Medical Treatment Planning and Decisions Bill 2016
Nov 22, 2016
Second Reading
Ms PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) — I am very pleased to be rising today to speak on the Medical Treatment Planning and Decisions Bill 2016. As members are aware, I was fortunate enough to be on the Standing Committee on Legal and Social Issues when they conducted the end-of-life choices inquiry. I am also very pleased to say that I initiated that inquiry. This is why we initiated it. We needed to look at end-of-life choices and we needed to provide new tools for people at the end of their life. We needed to provide ways for patients' wishes to be...
Ms PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) — I rise to speak on the Sentencing (Community Correction Order) and Other Acts Amendment Bill 2016. Given the contributions of Ms Pennicuik and Mr Rich-Phillips, I will not restate the purposes of this bill — they have already been canvassed in this house — but I have to wonder what the Attorney-General was thinking when he introduced this bill or what he was thinking when he dreamt up this entirely ridiculous piece of legislation. I cannot help thinking that this is something we might have seen from the previous government, and I note that the coalition will of course be...
Second Reading
Ms PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) — I rise to speak briefly on Ms Pennicuik's Equal Opportunity Amendment (Equality for Students) Bill 2016, and that is what it is — it is an equality for students bill. We keep hearing this talk about religious freedom and that this is all about religious freedom. This is not; this is about the freedom for students not to be discriminated against on the grounds of their gender, on the grounds of their sexuality or on the grounds of whether they have an unwanted pregnancy or if they are single parents. It is as simple as that. This...
Safe Schools program
Nov 9, 2016
Ms PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) — I will not speak on this motion for long, as I actually do not want to dignify the position presented and particularly because, in spite of all of the strong support for the Safe Schools program and the positive effect it is having in schools, I am not going to change the views of Dr Carling-Jenkins here. Often this debate has focused on claims that we should be cautious when we talk about sexuality in schools. They say being gay is an ideology and that such ideology has no place in schools, but these are the same...
Ms PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) — I would like to speak also to the Owners Corporations Amendment (Short-stay Accommodation) Bill 2016. I have to say that when I looked at this bill I had very mixed views about it. On the one hand it is about the government realising that there is a sharing economy that brings its own unique challenges to how our owners corporations operate and how our residents live harmoniously in those buildings, but on the other hand it does not seem to be responding to them in what I would say is an optimum way. We had an...
Melbourne College of Divinity Amendment Bill 2016
Oct 27, 2016
Ms PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) — I rise briefly to speak to this bill. When I first looked at it I looked up what a private act is. I thought this is a very interesting piece of legislation — a private act — where a private organisation can come to the Parliament and request that it has a private act and a private bill. Generally speaking in previous centuries this was paid for, and it was very expensive. In fact just on the weekend I was looking through some of my family history and found that my ancestors had had to petition for a private...
Standing Committee on Legal and Social Issues
Oct 26, 2016
Ms PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) — I am pleased to rise to speak in relation to Ms Crozier's motion. I promise I will try to keep it brief so we can get through this. I appreciate that Ms Crozier has been asking many questions about this issue over the past few weeks and the past few months, and I commend the work that she did in the last Parliament on child abuse within organisations. Like Ms Springle, Ms Crozier and previous speakers, I too have an interest in youth justice. I have a family member who is a forensic psychologist who worked at Don Dale and...
Corrections Legislation Amendment Bill 2016
Oct 25, 2016
Ms PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) — I think I would like to take a novel approach in my contribution and actually speak to the bill.
Honourable members interjecting.
Ms PATTEN — I know, yes. Not often is that heard in this house at the moment. But in fact I am going to keep it brief, because I only want to speak to one particular section of the bill. I support most of the changes proposed in this bill, but I do have a number of significant concerns about the new powers given to our new SWAT (special weapons and tactics) parole team that is the security and...
Ms PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) — I rise to speak briefly on what I think is one of the most unnecessary pieces of legislation we have seen, the Crimes Amendment (Carjacking and Home Invasion) Bill 2016. Apparently this bill creates new offences of carjacking, aggravated carjacking, home invasion and aggravated home invasion. I do not know whether anybody else has been looking at different acts to me, but these are already crimes. It is already a crime to steal a car. In fact it actually has the same penalties as this. I am not sure; it seems that many people in this house...
National Domestic Violence Order Scheme Bill 2016
Oct 13, 2016
Ms Patten (Northern Metropolitan):
I rise briefly to speak to the National Domestic Violence Order Scheme Bill 2016. As we have heard, this bill gives effect in Victoria to a national domestic violence order (DVO) scheme, which will provide automatic mutual recognition of an enforcement of domestic violence orders no matter where they are issued.
This replaces that existing and onerous situation where someone who has sought protection by obtaining a domestic violence order in one state and has moved to another state to try to start again and escape a lot of the effects and the memories of that domestic violence by...