MS PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) (10:01:07): I am very pleased to rise to speak to the Safe Patient Care (Nurse to Patient and Midwife to Patient Ratios) Amendment Bill 2018. It has been some time in coming, and certainly we nearly got there last year and I felt terrible that we did not get there. However, I would concur with Ms Crozier in her contribution that this bill is actually a better bill. Can I say at the outset that I heart nurses and midwives. I wonder if Hansard could put an emoji in for that? This bill, as we all...

MS PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) (14:36:24): I rise to speak to Mr Bourman’s motion that effectively says that we allow suitable people to obtain and use items designed for non-lethal self-defence in the wake of a number of random attacks on women. The victims of the four most recent attacks we are talking about—Jill Meagher, Eurydice Dixon, Aiia Maasarwe and Masa Vukotic—all died in Northern Metropolitan Region, so these are my constituents that we are talking about. Can I tell you that when I went to the silent memorial for Eurydice, when I went to the march for Jill, when I...

MS PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) (17:39:48): I rise to briefly speak on this condolence motion, and I think of all those people for whom tomorrow may well be a very difficult day. As they say, their life will never be the same. But they also mention that this tragic event has brought a deeper resilience and kindness to their communities. Some of them say they are finally on the path to recovery, and for others, that sense of loss is never going to leave them. At the commemoration ceremony on Monday evening we heard Dr Kathy Rowe, who lost her husband...

MS PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) (10:07:56): I move: That the bill be now read a second time. Ryan is an Indigenous man in his 40s from rural Victoria. He became a member of the Country Fire Authority (CFA) when he was a teenager, helping to keep his community safe from fire, just as his family has done for generations. For Ryan, it was an important part of his connection to country. In his teens and early 20s, Ryan was convicted of assault and being drunk and disorderly. He received a criminal record, but was never imprisoned. At age 27, Ryan applied for...

MS PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) (10:30:01) — I would just like to take this time to thank all of the people here who have made this four years quite a journey, and in fact overall an incredibly pleasurable one. It seems like a long time ago that we were standing here being sworn in, but in actual fact it also seems that it has gone very fast. I would like to thank the red coats, the attendants, the clerks, Hansard, the library staff, the restaurant staff and particularly the committee staff, because I think the committee work was one of the most surprising...

MS PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) (15:55:57) — I rise to speak briefly on the point of consumption tax and the Gambling Regulation Amendment (Wagering and Betting) Bill 2018. I am pleased that we are seeing it in the house today. Certainly at one stage it was looking quite shaky as to whether we would get to this bill in this term of government. I certainly commend the Alliance for Gambling Reform for their pleas and advocacy to ensure that this bill did hit our chamber prior to the end of this term. This legislation really is overdue. If it had not got up,...

MS PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) (17:46:47) — I rise to make a contribution on this largely omnibus bill. As previous speakers have gone through all of the various wideranging areas of this bill, I will not, although I will just give a shout-out to the Real Estate Institute of Victoria, which was very pleased to see that some of the issues around ensuring that vendors pay commissions owed to real estate agents are remedied in this bill. Sadly, though, they were disappointed that it was in a bill about mandatory sentencing, which is what I will focus my contribution on. I have to say that...

MS PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) (12:18:47) — I too would like to commend this report and also again thank all of the staff from the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee, both present and past. I have to say that I think this report is an incredibly good, concise report. It very well depicts the work of the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee. I kind of wish that this report had been available to me when I came onto that committee. I would have had a much clearer understanding of how the committee operated. But having said that, I learnt an awful lot on...

MS PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) (15:17:59) — I too would like to make a brief contribution to Mr Elasmar's motion to amendment the standing orders and Ms Pennicuik's amendments to that motion as well. I come from a position where I do not really know Parliament without the existing sessional orders that we have had, and I have to say that I have thought that many of them have been quite good. At other times I have been completely frustrated in here by the delays and by the continuation of unnecessary debate. In some ways I would like to have seen more being done to address...

MS PATTEN — I do support this amendment because I really do support the community health sector, and I support the fact that they have had a portable long service leave program for a number of years. This bill — and I think it was unintended — does overlap on that and does give them a quite incredible level of extra work that money needs to be put aside for. These are organisations that have very slim budgets, and they do remarkable work for our community. Certainly the ones in Northern Metropolitan Region and around Victoria do remarkable work in primary health and...