Victorians deserve greater insight into how government decisions are made

In March 2021, when the final report from the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System was released, then-premier Daniel Andrews made the stakes involved in the commission’s work and the government’s response to it clear.

Committing the government to implementation of all 65 recommendations in the report – what he called “the biggest social reform in a generation” – he concluded that as things stood, “we are failing. And it is costing lives.”

Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan.Credit: Darrian Traynor

More than three years on, and with the premiership having passed to Jacinta Allan, there are worrying signs that the eight regional mental health boards that were supposed to be rolled out across the state by the end of 2023 are now to be shelved altogether.

Reference to the boards, which aimed to ensure greater community control of services, has been removed from the Department of Health’s website, and key figures in the sector complain of a vacuum in communications about the next steps in what was supposed to be a years-long process to improve provision.

It would not be the first time that the Allan government opted to turn away from implementing advice it has sought. Its April decision to walk away from plans for a safe injecting room in the CBD flew in the face of recommendations by former police commissioner Ken Lay, in an area where lives are also being lost.

But the more worrying element of an about-turn on mental health boards – if that is indeed what is happening – is the lack of transparency in how such decisions are made.

Responding to questions from The Age, the government said the health landscape had changed over the past three years, and they would consult the sector about how governance would work alongside new “health service networks” the government opted to create when it chose not to pursue hospital amalgamations.

Vrinda Edan, the chief executive of the Victorian Mental Illness Awareness Council, summed up the experience of many when she told us that “there’s not been any official information that we’ve been given about what’s been happening”.

When residents of the public housing towers in Flemington and North Melbourne went to court to find out the basis for the Homes Victoria decision to demolish and redevelop the places where they live, they were told by the government’s lawyers that no such documents existed.

Then premier Daniel Andrews committed the government to implement all 65 recommendations in the mental health royal commission reportCredit: Eddie Jim

Since February, The Age has been seeking access under freedom of information laws to a set of documents that do exist, relating to departmental and ministerial briefings on the towers, engineering assessments and cost-benefit analyses for each site.

After multiple deadline extensions and a subsequent complaint by The Age to the Office of the Victorian Information Commissioner, the Department of Housing informed us in September that while 941 pages of documents – including three briefings to the minister for housing and multiple consultant reports – were found as part of the request, it would grant access to only 57 pages of one report already in the public domain.

This sort of stalling and secrecy raises obvious questions for probity and confidence in government – as mental health advocate Simon Katterl put it, “it’s hard to trust that governments keep their promises when they just change what they promised”. But it also has far more tangible, practical consequences.

There was a special sitting of parliament for the presentation of the royal commission report.

On the largest of all the government’s projects, the proposed $34.5 billion Suburban Rail Loop, federal funding is being held up by the state government’s failure to present the details of its case. As Infrastructure Australia pointed out, this makes it impossible to determine whether the proposal is a “reasonable investment” because we cannot know how benefits from the plan were calculated, and whether alternatives to the 26-kilometre underground rail line were considered.

The problem is echoed in the debate over the housing towers, where the government’s High-Rise Redevelopment Program, announced with great fanfare but to widespread criticism just days before Andrews left office, lacks detail of how it will be financed or its development model.

This is a bad way to implement such consequential policies because it leaves us unable to assess the merits of alternative approaches and hence the wisdom of the option presented to us. That may strengthen the government’s hand politically, but at what price to Victorians?

Many of these policy decisions were made during the period of electoral supremacy enjoyed by Andrews, but as we have noted previously, the Allan government is not simply their inheritor; Allan was right beside Andrews in a matching hard hat when many of these plans were announced.

It may be that her government will ultimately be vindicated on mental health boards or housing towers or many other policy matters. But those affected by these policies – and, indeed, we who pay for them – deserve far greater insight and input into how they are made.