere—ever—with cold turkey or just say no or patches or Nicorette. This was a phenomenal result, and that result one year later is still at that rate. They had an incredible result there. Why are we not allowing this? We look at harm reduction in every other way.

Australia was one of those early adopters for needle and syringe exchanges because we knew that if we could provide clean equipment to people who were using drugs intravenously that that could prevent diseases like HIV and hepatitis C from being transmitted, and we were right and we were successful. So why are we not taking this same approach of harm reduction when it comes to tobacco? I just do not know.

And people say, ‘Oh, it’s big tobacco’. Well, I tell you, by prohibiting these types of products you are falling straight into the hands of big tobacco. Big tobacco loves the prohibition on e-cigarettes—absolutely loves it. This is the best thing for them. Now, this is very speculative but I have questioned the Cancer Council because one of their biggest donors is Woolworths. Guess what? Woolworths is the biggest retailer of tobacco in Australia. I know I am probably putting two and two together and getting five, but the Cancer Council opposes this harm reduction product. It opposes it—says you should not use it, there is not enough research, it might be dangerous. They will concede that it is safer than smoking, but they will not accept that it should be part of a harm reduction policy, a harm reduction platform, a smoking cessation platform. They do not accept that, and that is the problem, but they accept money from one of the biggest tobacco retailers in Australia.

I know there are other smokers who want to speak. I am not a smoker. I was a smoker. I am a vaper though. And I do not vape often because I did not smoke often. I was a social smoker and I am a social vaper, but I have not touched tobacco for, well, we are getting on nearly two years, and I am around smokers a lot. From a personal perspective I have found that it worked for me, and from the number of people who have written to me about how it has saved their life, I cannot for the life of me understand why the Victorian government—who has been a leader in harm reduction, a leader in harm minimisation—would not fully support nicotine vaping as a safer alternative for smokers. I fully support this motion.

Fiona Patten MP
Leader of Reason
Member for Northern Metropolitan Region
Motion by Mr Limbrick’s 9/12/20

Mr LIMBRICK (South Eastern Metropolitan) (11:52): I move:
That this house notes that:
(1) according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, smoking was responsible for 9.3 per cent of the total burden of disease in Australia in 2015 and for more than one in every eight deaths;
(2) the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare’s National Drug Strategy Household Survey 2019 report shows that despite a de facto ban on nicotine e-liquids, the rate of vaping has more than doubled since
2016, with 2.5 per cent of the population aged 14 years and over now using e-cigarettes;
(3) the report showed that vaping is primarily used as a quitting tool by smokers, with 44 per cent using it to quit, 32 per cent to cut down on smoking, 23 per cent to avoid relapse and 27 per cent to reduce harm
from smoking;
(4) according to the United Kingdom’s Royal College of Physicians, nicotine vaping is at least 95 per cent safer than smoking;
(5) regulation needs to strike the right balance between providing access for addicted smokers, while enforcing a minimum age of sale and strict penalties to discourage uptake by youth;
and calls on the government to support tobacco harm reduction by nicotine vaping as a safer alternative for smokers who are unable to quit through other methods and legalise nicotine liquid for vaping as a consumer product with appropriate and risk-proportionate regulations.

Ms PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) (18:03): I am pleased to rise to the Appropriation (Parliament 2020–2021) Bill 2020. Before I move on to some of the other aspects, I certainly would just like to thank everybody for what an extraordinary year this has been. I know that for our community it has been tough. I know that for many of us in this chamber it has been tough. We have had to change the way we work, and we have had to do things very differently. Our staff have had to do things very differently, and they have had to deal with a lot of new things. This has been an extraordinary learning curve I think for our staff. They have learned to work very differently but to do it very effectively. And in this Parliament, which has been closed to the public, this beautiful building that has been closed to the public for most of this year—

Mr Finn: Closed to us for a fair while too.

Ms PATTEN: Well, Mr Finn, I do not feel like I have missed a moment with you this year. I feel like we have spent plenty of time, probably enough time, together, but—

Mr Finn: Probably more than enough.

Ms PATTEN: More than enough. We can both agree that we will be happy when we have spent some time apart again, I suspect.

