Tim Read

Noting rising COVID-19 hospitalisations, in May 2022 he accused the government of ‘sleepwalking towards a health crisis’, and advocated for a government to launch a preemptive public health campaign for winter to promote masks, indoor air-quality and government grants for HEPA filters, and vaccination. Despite support from the Australian Medical Association, the Victorian Premier criticised his calls as “pure rank politics”, stating, “I’m terribly sorry but I’m not taking public health advice from them (the Greens), I’m just not.”

In July 2022 Read called for the government to offer people free masks to people on public transport, a move subsequently announced by the Victorian government in August that year.

In 2020 he was credited in playing a key role in preventing a controversial change to the Judicial Proceedings Reports Act 1958 which would have potentially criminalised the families of dead victims of sexual assault naming the victim, unless they had first obtained a court order.

In 2019, he called for pill-testing and the decriminalisation of public drunkenness in his first two adjournment matters, for the later calling on the Attorney-General to ‘form a working group to establish a process to care for people found to be intoxicated in public’ and to ‘establish appropriate facilities, instead of relying on police cells’ - the path to decriminalisation ultimately announced by the Victorian government later that year.

Tim Read is an Australian politician. He has been a Greens member of the Victorian Legislative Assembly since November 2018, representing the seat of Brunswick. A former general practitioner, and medical researcher with a PhD on the epidemiology of sexually transmitted infections, he is the current Victorian Greens Spokesperson for Health, Justice, Integrity and Science.

From 2015 he was a National Health and Medical Research Council early career research fellow at Monash University.

Read had previously run for the Greens at the 2013 federal election for Wills, and at the 2014 Victorian election for Brunswick. In the 2018 Victorian election he contested and won the seat of Brunswick, the first-time a non-Labor aligned MP had been elected in the seat’s history.

The Victorian Greens adopted a non-partisan, health and science backed policy to manage the pandemic, largely seeking to work collaboratively with the Victorian Labor Government during the crisis, including negotiating the controversial amendments to the Public Health and Wellbeing Act 2008. However, Read also publicly spoke against the ‘military’ response of Victoria Police towards anti-lockdown protesters, and against the need for Victorians to be locked out of their State when the COVID-19 virus was already known to be circulating in Victoria.

He completed a Postgraduate Diploma of Epidemiology in 2007, and in 2014, he completed his Doctor of Philosophy, titled ‘Studies in the epidemiology of human papillomavirus, the early detection of anal cancer and the control of human immunodeficiency virus.’

Read began specialty training, and from 1998 was sexual health physician and became medical coordinator of the HIV clinic at the Melbourne Sexual Health Centre, and from 2005 as a sessional sexual health physician at the Royal Melbourne Hospital.

Read attended the University of Melbourne, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery degree in 1985.