Ms PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) (09:43): It was an honour to attend the third Commonwealth Women Parliamentarians Australia Region Conference in Adelaide recently. The CWP conference is a non-partisan event for women parliamentarians and this year celebrated 125 years of women’s suffrage in South Australia. Unsurprisingly the conference had a key focus on gender equality in Australian parliaments. There should be equal representation of men and women leading our communities in our legislature, and a great deal more work on this still needs to be done. I also had the great pleasure of addressing the National Press Club of Australia last week in my...

  Ms PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) (10:05:15): I rise to speak to the tragic death of popular University of Melbourne Associate Professor Allison Milner. Allison was killed, in what was a freak accident, by a falling tree on the walking track near Princes Park earlier this week. A Reservoir resident, Allison was a much-loved wife and mother of two, and judging by the outpouring of grief amongst her colleagues at the University of Melbourne’s School of Population and Global Health, a popular and respected academic. Head of the school, Professor Terry Nolan, said her heartbreaking death was an immense loss to the university community. Allison...

  Ms PATTEN: On another matter, I would like to congratulate two Northern Metropolitan students—Freya Dobson from Princes Hill Secondary College and Mungo Sweeney from Fitzroy High School. They are the winners of the Parliament Prize for a members statement, so I thought it was very appropriate to mention them in my members statement.  

Fiona Patten MP

Leader of Reason

Member for Northern Metropolitan Region

Statement given 14/8/19

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  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...