MS PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) (09:40:32): Yesterday voluntary assisted dying became law. It was an incredible privilege to be a member of the committee that undertook the end-of-life choices inquiry, and I would like to thank all the people who made that possible—the families who told us sometimes harrowing stories about loved ones at the end of their lives but also many of their happy moments. We heard about good deaths and bad ones, and what we found was that the community wanted this to happen, and now it has. Thank you to the nurses and doctors who did whatever they could to ease...

  MS PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) (09:53:42): Courtney Herron’s tragic death still resonates with me now. It led me to deeply reflect: had she not been struggling with serious mental distress, had she not been suffering in isolation, had she not been homeless, would she still be with us today? Housing and early intervention is vital. I was talking to my intern and she revealed that in high school she knew of many students who suffered and are still suffering from intense mental distress and have displayed tendencies of homelessness, often leaving home without notice and not returning until one or two weeks...

MS PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) (09:56:14): Again I will attend a vigil for a young murdered woman killed in my electorate in a park where thousands of us walk, work out and play. Again I am feeling immensely sad and helpless. Melbourne woman Courtney Herron was the ninth woman to be murdered in Victoria this year. That is nine out of the 24 women killed this year in Australia. She was a person at the end of the day, just like all of us. She was just trying to get by— said her friend Jessica Bateman. Other friends of Courtney described...

MS PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) (16:29:19): On Saturday I had the privilege to travel to Canberra to take a tour of the second pill testing facility run by Pill Testing Australia at Groovin the Moo festival. It was again overwhelmingly successful by any measure. More than 230 festival goers used the pill testing service, and seven people, after being told that their drugs contained the dangerous substance ethylpentalone, dumped their pills in amnesty bins provided. But most importantly they had a health intervention and they had health professionals talking to them about the risks of drug use at a...

MS PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) (18:24:35): In this week of great tragedy, I feel it is a perfect time to reflect on some of the good being done in our community and to recognise those individuals and organisations—people like former parish priest Michael Parer, who is doing wonderful work to heal the pain inflicted by the Catholic Church by lobbying for swift changes to the inadequate redress scheme and to create a healing garden to support victims and survivors of child sex abuse in both Sale and Ballarat, like Ethan Mileikowski and Lachlan Lewis, who left school to participate in the...

MS PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) (15:33:02): Cardinal George Pell is now a convicted child sex offender and sits on remand in prison awaiting sentence. Twenty years ago I published a book called Hypocrites, which detailed hundreds of cases of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church. At the time, Cardinal Pell came out strongly against me. Time has now proven his criticisms to be false, and indeed while he rallied against me and my associates for making so‑called 'outrageous claims’, he had in fact abused children. Pell was the architect of the Melbourne Response—the compensation scheme now widely recognised as having minimised...

MS PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) (09:54:30): Although we have made headway into drug law reform in Victoria, we are still far behind most civilised jurisdictions. This I heard when I attended the Victorian Alcohol and Drug Association’s excellent conference. They brought out the outstanding Professor David Nutt, who was the inaugural chair of the UK advisory council on drugs policy, which I think is a body we should replicate here, as well as Professor Fiona Measham, probably the world expert on drug safety testing services. Both spoke about evidence showing the effectiveness of harm reduction in not only saving lives but...

MS PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) (15:27:29): Her name was Aiia Maasarwe. She was a Palestinian exchange student. She was vibrant and beautiful, with her entire life ahead of her until it was cut short on 16 January. Like so many others, I sat in silence on the steps of this Parliament a few days later in solidarity with the community. I thought about a life lost, I thought about her tragic end, and I was sad and angry. Her name joins a list, a list that should never be: with Jill, with Eurydice, with Masa. While those women paid the ultimate...

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) (10:07:56) — It was International Overdose Awareness Day last week, and I was pleased to speak at a number of community organisation events, including Banyule Community Health and the Australian Community Support Organisation. I heard the stories of people who had tragically lost brothers, sons and daughters and also the triumphant stories of people who had overcome addiction and had gone on to a very strong path of recovery. We also noted the rise in overdose deaths. Since 2014 overdose deaths have nearly doubled in Australia. We are now reaching close to the epidemic proportions of accidental overdose...