Attorney-General Jill Hennessy takes on challenge of law reform

Victoria’s Attorney-General Jill Hennessy says she has the dream job for a lawyer but some see it as a poisoned chalice, as she deals with the biggest legal scandal in the state’s history.

Victorian Attorney-General Jill Hennessy wants to improve access to justice for vulnerable Victorians. Picture: Mark Stewart

Jill Hennessy became Victoria’s Attorney-General right at the wrong time.

After last year’s state election, she was tapped by Premier Daniel Andrews for the job she says every lawyer dreams of getting.

But Hennessy was immediately thrust into the middle of the biggest legal scandal in the state’s history as the High Court revealed the damning truth about Lawyer X.

Her first act as Victoria’s chief law officer was to order a royal commission into the police force’s use of informants.

Jill Hennessy in her Melbourne office. Picture: Mark Stewart

“After the election, my kids were on all sorts of promises about going to the beach and doing all these great things on the weekend,” Hennessy told the Sunday Herald
Sun this week.

“Yet we went straight through an election, to becoming Attorney-General, to ‘Mum’s got to work again this weekend’ because we’re dealing with some big and challenging issues.

“There wasn’t really a moment to come in and exhale. We had to hit and respond to these issues very, very quickly.”

Some observers think the Altona MP was handed a poisoned chalice but she points out her early days as health minister were equally dominated by unforeseen events, with shocking revelations about a string of avoidable baby deaths at Bacchus Marsh Hospital.

Still, Hennessy managed to make health policy a political winner for Labor over the past four years and delivered the reform she says is her proudest achievement — legalising voluntary assisted dying.

Two and a half years ago, while she was crafting the complex legislation, Hennessy was also mourning the death of her mother after a decades-long battle with multiple sclerosis.

“I lived that reform each and every single day,” she said.

Then health minister Jill Hennessy speaking about the Bacchus Marsh hospital in 2014. Picture: Hamish Blair

“I felt great pride and happiness about it coming into effect, but I also know that today there’ll be people at home making decisions about the end of their life, and families confronting enormous grief.”

The Attorney-General is now also Workplace Safety Minister and her phone beeps whenever a workplace death is reported.

She said it was “always a matter of deep frustration” when she saw how Victorians were dying on the job.

“It reminds me a lot of preventable cancer … It’s like vaccinations, these are preventable, we could stop this,” she said.

But Hennessy knows that, unlike health, her portfolios do not necessarily allow for immediate changes to service delivery.

“Law reform takes a long period of time, so I’m having to adjust my expectations about the pace of reform and how quick it is to change things,” she said.

Jill Hennessy with her mother Joan. Picture: Supplied

From her high-rise office overlooking parliament, Hennessy is working on a long list of priorities to tackle in the next 3½ years.

She wants to improve access to justice for vulnerable Victorians, shine a light on the “crimes that go on behind closed doors” — including family violence and child abuse — and better engage victims in the justice process. Hennessy is also struggling with how to make the state’s laws fit for purpose in an era defined by the rise of technology that wasn’t even contemplated when the statutes were drafted.

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“I feel frustrated that I don’t have perfect solutions to that,” she said. But she says she is willing to “accept what lands on your desk” and is sticking by the motto that has served her well over almost a decade in parliament: “Do the right thing, do what needs to be done.”

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