Family First’s Jane Foreman says The Age’s revelations (10 August) that an independent watchdog’s damning report on Victoria’s mental health reforms was secretly rewritten to double the government’s reported progress is proof the state’s Orwellian habit of doctoring inconvenient truths goes all the way to the Premier’s own Cabinet table.
Mrs Foreman says The Age’s reporting shows the Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission’s original report, presented to government in December 2025, found just 54 of the 270 reforms promised after the mental health royal commission had been completed. By the time a reworked version was finally published on 24 June 2026, at least 75 of those ratings had been improved, findings on the impact of budget cuts and stakeholders’ refusal to work with the Department of Health had been deleted, and two of the report’s five original rating categories, including one applied to 32 sub-recommendations with “limited evidence of progress available publicly,” had been scrapped altogether.
The report’s original author, commissioner Annabel Brebner, says the change in methodology “raises questions about the overall reliability and validity of the assessments made.” The four independent commissioners who wrote the original findings were removed by an act of parliament before the rewritten report was released, replaced by an interim commissioner appointed directly by the Minister for Mental Health, Ingrid Stitt.
“Just days after Family First called this out as an endemic cover-up culture, not an isolated incident, The Age has handed us exhibit number four,” said Mrs Foreman. “Sack the independent commissioners, hand the pen to a minister’s own appointee, and delete every rating category that admits failure. That’s not bureaucracy, that’s a Ministry of Truth, and Victorians are entitled to ask why this government keeps needing one.”
Family First says this is the same playbook it exposed on 6 August, when the Operation Richmond IBAC report revealed former Premier Daniel Andrews and former minister Gavin Jennings had secretly negotiated the CFA and MFB pay deal that created Fire Rescue Victoria without telling the responsible minister or the services themselves, and the same playbook behind July’s revelations that a 33-page CFA report on the state’s firefighting capability was cut to 18 pages after talks with government.
Mrs Foreman says then-Deputy Premier Ben Carroll sat in Cabinet throughout the period the mental health report was delayed and rewritten, including when the bill to abolish the Commission’s independent commissioners was introduced in December 2025 and when it took effect in April 2026, months before he became Premier in July.
“Ben Carroll wasn’t a bystander to this cover-up, he was Deputy Premier and at the Cabinet table when this government decided to abolish the very commissioners who wrote the honest version of this report,” said Mrs Foreman. “He can’t wash his hands of a rewrite that happened on his watch and then ask Victorians to trust him now that he’s Premier. Every one of these cover-ups happened while he was one of the most senior people in the room. Real accountability doesn’t change just because the person at the top gets a new title.”
Family First is calling for the immediate restoration of the Commission’s original four-commissioner model and its full five-category rating system, an independent audit of all correspondence between the Department of Health and the Commission relied on to alter the report, and new legislation preventing any minister’s department from editing an independent watchdog’s findings before publication.
Mrs Foreman says the pattern uncovered in many other areas and now in mental health is exactly why Victoria needs Family First’s genuinely independent voice in the Legislative Council after November — because this government policing itself clearly is not working.
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