Rachel made a contribution to the Entities Legislation Amendment (Consolidation and Other Matters) Bill 2025.
Rachel expressed concern around the proposed abolition of Recycling Victoria, the Victorian Environmental Assessment Council and the Victorian Marine and Coastal Council.
She also raised disappointment in the bill’s removal of lived experience requirements, related to the appointment of commissioners of the Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission. She notes the importance of lived experience workers having key involvement in policy and development of the mental health sector.
Tuesday the 17th of March 2026,
Victorian Legislative Council
Rachel Payne (South-Eastern Metropolitan):
I rise on behalf of Legalise Cannabis Victoria to speak on the Entities Legislation Amendment (Consolidation and Other Matters) Bill 2025. To begin, I would like to be clear that we do believe that there is value in reducing unnecessary waste and we are not opposed to all of the changes in this bill. That being said, we do not believe that reducing waste should come at the cost of proper oversight and lived experience representation. While in the short term retaining these safeguards may create added costs and inefficiencies, their value must be understood in the long term – the costs that they save over time by reducing risks and improving outcomes. With this in mind our main concerns in this bill are twofold. We are deeply concerned about the changes that will reduce oversight as it relates to the environment and mental health sector and changes that remove lived experience leadership.
Mental health lived experience representation
When it comes to lived experience representation, this bill removes requirements related to the appointment of commissioners of the Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission and replaces them with a general requirement to understand specific matters. The current arrangements require lived experience representation for commissioners, both those with experience of mental health or psychological distress and those with experiences caring for or supporting a person experiencing mental illness or psychological distress. It also removes lived experience requirements relating to the leadership positions at the Victorian Collaborative Centre for Mental Health and Wellbeing. No longer will there be specific requirements for directors; instead they will just need to have relevant experience, skills and knowledge, and requirements related to board members are completely removed. The Victorian Collaborative Centre for Mental Health and Wellbeing is responsible for connecting lived and living experience leadership, innovative service delivery and research to drive change to Victoria’s mental health and wellbeing system. Lived experience is central to this role.
We want to acknowledge that the government has worked in good faith to try and improve the changes to the mental health sector in this bill, but you do have to stop and ask why it took so long for this work to take place. From what we understand there was limited or minimal consultation on these changes before they were announced. It is really therefore no surprise that we are now having to discuss walking back some of these changes. I will be putting forward questions on this and several other concerns during the committee-of-the-whole stage.
Lived experience involvement essential, not tokenistic
The mental health sector and public at large remain sceptical that this government is making genuine progress to improve mental health outcomes for Victorians and to make effective use of the funds generated by the mental health and wellbeing levy. It is in this environment that the government chooses to progress legislation that removes lived experience representation from the sector, both of those who have experienced or are experiencing mental illness or psychological distress and of their carers. Lived experience is all too often the last group of people to get a seat at the table. It has taken sector failures across decades for lived experience to finally be valued for what it can do and get the promise from this government that lived experience will always be central to the mental health workforce. Now, when the time has come to cut costs, the idea that it will be lived experience on the chopping block all but confirms the sector’s worst fears that lived experience inclusion was tokenistic and that when times are tough it is the first thing to go.
The royal commission was clear: people with lived experience must be involved in the leadership and design of the mental health system, not merely consulted. The reason for this is not that lived experience is a feel-good thing we do; it is something we do because it actually works. It keeps the system accountable, it secures better outcomes and it makes sure it is human-centred. We strongly oppose these changes and will support any amendment that will prevent the loss of lived experience voices in these roles.
I would like to again touch on the changes to the Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission, because they go far beyond just the removal of the lived experience requirement. These changes also go to the very role of the commission. The Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission is an independent statutory authority that is responsible for holding the government to account for the performance, quality and safeguards of Victoria’s mental health and wellbeing system. The changes in this bill include reducing the number of commissioners from four to one. While a reduction was recommended, we understand that a specific number was never specified.
Risking quality and safety of the mental health and wellbeing system
Further, this bill removes information sharing agreement powers and enables the minister to issue an annual statement of expectations that specifies strategic priorities, opportunities for improvement in the performance of the commission and any emerging risks to the mental health and wellbeing system. It will also limit the monitoring and reporting functions of the commission to performance, quality and safety of the mental health and wellbeing system in the course of their dealing with complaints or conducting investigations, inquiries or complaint data review. It also limits functions to monitoring and reporting on progress to improve outcomes of the mental health and wellbeing system, rather than to improve mental health and wellbeing outcomes.
The changes to the commission share a very clear theme: restricting its ability to provide independent oversight and to identify systemic failures. For any oversight body this would be troubling, but for one that is only two years old there is a particularly disturbing quality to these changes. A range of stakeholders have contacted us to express their concerns about these changes. While I understand the government is responding to these concerns in the form of several amendments, there is no reason that it should have gotten to this point to begin with. Sector consultation could have prevented all of this and avoided unnecessary uncertainty and distrust brewing in the sector.
We know that this is by no means the end of the government’s cost-cutting exercise, with more legislation to come to enact the recommendations in the Silver review. With that in mind, we hope that the government learns something with this tranche of changes. When you are looking to abolish, absorb or reduce the size of an organisation, that can be when consultation is most frightening, but it is also when it is most important. We hope that the next time we do not have to make these kinds of last-minute changes, but we can assure you that if it comes down to it, we will be there to call it out and secure changes.
Environmental oversight undermined
With respect to changes to environment bodies, we are deeply concerned about the decision to abolish Recycling Victoria and confer its responsibilities, functions and duties to the Environment Protection Authority Victoria. This will undermine environmental oversight at a time when the Victorian Auditor-General’s Office has warned that Victoria is not on track to meet its target of diverting 80 per cent of waste away from landfill by 2030. These changes include extending the requirement for a responsible entity to prepare and submit a responsible entity risk, consequence and contingency plan from annually to every three years. In simple terms this means responsible entities like large thermal waste-to-energy services will no longer have to regularly report on risks of serious failures to the provision of their services and the actions that they are taking to minimise or prevent such risks. As I have spoken about many times in this place before, Victoria is set to become the waste energy capital of Australia. To reduce environmental oversight at this time beggars belief.
We are also deeply concerned about the change in this bill to abolish the Victorian Environmental Assessment Council and the Victorian Marine and Coastal Council. The Victorian Environmental Assessment Council is responsible for scientifically assessing environmental biodiversity and other values and threats in the immediate protection areas and state forests of eastern Victoria.
While the functions of the commissioner for environmental sustainability are set to be expanded to capture some of the investigation and assessment functions being abolished, expertise will be lost and oversight weakened through reduced reporting obligations. The Victorian Marine and Coastal Council is the state’s peak advisory body on coastal and marine issues, providing expert stakeholder-informed independent advice on marine and coastal issues to the Minister for Environment. Disappointingly, unlike the Victorian Environmental Assessment Council, this bill does not make provisions for these functions to be done elsewhere. Again we see a cloak-and-dagger approach where cost cutting gets used as an excuse to remove or reduce government oversight, and it will be the mental health and environment sectors that suffer the most. For these reasons Legalise Cannabis Victoria cannot support this bill.
Related:
- Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission cuts – Rachel Payne
- Mental health service gaps in Casey and Cardinia – Rachel Payne
- Motion to refer inquiry – Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health – Rachel Payne
- Zoning loophole raises alarm on environmental safeguards – Rachel Payne
- Data needed to justify landfill buffer reduction – Rachel Payne
