Wednesday, 7 February 2024

Government performance

Tim READ (Brunswick) (17:01): A few weeks ago the wonderful team at our parliamentary library prepared an online tool that ranked the 2021 ABS census data for each Victorian electoral district. As the members representing these districts, I am sure much of this was not surprising to us; although for my part, learning such details as the fact that 2493 people in Brunswick ride a bike to work is not only interesting but adds weight to my calls for better cycling infrastructure in my electorate. By the way, that is the highest number in Victoria, and in fact Brunswick made up 11 per cent of all Victoria’s bike trips to work that year. Brunswick is also the 11th-youngest electorate, with a median age of 34. Given this is a grievance debate, I can admit to grieving somewhat for my own relative birthdate, but I feel more aggrieved knowing the many challenges the majority of these young constituents are facing today, particularly as someone who has enjoyed so many of the opportunities afforded to my generation, like free university and affordable housing.

I felt some hope for a safe future climate when I marched amongst almost 100,000 students and families during the School Strike 4 Climate in 2019, but since the pandemic I have been growing more concerned that we are losing our momentum on climate. While there have been some positive initiatives by this Victorian government, we must do more to avert extreme global heating, which will bring more catastrophic weather events, coastal inundation, droughts and floods, and the resulting loss of biodiversity. The Victorian Greens believe that the government should do much more and do it faster, and that with more ambition we could progressively close all of Victoria’s dirty coal-fired power stations well before 2035. Labor must commit much more funding to renewables, more than the paltry $1 billion – and admittedly a nice retro logo – currently committed to the SEC. The fact remains that catastrophic climate change cannot be avoided while governments like Victoria’s continue to prolong the life of coal and open up multiple new gas projects.

Everyone agrees much more will be needed, so the question is: why is much more not being done now instead of years later, when it will cost more and may be too late to influence other jurisdictions? It is already too late to avoid significant climate impacts which could have been prevented, considering we are almost at 1.5 degrees of global heating already. At this level of heating, many climate tipping points are within reach, and these include the release of methane from melting permafrost, the loss of protective reflection from polar ice and the loss of CO₂-absorbing forests around the world. All of these losses will accelerate global heating. So let us do what we need to do to close coal faster and boost funding to the SEC. It is the least we can do.

While climate may be the most significant, there are plenty of other issues disproportionately affecting young people right now, and one of the biggest is housing – a problem especially felt by young people and the almost 50 per cent of people who rent in Brunswick. Today’s young generation are paying the price for governments that have promoted housing as a speculative asset for investors, developers and land bankers rather than as an essential human right to shelter – or, as Alan Kohler recently put it:

… a cartel of the majority, with banks and developers helping them maintain high house prices with the political class actively supporting them.

Australia’s only apparent human right relating to housing is the implicit right of those privileged to own a home – or multiple homes – to see the value of their assets and rental income streams increase year on year. At the same time, government policies continue to promote housing demand, encouraging young people to literally mortgage their futures to try and get in at the bottom of this pyramid scheme, lest house prices actually fall, jeopardising the stamp duty that comprises over a third of the state’s revenue.

I grieve that, like a guest arriving decades late to a party, the Victorian government’s belated housing solution announced last year was simply a rebranding of the same failed policies of yesteryear – more aspirational annual building targets, no mandatory social and public housing requirements on new housing developments and an inexcusably naive hope that property developers will for some reason voluntarily lower their profit margins by selling cheaper homes. Meanwhile, a single young person with a Twitter account called Purplepingers has done more to enforce Victoria’s legislated minimum rental standards and hold dodgy landlords to account than the whole panoply of departments in the Victorian state government. So I grieve for those facing continuing unlimited rent increases, prohibitive stamp duties, the primacy of investor rights to profit through negative gearing and capital gains discounts, unenforced minimal rental standards and, incredibly, the privatisation of two-thirds of prime public housing land, which will be forever lost as a housing safety net for future generations.

