I rise to speak on the Justice Legislation Further Amendment (Miscellaneous) Bill 2025. Like so many bills that have come before the house in my almost eight years here, this one aims to make a number of really important changes to improve the operation of our courts and, most importantly, our justice system.

Talking about courts and our justice system, I do want to take a quick opportunity to once again note and acknowledge the recent opening of the Wyndham law courts at the end of last year. Having been the member for Tarneit and now the member for Laverton, I have opened many, many, many, many projects in Wyndham, and being at the opening there alongside my great friends the member for Tarneit, the member for Werribee and the member for Point Cook and having that first glimpse at those law courts, I have to say they were absolutely amazing. My breath was completely taken away by the outside architecture of this amazing building and then going in and seeing the entrance and the foyer and going up and having a look at the courts. It has been a long time since I have been in court. I was a judge’s associate many, many moons ago and spent a lot of time in court in Queensland. Courts have a particular smell. I often think that they have a smell sort of like this room here, which is a little bit scary. I say it is just the age of the seats, the chairs and all that kind of thing here in the room. But I have to say these law courts were absolutely incredible. The courtrooms were the sort of place where you would just love to go and watch. It was absolutely amazing. When I spoke to the Chief Justice of Victoria and others in there in the legal fraternity, I said to them, ‘I don’t remember courtrooms being this fabulous.’ I think courtrooms used to have brown carpet or even orange carpet. Orange is a very bright colour, all of those kinds of things, in a courtroom. It was really, I remember, 1960s, 1970s kind of architecture. But seeing Wyndham and looking at the beautiful, beautiful architecture and the wood and the other natural elements and the light that they have brought into those courtrooms – and they have done this specifically not just to be a fabulous place to work and a fabulous place perhaps to go for sentencing, but it was actually explained to me that when you have these really smart architectural sorts of designs built into a place like a courtroom, which can be really adversarial and really confronting for a lot of people, it actually brings the temperature down in the room. It makes people that have got mental health issues a bit more calm. When you have got trials and sentences dealing with really sensitive, tragic circumstances and there are heightened emotions, it can really bring things down. I think it was the Chief Justice who said to me that it enables the judge or the magistrate to have better control in the room – something I think, Speaker, sometimes probably you wish you had here in this place as you take back control.

I say to the community: if you have the opportunity, go and get a coffee, go and have a look, because this is the kind of stuff this Labor government is building, and it is building it for people in Wyndham and it is building it right across Victoria. But I have to say this piece of infrastructure was I think the best and most extraordinary I had seen in eight years – well and truly worth the wait. The Wyndham community are really going to appreciate and love having those law courts there and being able to have justice delivered closer to home.

Those courts also have dedicated Koori Court services, and I checked them out. They were absolutely amazing. That is really about improving access to the justice system for Indigenous Victorians living in the western suburbs, and there are a lot of them. The children’s division and the family hearing day services open in July this year, with the full Koori Court coming online early next year. The law courts there also have VCAT services. Many people in my community do go to VCAT, and they like to know those services are up and running. It is also the first community-based venue to bring VCAT services, would you believe, to Melbourne’s booming western suburbs.

That includes our government’s Rental Dispute Resolution Victoria, a dedicated one-stop shop for all rental matters to be heard and resolved, which is a great win for those living in Melbourne’s west who rent. I have said time and time again here that I have spent many years as a renter and talked about the trials and tribulations that go with that.

In finishing up about Wyndham Law Courts, I will say that we will very soon have a dedicated specialist family violence court. That will be up and running from next year as well, making an absolutely profound difference for families in the western suburbs that find themselves experiencing family violence. In Melbourne’s west, particularly in the Wyndham municipality, we know that the number of family violence call-outs and things happening there in the home is far, far above many other municipalities and is something that I think having this sort of specialist family violence court will be really good for, so people are able to access justice more quickly and closer to home. I mention all of this because physical access to justice is really important. When appearance and timing are things that are crucial in having legal matters heard and resolved and when documents need to be lodged with the courts and things like that, having a courthouse close by with all the services you could possibly need – and then Werribee cop shop, the police station, right next door – leads to better outcomes in communities and better outcomes for community safety. Of course you do not just get that by building more courthouses and expanding services, and this is what I am here to talk about this afternoon. Our law books also have a really important part to play. I have not said the words ‘law books’, I think, since doing my law degree in Queensland, which is a very, very, very long time ago, but that is what this bill is really about.

One of the bigger focuses of this bill is in relation to what we call the legacy suppression orders. This acquits a key recommendation – number 33 – from the Victorian Law Reform Commission’s 2020 report on contempt of court, if anyone is counting. As many of us will know, suppression orders play a really important role in ensuring that sensitive information that is disclosed in a courtroom proceeding – and there can be a lot of things disclosed and a lot of things said in those proceedings –is prevented from being disclosed, repeated and, really importantly, published outside of the courtroom. There are a number of reasons, including to ensure the safety of parties, witnesses or other persons that may be involved in a case. Under the current rules that govern suppression orders – the Open Courts Act 2013 – all suppression orders have an expiry date of up to five years, which in this day and age kind of does not seem a lot. However, legacy suppression orders – orders that have been made by our courts before the act was introduced and came into effect – had no expiry dates attached to them. So what that means is that information is sealed by the order, which effectively has become a permanent gag order. That is what this bill is going to do – in particular, it is going to empower courts to be able to review these orders under the current act.

I have said time and time again here that it is really important that legislation keeps up with the community’s expectations and the times that we live in. Part of the legislative agenda that this government has gone ahead and rolled out while I have been here for the past eight years is sometimes having bills like this, which do not seem that big or that important but are tidying things up and modernising services, procedures, regulations and legislation to ensure they are in step with community expectations. This actual change will be particularly important, and it builds on the work that we have been really busy doing for victim-survivors of sexual assault and violence in freeing them up, finally, to tell their story – prohibiting gag orders, restricting non-disclosure agreements and now this. This gives those victims-survivors greater control, which is something I think they lost when they had that crime committed against them.

This is a really important bill. I do not have time to go through all the bits and pieces, but what I will say is the bill makes a number of changes at its heart – which is always at the heart of Labor governments like ours – that are all about fairness, about dignity and about making sure our justice system truly works for the people that it serves. I think that is a really important reminder to folks here in this place.

It strengthens protections, it removes barriers, it modernises outdated processes and it closes gaps that simply should not exist anymore. From victim-survivors who deserve a voice, to families waiting for answers, to communities who expect a system to keep pace with the world around us, the changes in this bill are sensible. They are meaningful improvements. They reflect the kind of justice system that Victorians want and expect, and they reflect the kind of justice system that Labor is always committed to delivering for all Victorians. This is good, this is practical reform that will make a real difference in people’s lives, no matter where they come from and what pocket of Victoria they live in. I am very pleased to commend it to the house.