MP celebrates a strong career

BELLARINE MP Lisa Neville is now recovering from COVID-19, diagnosed within 24-hours of her announcement last month that she’ll retire at the coming election
in November.

It’s not exactly how she pictured her departure, particularly as the immunocompromised MP has hade five vaccinations against the virus, but the 20-year state parliamentary veteran is otherwise leaving the way she wanted.

“While your seat’s in a really strong position… when there’s a level of respect for you and you’ve left some legacies in your portfolios… obviously health has not been an ideal contributor to that, but it’s still been very much on my own terms, not to be pushed, not to be seen as being there too long, not to have lost the election.

“We should celebrate people who know when it’s time to go.”

During the depths of the pandemic lockdowns, the state’s longest-serving police minister worked from her kitchen bench while making decisions that affected
every Victorian.

“That took the most personal toll…every decision was agonised. The pandemic was nothing like you can plan for, it went on and on and on and it keeps going on.”

Ms Neville barely had time to draw breath between the pandemic and the Black Saturday bushfires, and did not do so until hospitalised with Crohn’s disease last year.

“I was starting to get pretty unwell about middle of 2020, I was trying to manage on my own, you weren’t really seeing doctors, I got extra work.”

Acknowledging that her government did not get everything right during the pandemic – including hotel quarantine – she’s confident Daniel Andrews and Labor will be returned at the November poll.

“We might lose some seats around the edges, I don’t think you go through a big event like the pandemic where that doesn’t happen… but I think the opposition have still got a long way to go to make ground.

“We socially transformed Victoria… people know who we are.”

Closer to home, Ms Neville feels her work as a local member is almost complete.

“I’m determined to get the DAL done,” she said of the Bellarine Distinctive Areas and Landscapes policy, that will determine planning growth in the region for decades to come.

“Every school has been upgraded…we subsidised the Portarlington ferry, the Drysdale bypass, sports precincts, extended irrigation to Bellarine growers…”

Anti-fracking campaigner and Labor staffer Alison Marchant has been named as Ms Neville’s successor to contest the seat of Bellarine at the coming election.