But apart from that I think in fact we have sat. It has been a very rare day that we have not sat in the chamber, and our staff here have made that possible. I think that has been extraordinary—even working in team A and team B to ensure that we can operate this Parliament as safely as possible. I really feel that we did do that. For most of us we were in here for all of the sitting days that were on the schedule, but this meant some extraordinary creative thinking and lateral thinking from the staff of this Parliament, and they have done that extraordinarily.

I look at my work in the committees. We have undertaken probably more public hearings than we would have another years. We have enabled the public to share in that. It might have been that in another time for homelessness, for example, we might have travelled to Finland to see how they solved homelessness. But this time we brought Finland to Victoria, and we were able to share the conversations that we could have with the Finns, with people from around the world, via our public hearings that the committee held, and the public could play a part in that. I think the way that the Parliament has enabled us to engage with the public during this time has been very different and something I hope that we do not lose once COVID has passed. I hope that many of the things that we have done well we continue to do.

I am still waiting to see a new website for the Parliament, but I understand yet again that it is on its way, almost there. But certainly the technology and the way that we have been able to work has really been able to be escalated incredibly quickly, so I would particularly like to thank everyone who has made that possible—from the IT crew through to Greg and his team here. To all of the clerks and all of the staff in the table office, who have managed to provide us with the information that we normally would have received face-to-face in electronic ways. I especially would like to recognise the committees and the committee staff. For many of them they have been working from their homes since March. They have almost been under house arrest since March, and I think that has been incredibly tough, so I am hoping they all get a very good break come next week or certainly in January and have some really good time when they can at least get out of their homes and travel around the state and around the country. I would also like to thank my own electorate staff—for not a day did they miss a beat in responding to emails, in working hard, sometimes from the electorate office but more often from home, so I thank them all.

I noted Mr Rich-Phillips at the start of his remarks talked about the appropriation for Parliament and that we are in the same position that we were in 12 months ago. We have come to the realisation that, no, we have not funded the Parliament and particularly the Legislative Council to the degree that it is required. And there is a scrambling in these last few days and few weeks leading up to this debate where that funding is found, where problems are solved, and as I understand today we certainly had a considerable shortfall for the Council and particularly for Council committees. I appreciate the Speaker in the other house and certainly I appreciate the President and the work of Parliamentary Services to enable some fast action in shuffling funds to ensure that the Council and the Council’s committees can operate properly for the next six months. I hope that in the May budget we will be able to ensure that this does not happen again and that there is solid, continuous funding and recognition that this is a house of review.

This is a house whose committee processes are incredibly important. This is a house where the committees process and the committees have resulted in policy change and have resulted in real change that affects people’s lives, and I know many of us who are part of committees understand the importance of that work and, outside this velvet chamber, the collaborative and often consensual approach that we take to problem-solving in that committee process. It is something that I think the community does not see enough, although I think through COVID it has managed to see a lot more of that. I certainly am pleased to see that my concerns about the shortfalls in our budgets have been amended. However, this is something that we need to maintain, and this is something that I will be seeking absolute assurances on—that we know that this Parliament is funded and funded well.

That goes to the other point of this appropriation bill, which is about the other organisations that are the conscience of government. As I said, this is the house of review, and this is where we provide that conscience to the government—the Parliament is not the government. And then we see independent organisations like IBAC and the Ombudsman’s office asking for more money, and it is this bizarre situation where you have got people who are providing that oversight of government behaviour, of government actions, of us in this chamber, and we are deciding if they get paid; we are deciding what sort of funding they will have. I thank the Treasurer’s office. I have had numerous conversations with them over the last few weeks, and they have provided me with, I think, adequate assurance that for the time being, until we get to the next budget in May, IBAC and the Ombudsman’s office will be funded appropriately, will be funded as they desire and in their way. But that raises this important point that the Parliament is not the government. IBAC, the Ombudsman—this is the oversight of government, yet government decides how they are funded. I would like to see that change. I think it is time for us to look at an independent committee, maybe a parliamentary committee, that looks at how we fund the Parliament and what we fund the Parliament for, because I can imagine a day when the Parliament may decide that the parliamentary committees do not need funding. Now, it would be difficult in the current make-up of this Parliament for that type of decision to pass, but there may be a time in the future when governments may not want this Parliament to run as effectively and as efficiently as it does; they may not want it to. So they may reduce that funding, and it would be up to the government and the executive to make that decision. The government and the executive make that decision about IBAC, about the Ombudsman and about this very chamber. Now, I see that in other jurisdictions that is not the case. If you look at Canada, if you look at Scotland, if you look at the UK, there is independent review of the funding of the independent bodies that provide that scrutiny of government. It is something that I will continue to pursue.

