Just over three years since our petition was launched, over 100 emails, phone calls, our petition being tabled in Victorian Parliament with associated media coverage, and the support of Stuart Grimley when a member of Victorian Parliament, and most recently Zoe Daniel MP and Rachel Payne MP, the Victorian government has finally responded.

We cannot share what the Deputy Secretary, Family Safety Victoria communicated, because sadly it came with the warning that any disclosure, copying or use of the information is prohibited, and may be subject to legal privilege.

We can share, more importantly, what was not communicated. 

There was no response to, nor mention of, what our petition seeks.

• A meeting with The Hon. Mary-Anne Thomas MP, the Victorian Minister for Health, to discuss what a meaningful, restorative investment in the lives of survivors, families, partners and the communities impacted, can look like. Including funding the facilitation of the co-design of responses, with those impacted.  
  
  
• Our vision includes piloting frameworks of accessible and integrated service systems that are already working well elsewhere in Australia, and in the world, in a couple of Victorian communities devastated by historic, systemic institutional child sexual abuse. The Ballarat community, and the Bayside communities of Melbourne.
  
  
• We are also asking The Hon. Mary-Anne Thomas to work with the relevant decision makers within Victorian State and Federal Government, to ask that they collectively fund a person-centred approach to survivors, their families and communities, that requires knocking on just one door. Designed around the holistic needs of individuals and families, that provides victims and survivors of institutional child sexual abuse with "no wrong door."

The urgent action our petition seeks, is well known to the Victorian State and Federal Governments, given:

• 2017 Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse Report, Recommendation 9.1,
• Recommendations of the Victorian Government submission to the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System July, 2019,
• The Federal Department of Social Services Stakeholder consultation in 2020 with victims and survivors of child sexual abuse and their advocates, practitioners, non-government organisations, academics and government officials identification of key gaps in Victoria, and
• Mental Health and Wellbeing Bill 2022, tabled in Victorian Parliament, June 2022, includes the establishment of Regional multiagency panels.

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We have responded to the the Deputy Secretary, Family Safety Victoria, communicating that what our petition seeks remains unchanged.

We have thanked Zoe Daniel MP and Rachel Payne MP for their support. Rachel Payne engaged directly with the former Minister for Prevention of Family Violence, Vicki Ward MP on our behalf, and Minister Ward was provided with our petition.

And we thank you again for supporting our petition.