I rise to speak in strong support of the Workplace Protection Orders Bill 2026.
In Northcote we are incredibly proud of our local shops, cafes, restaurants and our beautiful retail precincts.
High Street has even been named, and is the proud title holder of, the coolest street in the world. That is something that brings visitors from near and far to our suburbs.
Of course, behind the venues that make up our wonderful retail precincts, which we all love, are the thousands of people simply doing their jobs – the person opening the cafe really early in the morning, the young person on the supermarket checkout at Northcote Plaza, the pharmacy worker helping someone access their medication, the shop assistant working late, the tram driver getting people home.
Some 2.8 per cent of employed people in Northcote work in cafes and restaurants. It is above the Victorian average of 2.4 per cent and the fourth largest industry of employment in my electorate.
Another 6 per cent of employees in Northcote are sales workers, and these workers form an enormous part of our local economy, our community and the fabric of our suburbs.
They should be able to go to work, to do their job and to come home safely.
For many young Victorians, a supermarket, a cafe, a fast-food restaurant, a local shop or a clothing store is their first experience of work.
Around a third of retail workers are under the age of 24, and most retail workers are women.
Your first job should be about earning some money, learning some new skills and gaining some independence.
It should not be where you learn that being screamed at is something that you should tolerate, and it certainly should not be somewhere you are expected to accept violence, yet almost nine in 10 retail workers have reported experiencing verbal abuse.
More than half of retailers report experiencing physical abuse monthly or even more often, and around 800,000 retail crime incidents were reported across Australia in a single year.
Behind every one of those statistics is a person who has to come back and do their next shift, and that is hard.
There are particular workers who do find themselves on the front line.
I recall just a few weeks ago my husband and I were at one of the local restaurants in Northcote on High Street. We went for dinner, and we were just chatting casually to one of the floor staff. We could see that she was a little bit off, and so we inquired a little bit. Just a few hours earlier they had had a really awful incident with a customer who became increasingly aggressive, asking for things that were not on the menu and demanding more alcohol, to the point where they ended up smashing the front door glass pane of the restaurant itself.
These workers and the team that are at that restaurant pulled themselves together and carried on. They kept going with the lunch service and the dinner service, but you could see that they were shaken up.
They were shaken and rattled by it, yet they had to just persevere. That is not what we want in Victoria.
People should not have to face threats or intimidation or violence just for doing their jobs and for serving people, so Labor does not accept that violence and abuse are simply part of doing the job.
That belief sits within a much longer record that we have in Victoria.
When we have seen gaps in the protections available to working people, the Victorian Labor government has acted.
We have introduced workplace manslaughter laws that I was very proud to speak on, because nobody should go to work and then not come home and because the most serious failures to keep workers safe should have serious consequences.
We established labour hire licensing to tackle exploitation and lift standards for vulnerable workers. We established portable long service leave in industries where the nature of employment means workers could otherwise spend years doing the same work without ever receiving that entitlement.
We strengthened protections against sexual harassment at work through restricting the use of non-disclosure agreements.
And last year, when retail, fast food, hospo and transport workers told us about the violence and abuse they were experiencing, we acted again: we introduced new criminal offences for assaulting, threatening and intimidating these workers.
Serious assault or threats of assault can now attract up to five years imprisonment, alongside separate offences for lower-level assaults, threats and intimidation.
These reforms all respond to different problems, but there is a common principle behind them: the law should keep pace with what people are experiencing at work.
That brings us directly to this bill, because after strengthening the consequences for attacking a worker, there was another practical problem we needed to address: what happens when they come back?
What happens when someone has already threatened a pharmacy worker or a shop assistant or a supermarket worker and they know exactly where that person will be the next day?
What happens when someone has repeatedly caused trouble at the same workplace and the people working there see them walking towards the door again?
The criminal law can deal with what someone has already done, but the workplace protection orders give us another way to help prevent them from doing it again, and that is the gap that this bill addresses.
Where someone has engaged in unacceptable conduct at a covered workplace, there is a true likelihood that they will do it again, and a court can consider an order appropriate, and the protections can be put in place.
That might mean preventing someone from returning to the workplace.
It might mean preventing them from contacting a worker.
It could mean requiring them to stay away from a particular shopping centre or car park or to keep a specified distance from the workplace.
And the orders have teeth: breaching a workplace protection order will be a criminal offence carrying up to two years imprisonment, a fine of more than $50,000 or both. Importantly, the worker who has already been subjected to that behaviour does not then have to carry the entire responsibility of seeking protection themselves: an eligible employer can seek an order on behalf of their workers.
Registered employee unions can also apply, including independently, where an employer is unable or unwilling to act.
That gives workers more than one pathway to protection and recognises something very practical: someone who has already been assaulted, stalked or seriously threatened should not simply be told what happens next is entirely up to them.
This is an additional tool for workplaces to keep their people safe, and I know there will be questions about the scope of this scheme, but what about workers in other industries, that sort of thing? Those workers matter too, and this bill does not suggest otherwise, nor does it pretend to solve every form of occupational violence in every workplace, but it establishes a targeted new preventative scheme for particular customer-facing workplaces where there is a demonstrated problem of repeat, unacceptable conduct.
It also builds on the broader criminal protections we introduced last year, which extend across retail, fast food, hospitality and transport.
People on the front line told government they needed another way to deal with repeat threatening and violent behaviour. Employers told us they needed another tool to keep their workplaces safe, and we listened, and this is the outcome of that listening.
There is also a bit of a political history here that is worth reflecting on.
The protections working Victorians have today simply did not simply just appear out of nowhere: people fought for safer workplaces; they fought for fair pay and decent conditions; they fought for leave and time with their families; and they fought for the principle that when you go to work your employer and your government have obligations to you too.
The mighty union movement has been at the centre of those fights, and I particularly want to acknowledge the SDA and the Transport Workers Union for their collective action and their leadership across many domains of workers rights.
Our Labor government has turned so many of their principles into rights protected in law, and that history matters because workplace protections can never be taken for granted.
We know the Liberal Party’s record when it comes to strengthening workplace rights, and now Victorians face the prospect of a Liberal Party increasingly looking to One Nation for support – a party with its own woeful record of opposing stronger rights and protections for working people.
There is a very big difference between putting on a high-vis vest and shaking the hand of a retail worker for a photo and actually doing the work of government and strengthening rights for the person wearing that retail outfit.
When politicians argue that workplace protections have gone too far, working people are entitled to ask: which protections?
Which protections have gone too far?
We do not think any have gone too far, and we will defend them to the last.
I commend the bill.