In saying that and in finishing, I believe that this is not perfect, but we have scrambled together to find the right funding for this chamber, for this Council, which I am very pleased about—although I believe it needs more, and I will be campaigning and working on that over the coming months leading up to the next budget. The same goes for IBAC and the Ombudsman. I have been given in writing assurances from the Treasurer that both of those organisations will get the funding that they want, and we can reassess and we can work on this to ensure that this happens in May.

I have always said that when I come into this house I am here to push Reason’s policies and the platform that I was elected on. I am not the government, and I am not the opposition either—I am not an opposition. I am here to provide scrutiny, to hold the government to account, but also to advocate for my community and advocate for the platform that I was elected on. So quite often I feel troubled about amending government bills such as this.

Fiona Patten MP
Leader of Reason
Member for Northern Metropolitan Region
Second reading 8/12/20

Ms PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) (18:01): I am pleased to rise to speak to the Justice Legislation Amendment (Drug Court and Other Matters) Bill 2020. Yet again this is another omnibus bill. It amends numerous pieces of legislation, and I think the one that we have heard most of today is the amendment to the County Court Act 1958 and the Sentencing Act 1991 to establish a Drug Court division in the County Court. But the bill also makes amendments to the Charities Act 1978, the Limitation of Actions Act 1958, the Children, Youth and Families Act 2005, the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal Act 1998 and the Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2017. But principally this bill is about the expansion of the Drug Court as an available sentencing option for our County Court.

Now, we know, and many of the other speakers have spoken about the fact, that we have had the Drug Court operating in the Magistrates Court, and it has been operating in Dandenong and also in Melbourne. It really did demonstrate, in evaluations in 2005 and 2014, that doing something different to locking someone up did reduce reoffending. When they did reoffend, it reduced the seriousness of that reoffending.

I just think of one quick story that I heard. When I was first elected, I had never been to a prison. I had never understood what it was like. So when I was first elected, I did go and visit the prisons to get an understanding about making laws that were going to send people to jail. What did that actually mean? I was at Dame Phyllis Frost, and I was allowed to go in and watch a very intense drug treatment session. These were relatively young women all with a significant history of trauma, but also in jail effectively because of their drug use. That was why they were there; that was why they offended. I spoke to one woman there, and actually, Minister, she was from your region, and she was a hairdresser. She had become addicted to methamphetamine. It was a self-medication, her addiction, and this led her into a series of offending and reoffending, and she ended up in Dame Phyllis Frost. And she said, ‘I will never use drugs again. This has been quite life changing’—the sessions and this intense drug treatment program that she was undertaking at Dame Phyllis Frost. But she said, ‘When I get out of jail, I won’t be able to get a job, because I just got out of jail. And when I come back to my community, I won’t really feel like I can go back to my community, because I’m an ex-con—and that’s how I’m seen. If I had gone to drug treatment, I would’ve been seen as a hero—someone who broke the back of that addiction, someone who picked themselves up and did the hard work to not be addicted, did the hard work to go into recovery’. That is what Drug Courts enable. They enable people to go into treatment. They enable people to get that without the stigma of being imprisoned.

We know that the result of that is that it reduces recidivism. It reduces the probability of rearrest. It means better treatment retention. People stay in those treatments longer—you know, it is a good point; they will go to jail if they do not—and it also increases the opportunities and increases the likelihood of employment.