But I also grieve it seems almost every year for the senseless stubbornness of the Victorian government, which is risking the health and sometimes the lives of young people taking pills at music festivals and venues. I cannot believe that after five years I still have the same talking points today, calling on the government to introduce a pill-testing and early warning drug alert service. I am still contacted by peak health agencies, unions, doctors, paramedics and pharmacists frustrated by a government that for political reasons will only do pill testing on a blood sample from a young ICU patient or on an eye fluid sample from someone in the morgue. How many coronial inquests on young lives are required for the government to finally listen to health advice on pill testing? Sadly, it seems it is not a rhetorical question. We know the answer is currently more than four.

On the question of Victoria’s drug policy more broadly we should all grieve that Labor has wasted the last decade by persisting with the prohibitionist drug strategy devised by Richard Nixon more than 50 years ago. Despite half a century of failure Victoria continues to treat too many young drug users as criminals in this state. They are very often disadvantaged and often have one or more mental or physical illnesses when they are charged with possessing a small amount of cannabis. Billions have been wasted on law enforcement and prisons as a solution for drug use and the related antisocial behaviour of children and young people, which typically results from their own trauma, abuse, neglect, mental illness and poverty. So let us make cannabis legal, introduce pill testing and save billions of dollars on law enforcement for use in health-based drug and alcohol programs.

I have talked already about inequality and opportunity for housing, and financial inequality more broadly is one of many drivers of mental illness in our society. It does not take an expert to work out that if you cannot afford to live, to feed yourself or your family, to keep a roof over your head and to see a doctor, dentist or therapist when you need to then your mental health can suffer. There is no shortage of studies clearly demonstrating the links between disadvantage, financial insecurity and mental ill health. Here in Victoria the Greens found last year in a survey of people in our electorates that there is a very clear link between mental distress and the cost-of-living crisis. We heard from people who are struggling to see a psychologist or pay for medication on top of all their other bills, and we heard from people who are suddenly experiencing a decline in their mental health precisely because it is so difficult to stay on top of rent and food. It is a vicious circle, and a bold government would step in and stop it.

Of course recognition of the legitimate statewide crisis in mental health is one of the rare points of agreement among us in this place. The Greens commended the government for calling the Royal Commission into Victoria’s – cruelly underfunded – Mental Health System, and we support the implementation of all of its recommendations. But we should acknowledge that even the full implementation of these recommendations will not solve some of the big problems impacting young people’s mental health today.

We need to build and fund the workforce responding to their needs. In this regard we need to fund Lifeline so that it can respond to the increased number of calls it is receiving from Victoria. The current low level of funding means that Lifeline centres in Victoria are unable to meet this new level of demand. In fact Victorians making calls to Lifeline are rerouted to other states, and the state government seems happy knowing that other states are picking up the tab.

Someone recently said to me that any failure in policy ends up being a problem of mental health. There is a whole lot we can do to reduce preventable mental illness, to fix up our failed social policies so that many people will not end up experiencing avoidable mental distress in the first place and to ensure that people who need treatment for mental illness are secure and supported. Housing is a human right, and we should recognise this not by knocking down 44 public housing towers in Victoria and selling off land to private developers but by investing in world-class public housing as the primary health policy that it is, keeping Victorians stable, secure and out of homelessness. We can stop the shameless price gouging of the big supermarkets and other corporations who are driving up our cost of living, contributing to mental distress and, indirectly, to housing insecurity and homelessness, and while we are doing all of this we could also make sure our mental health sector in Victoria is properly resourced to support people in need of treatment.

We are beginning to fall behind in implementing the recommendations of the royal commission. This includes implementing recommendation 29, to establish a new agency led by people with lived experience of mental illness or psychological distress to ensure that the sector is informed by their experience. It also includes further progress on recommendation 10, to shift to a health-led response to mental health emergencies instead of a default police-led response, and most importantly it includes supporting and properly funding the mental health workforce so that under-resourced teams do not feel the need to rely on outdated practices like seclusion and restraint.

Despite my grievances today, I still believe that there is hope for younger Victorians in the generations to come, and this hope of course comes from the current younger generations themselves. It is the younger generation today that is more engaged in the politics and problems of our society, both in Victoria and across the world, and surely the future is bright when we are increasingly seeing that even as people age they are not retreating into a life of privilege but are continuing to live up to their values. The trend is that they are continuing to work for a better world and continuing to vote progressively. It seems more and more are defying the old adage that you get more selfish and conservative as you age, and this change is something I certainly do not grieve about.