Thursday, 20 February 2025

 Wendy LOVELL (Northern Victoria) (17:39): (1436) My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Health, and the action that I seek is for the minister to appoint a new person as chairperson to the board of Remembrance Parks Central Victoria trust and to rule out reappointing the current chairperson. The current chairperson of Remembrance Parks Central Victoria was appointed in September 2020, and her term ends on 28 February 2025. During her tenure the chair has presided over a series of governance failures that are clearly disqualifying, and the government should not reappoint her after the current term ends. Since taking the chair, the trust has lurched from scandal to scandal, demonstrated financial incompetence and failed to meet the reporting requirements for a public entity. It is a statutory obligation set down in section 18H of the Cemeteries and Crematoria Act 2003 that a class A cemetery trust must hold an annual meeting before 30 December in each calendar year and must make the cemetery trust’s most recent annual report available. But RPCV has failed in these two basic obligations. The last annual report lodged by the trust was for the 2021–22 year, and no annual report for the trust has been released for the 2022–23 or 2023–24 years. That is two years without annual reports being released and without annual general meetings being held on time or held at all.

Missing annual general meetings means the board has completely avoided public scrutiny and accountability at the very time that its cemeteries have been involved in a series of operational scandals. In 2022 RPCV attempted to implement an exorbitant increase in the cost of burials. In 2023 came the adornments scandal, when cherished family mementos were removed from graves without permission, then 2024 started with two controversial incidents in which graves were recklessly disturbed by maintenance crews. The most recent controversy was to propose a dramatic increase to the cost of a plot and burial to make up for years of financial irresponsibility in which the trust posted operating deficits in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Under the Public Administration Act 2004 the minister is responsible to Parliament for the public entity exercising its functions, and yet Minister for Health Mary-Anne Thomas has failed to take responsibility, has failed to provide answers for the ongoing governance failures and has failed to take action to remove the board chair. The minister must not reappoint the current chair. It is essential that she appoints someone who can establish good governance at this cemetery trust.