And we know that employment is one of the biggest protectors against reoffending. If you have a job, you are far less likely to reoffend, you are far more likely to have a house, you are far more likely to be back connected with your family—and we know that these are the protectors. Certainly as someone waiting anxiously and somewhat disappointed that the spent convictions legislation will not make it to this house probably before the end of this year, I know that the stigma of offending and the stigma of having gone to prison has such a negative impact on people getting employment and getting jobs. That creates that vicious circle—no job, you might end up reoffending and you end up in prison, and the cycle and the spiral down continue.

Again, the Drug Court model, as we know, addresses the underlying causes of offending by providing intensive drug treatment services to those offenders. It is intensive and it is integrated. You speak to the justices, the judges who are involved in this, and they are passionate about this. They become personally interested and involved with those offenders, with the people who are coming before them. They understand their lives. They very often understand exactly what brought them to that court, and they see that person in a much more three-dimensional way and a much deeper level than they would if they were going before another court and not having the opportunity of this integrated drug treatment program that is judicially supervised. It teaches people about accountability. It teaches people that they can take responsibility, that they can accept a level of trust, that they can accept a level of help, that it is okay to accept assistance and that it is okay to accept help. We know that it has been successful, so it makes good sense to extend this scheme to the County Court and capture a wider range of offenders who can benefit from this therapeutic model. So that has my full support.

I suppose I would question why we are not expanding it further. It was good to see in the budget some expansion of drug treatment, and I wonder if it is a chicken-and-egg problem—that we cannot expand Drug Court proceedings into more Magistrates Courts around the state because we do not have the treatment facilities for them? If we had more treatment, then could we expand the Magistrates Court? It is something that over the next year or two I will certainly be advocating for. We know that the Magistrates Court is by far the busiest court in Victoria, handling about 90 per cent of the cases that come before Victoria’s courts, so in fact expanding the Drug Court further around the Magistrates Courts may have had greater benefit. As I say and as I repeat, you will hear more from me in the coming months and years about that. Victoria has 3500 towns and suburbs, of which our existing Drug Courts only really service about 10 per cent. Obviously I will accept that it is probably more than that because they are densely populated areas, but again I would argue that I would like to see greater expansion of this.

Before I turn to other parts of the bill I would just like to briefly turn to Mr O’Donohue’s amendments. I think to exclude people who have engaged in low-level trafficking from this program is really cutting off nose to spite face in many ways. We know conduct like sourcing drugs for peers or trying to offset the expense of your own habit is a symptom, not a cause, and we should be treating it as such. I heard Mr Ondarchie’s contribution talking about North Richmond. I have personally spoken to a number of the people in the streets in North Richmond. I know why they are supplying substances and drugs. They are supplying substances and drugs so they can maintain their supply of substances and drugs, because they have an addiction and this is a way to feed their addiction.

So to be saying that those who are addicted, those who would benefit from drug treatment, cannot because they are being prosecuted or they have been charged with low-level trafficking I do not think is useful, and I do not think it really reflects the nature of the people that would benefit from drug courts.

Now, the bill also makes an important amendment to VCAT, and this is around, remarkably, protecting the privacy of parties to the Victorian Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2017. I suppose we did spend quite a lot of hours debating this bill, so it is maybe not surprising that we missed this point—protecting the confidentiality of people using VCAT as part of the voluntary assisted dying process. We want to ensure that their information is confidential. Of course it is highly personal and it is highly sensitive, and I am pleased to see that we have picked this up.

Going to the amendments to the children’s legislation, this means a lot. It means a lot to probably a relatively small number of people, but they are people I know personally. These were people who entered into unfair historical compensation agreements before 2015. It was a mistake that we excluded them when we amended the legislation last year, and I am very pleased to see that this mistake is being amended today. I know I raised it last year when we debated that bill. I think Mr O’Donohue also raised that fact as well, that people were being excluded when they should not have been. So I am glad that we have acted on this issue and there has been change, because survivors of institutional child abuse should not be left worse off as a result of their involvement in that internal and hugely flawed redress scheme that was established by the Catholic Church and other institutions. It is important to me and the Reason Party, as evidenced by bills that I have introduced in this house, that we need to ensure that those survivors of that abuse are respected, understood, believed and given the compensation that they absolutely deserve.

And in speaking of the redress scheme, I would certainly say that it is beyond time for the Attorney-General to strip those organisations who have refused to participate in that scheme. They should be stripped of their charitable status, and I really would refer specifically to the cesspit that is the Jehovah’s Witnesses—1800 victims and they refuse to sign up to the redress scheme. They refused to take responsibility for the hurt, the pain, the anguish that they have caused not only the victims and the victim-survivors but the families of those people. It is possible for the Victorian government to do this; they do not have to wait for Canberra.

I simply think that we cannot allow this intolerable conduct to go unchecked, so I will continue fighting for redress, for the compensation for the survivors of this vile institutional conduct. I will continue to advocate for the expansion of drug courts in Victoria, because as I talked about that woman, if she had had treatment, not jail, she would be in a very different place at the end of that. Her opportunities for work and her opportunities to reconnect with family would be far more promising. I commend the bill to the house.

Fiona Patten MP
Leader of Reason
Member for Northern Metropolitan Region
Second reading speech 26/11/20

Ms PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) (15:41): I too am very pleased to rise to speak to the Human Tissue Amendment Bill 2020. I noted, as I was thinking about this bill, that I had my DonateLife badge sitting on my desk today. Certainly, as Mr Tarlamis mentioned, donating your organs or your tissue can save not just one life, it can save a dozen lives. Over the course of just last year nearly 1500 Australians’ lives were saved through a transplant due to the generosity of 500 or 600 people. So you can see how the gift really does give.

I am an organ donor and I have had that conversation with my family. In fact all my family are organ donors. I vividly remember the Christmas Day lunch where we had this discussion while the turkey was being cut. It was amusing but it was also great to know that we were all on the same page. We all knew that if something was to happen to us, that we would all do whatever we could to ensure that the organs of my brothers and sisters, my mum and dad, would be donated—and that is what this bill does. In some ways it almost feels administrative. When I decided many years ago to become an organ donor I never imagined that that meant I had not consented to have a blood test prior to that or I had not consented to have administration of antibiotics or an anticoagulant or some sort of X-ray or some sort of study to make sure that my organs were fit to be donated for the next person who might use them. I do not think anyone imagined that that just would not be part of the process. This is what has been discovered—that ante-mortem processes have not necessarily been picked up in this.

What we do know is that the person has to have consented to being an organ donor. We know that. I do not think that I am alone in being an organ donor and assuming that that might have required some form of test of my organs prior to that process taking place. We know from the existing act that this is not a process that is taken lightly. This is a process that requires two medical practitioners already to provide authorisation. Certainly you will have a medical decision-maker there. Just coming in at the tail end of Mr Meddick’s contribution, yes, those decision-makers can overturn my decision. That is why you have those conversations with your families—to ensure that your decision is honoured by that medical decision-maker.

That medical decision-maker right now can say, ‘Well, Fiona might have wanted that, but I don’t want that’ for whatever reasons, and they could deny that. This does not change that, and I think the community is ready to have that conversation about whether your organs are donated unless you actively say, ‘I don’t want them to be’. I think we are at a point where we know the life-giving that organ donation offers. It is something that as a community we are ready to accept and ready to take to that next level. I know countries like Spain which do have an opt-out process have a much larger number of organs donated each year.

By saying that someone’s organs could not be donated because there was not a decision-maker there to say that they consented to an ante-mortem test, I think it denies the final wishes of that person—because what we know is that that person wanted their organs donated. I do not think there is a person out there who has said, ‘I want my organs donated, but I don’t want a blood test before it. I want my organs donated, but I don’t want you to provide any anticoagulant that might keep the organ alive for longer’. I do not believe that there is anyone out there like that, and so I think that this is important legislation.

We know that this is about the benefit to another individual, and the fact that there may have been some silence around ante-mortem testing should not deny the final wishes of a person who wanted their organs to be donated for the benefit of maybe not just one person but of many people. I hope that in future, next year, we will have a much more active and a much more public DonateLife Week. It is something that I have been involved in over the years, both here at Parliament and prior to my time here. I hope that we can further increase the numbers of organs that are donated and that we can reduce that really tragic waitlist. You hear of people who are just waiting by the phone, and it is an awkward and awful thing when people tell you about waiting by the phone for someone to die—to be waiting there to receive a life-saving donation of lungs or of a heart or of tissue or of bone marrow. But to do that, there is the tragedy of somebody else having lost their life or other people having lost their loved one.

But on that note, I thank the minister’s office because this did create, as you know, Acting President Gepp, quite some discussion in the Scrutiny of Acts and Regulations Committee when we were considering this legislation and its compatibility with the charter of human rights. I appreciate the very thoughtful correspondence that we received from the minister’s office on that. I think it certainly allayed any fears that I had that this would be a breach of the charter, and therefore I commend the bill.

Fiona Patten MP
Leader of Reason
Member for Northern Metropolitan Region
Second reading speech 26/11/20

Ms PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) (12:53): I rise to make just a fairly short contribution to this bill, which is a very broad and wideranging bill. I did just want to touch on some of the points that were made by Mr Gepp and also Mr Grimley at the beginning. The road toll in Victoria, as Mr Gepp quite rightly said, is one of the leading causes of death. The road toll in 2019 was 242. But I just think it is worth us remembering that the toll from overdoses far exceeds that. The toll from accidental drug overdoses in Victoria now sits at nearly 400. Now, this is something that we often forget. We talk about Towards Zero on the road toll, and I think that is an absolutely admirable goal, but what we do not talk about are the people who die from accidental overdoses and the stigma that surrounds this.

Just as a little aside, when Mr Grimley was speaking about drug testing on the roads, one of the passions I have had here is around how I can advocate for medicinal cannabis patients. Now, there is a connection here, because we know that many of those medicinal cannabis patients are taking this to avoid using some of those incredibly strong opioids that do lead to accidental overdoses. So the more that we try and exclude and try and put up barriers to people using medicinal cannabis, the more likely we are to not help in reducing the drug overdose toll in Victoria, which sadly continues to rise. And sadly in regional areas, where do see death tolls, we also see much higher accidental drug overdose figures—considerably higher in those areas.

I just make the point again that with changes to the way that we treat medicinal cannabis patients, particularly around their ability to drive and particularly for regional medicinal cannabis patients, it is still very important that we recognise that not only should they have the same rights as any other patient if they are not impaired to drive but also it can have the added benefit of reducing the number of people and patients in Victoria who are taking strong opioids that are causing more people in Victoria to die from those drugs and from overdoses than who die on our roads.

The bill, as I mentioned, is wideranging, but I did just want to talk briefly about clause 32, which is around micromobility. This is around electric scooters and electric bikes. I raised this right back in my address-in-reply speech, mentioning that these were some of the initiatives that we should be pursuing and that we should be enabling here. I do not know if members recall, but I also had an electric scooter here that many of us rode—strictly on the carpet to keep us safe. But technically an electric scooter requires you to wear a motorcycle helmet currently. These amendments in clause 32 actually go towards enabling the department to treat new and emerging micromobility models and vehicles—like electric scooters, like electric skateboards and like electric bikes—differently to other vehicles, and they enable them to get these regulated and to get people on the road using them. Because we know that they do not fit comfortably in motor vehicles. We find this often with legislation. This bill really probably started in 1986. I think as we move our technology changes, and we see these types of changes. So people generally used to power bikes and scooters, but now we actually have electric motors that do that. As I said, currently they do not sit comfortably within the definition of a motor vehicle, and this bill finds a very neat way to fix that.

It also means that people on these vehicles may well be subject to drink and drug driving rules. I do not think that is a problem. I think that it certainly addresses some of the concerns that I know the police have had with the emergence of share vehicles like these—the share scooters and the share electric bikes—the types of vehicles that will really help us in that last mile and that will really help us in getting people from the tram, from that train station, from the bus station or from the bus stop to their homes. We are seeing it all around the world. These types of vehicles are proving to be extremely popular. They have the added benefit of taking cars off the road—cars that are used for those short drives. These types of electric vehicles, these types of new vehicles, are really addressing that. I was watching a documentary on Chicago the other day, and going over one of the bridges there were just scores of people on electric scooters making their way to work or making their way between appointments and things like that. I think this is a little bit overdue. It is certainly something that I know the department has been trying to find a solution for. I look forward to this bringing in further technology fixes for congestion, obviously in a very environmentally safe way and environmentally efficient way. But also with these types of technologies, if we move into that type of share economy, they will bring a number of new jobs to Victoria as well, which I know we would all welcome.

I was very pleased to see that in the bill. I know for some people it is a small thing, but anything that we can do to reduce that congestion and increase people’s accessibility to public transport and increase people’s ability to get out and about without using a car is surely a very good thing. On that note I commend the bill.

Fiona Patten MP
Leader of Reason
Member for Northern Metropolitan Region
Second reading speech 26/11/20

Ms PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) (13:07): I am pleased to rise to speak to the Food Amendment Bill 2020. As previous speakers have said, this does aim to support a more consistent and transparent regulatory process for the regulation of our food businesses, our cafes and all of those businesses that we are so pleased to be back visiting and eating in. It does this by providing an online portal for councils. I have to say this intention to provide this portal will help improve councils’ reporting processes, compliance, monitoring and operational decision-making. This is very important.

Again, I will also make mention of the Legal and Social Issues Committee’s inquiry into I Cook Foods. What we found was that there were big problems in these areas. We really found that, particularly in Greater Dandenong City Council, a lot of those areas were lacking, that information was lacking and that those processes were lacking. This bill actually goes some way to improving and addressing a lot of the issues that the committee found in what was a whirlwind inquiry. In less than a month we produced a 200-page report that really did highlight a lot of the shortcomings in the Food Act 1984 but also in the ways that councils reported and regulated food businesses. This bill does go to a number of those areas that the committee found. We certainly made recommendations that the Food Act be amended. This goes to some of those areas that we found were lacking in the Food Act. I am really pleased to be supporting this bill because I think it does modernise the Food Act in many ways.

I think there are still more ways that we could go in modernising the Food Act 1984 and in streamlining it to make it easier for small businesses but also for councils to regulate those small businesses. That was certainly what we found with I Cook Foods. I probably will not say too much about it because there are still court proceedings being undertaken, but we found that the communication processes just were not adequate. The communication processes were outdated and they were severely lacking, and this led to some of the problems that led to the closure of I Cook Foods. In fact had those problems been fixed—who knows—it may actually have meant that that business would not have closed down.

We saw that the City of Greater Dandenong just could not manage the processes, and I certainly think that a number of the amendments in this bill do go a long way to addressing that. I guess it is just another note to say why parliamentary committees are important and why, particularly as an Independent member, I really gain so much from the inquiry process and from the parliamentary committee process. You get to do a very significant deep dive into legislation and into the issues that you might not have the opportunity to do otherwise. I certainly found this with I Cook Foods. I learned a lot about the Food Act that I probably never thought I would need to know. I learned a lot about unseasonal slugs and the mating and sleeping patterns of slugs—things I never thought that I would learn about in my life. But I am much wiser on the goings-on of slugs in February in Melbourne.

This bill does make some really good and I think really sensible amendments, including that when a business changes hands the business needs to be re-registered. It is not that the business under completely new management stays registered; it actually now requires a re-registration process. I think these are all very sensible amendments that will lead to greater transparency.

When you look at the recommendations that the inquiry into I Cook Foods made, we found that the Food Act really was lacking and that it needed amendments to enable the management of conflicts of interest where a local council is a shareholder in that business and is authorised to regulate and determine. There was this conflict of interest where you had a local council that ran a food business and regulated food businesses in their area, and this did highlight some conflicts there. Now, this bill does not go towards remedying that, but I think that certainly is something that we would recommend the government does consider going forward in what I imagine will be a series of amendments to the Food Act 1984.

It does go towards consolidating reporting requirements. It goes to a way of providing online transmission for publication of orders and for publication of reporting. I think these are all very much needed and will be welcome modernisations of our processes for regulating our food businesses in Victoria. It is part of the way, and I think the online portal will be something that will be appreciated by businesses and councils alike. I will listen with interest to some of the questions that Ms Crozier will raise during the committee process, but on that note I commend the bill.

Fiona Patten MP
Leader of Reason
Member for Northern Metropolitan Region
Second reading 24/11/20

Ms PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) (15:26): I am very pleased to rise to speak on this motion. I just want to make note of the kind of graffiti amendment that the opposition has put forward today. It is almost like they crossed out some of the letters so the word means something different altogether—omit ‘Green New Deal’, omit ‘wildlife’, insert ‘roads and pollution’. You know—how to completely change the whole motion. In fact I think I am going to take some inspiration from this and look out for opportunities to do the same kind of graffiti on some of Mr Finn’s future motions.

But yes, we do need to do things differently, and this year, as this motion says, has been difficult for us all and certainly far more difficult for many people in our community. This is going to have a long tail. The year 2020 is going to reverberate for the rest of this decade. This will not be forgotten, and we will need to do things differently. But let us take that as the opportunity that it could be, and this is what a lot of this motion goes to—the opportunities that are in front of us to do things differently. I totally support this. I think we are seeing the world recognise this.

We have all done things differently. As someone who is chairing the homelessness inquiry brought to the Legal and Social Issues Committee by Mr Barton, we are hearing how things can be done differently and how COVID has enabled that to happen and has enabled us to do things differently. No-one would have thought in January this year that we would have been able to find housing for every single person who needed it and every single person who wanted it. Now the challenge is to maintain that. Now the challenge is to keep that going.

We are working differently. Who would have thought that we would be Zooming each other, that we would be in Brady Bunch boxes for most of the day? But it has shown that we can do things differently. For many people, not being able to go to work, or not having a job, has been really difficult and damaging. That is why we do need to invest in our careworkers; we do need to invest. Again, if this year has shown us anything, it is that we need to invest in our health system. This year has shown the cracks or the crevices in our health system, and certainly in our mental health area. So, yes, we can invest. We know that the dollar that you invest into a care economy is a far better dollar than the one you invest in a hard hat job.

It seems that some people think that the only way you can create a job is to build a road. That is not the case. We have shown that by working differently, by staggering our start times, by working from home some days and working in the office on other days that we are actually possibly not going to need the infrastructure that we had planned. We are not going to need all of it, and we should be rethinking this. We should be rethinking how we can invest in our community in really meaningful ways.

As we have seen with the congestion on our roads—well, there is not any. On public transport systems, we are able to socially distance on the trams at almost any time of the day because we are doing it differently. As the Grattan Institute said, we could be creating ‘a herd of white elephants’ if we go ahead with some of the infrastructure that is being planned.

So I support this motion. I laugh at the amendments. I did; I thought, ‘Look, if this was a joke, it was hilarious’. But I support this motion. We can do things differently, we must do things differently and we must take on the challenges that this year has brought to us—the harm that this year has done to many of us. We need to take that and we need to look at that and do it differently, do it better and create a better economy, a better Victoria.

Fiona Patten MP
Leader of Reason
Member for Northern Metropolitan Region
Motion by Dr Ratnam 11/11/20

Dr RATNAM (Northern Metropolitan) (14:06): I am pleased to move:

That this house:
(1) supports a Green New Deal for Victoria;
(2) notes that 2020 has been an extremely difficult year for Victorians, starting with horrendous bushfires and followed by the COVID-19 pandemic;
(3) further notes that increasing unemployment due to the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as climate change and rising economic inequality, are key challenges facing Victoria into the future;
(4) acknowledges that the upcoming state budget must provide for a plan to build Victoria back better, with significant investment from the government to create jobs and build a caring society and clean economy;
(5) calls on the government to create tens of thousands of good-quality new jobs through investing in:

(a) publicly owned renewable energy and storage projects to address climate change and transitioning Victoria away from fossil fuels;
(b) a big build of new public housing to help end homelessness;
(c) employing more educators, healthcare workers, nurses and social support workers so all Victorians can get the care they need;
(d) restoring our precious natural environment by regenerating bushfire-affected areas, protecting threatened species and planting trees and native vegetation;
(e) walking, bike riding and public transport to cut traffic and reduce emissions;
(f) reviving our main shopping streets to support jobs in retail, hospitality and services; and
(g) a recycling revolution to reduce waste and protect our waterways and wildlife