The ‘Mushroom Lady’ case just keeps on delivering. As I wrote recently, her legal team have pounced on an extraordinary court blunder, to try and toss out the verdict.
While the original case was being heard, some bright spark decided to sequester the jury in the same hotel as the prosecutors and media. While there is no indication jurors were potentially tainted by contact with prosecutors or media, CCTV footage of the hotel lobby has mysteriously vanished.
If she ever does see the outside of a cell again, it will be a notably more svelte Erin Patterson who walks on a technicality.
That’s because, while ordinary Australians are left to sleep on the streets and veterans are being told to make do with a maximum $5000 of medical support, a triple murderer is being supplied with weight-loss drugs for ‘free’. Meaning, of course, at the taxpayers’ expense.
Drugs that cost law-abiding Australians hundreds of dollars a pop are gifted to a murdering psychopath.
Labor has approved taxpayer funded Ozempic for Erin Patterson, the triple murderer serving life for the Leongatha beef Wellington lunch, inside Victoria’s maximum security women’s prison, exactly a year to the day since her sentencing.
The approval came to light on Monday, with Patterson starting the jabs in recent weeks inside solitary confinement at the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre, where she remains while the Court of Appeal decides on her retrial bid.
Justice Health’s response was the usual wet lettuce. They would not say whether Patterson’s script is for diabetes or for the waistline. They would not say who approved it. Nobody above a single prescriber had to, because Victoria’s prison rulebook is a blank cheque with a letterhead.
Primary care at Frost is contracted to Western Health. The department’s Quality Framework, published in July 2025, is 56 pages of nothing much. Clause 2.11 tells providers to “prescribe medications as clinically indicated, based on evidence-based guidelines”. That is the entire test. No formulary. No spending cap. No committee. Yet clause 9.23 demands full departmental sign-off before a prisoner sees a dentist. A filling needs a bureaucrat. A fashionable injection needs a pen.
The excuse is as neat as it is circular. She cannot exercise because she is in solitary. She is in solitary because Ben Carroll’s prisons cannot roster enough officers to unlock a door. She’s in prison because she murdered three people. At the pre-sentence hearing, Colin Mandy SC told the court she was locked down some 22 hours a day, one hour in a courtyard. Justice Beale noted a substantial chance she would stay in solitary for years, if not decades, because of her notoriety. Well, cry us a river.
Weight-loss drugs crept into Victorian prisons after Michael Suckling, a plasterer, went into Ravenhall at 82 kilograms and was found dead in his cell in 2021 at 199kg. The coroner found better care might have saved him. Maybe somebody should have just told him not to scarf all the pies in the commissary. Even better, maybe he shouldn’t have killed somebody else with his dangerous driving.
Meanwhile, 7.5 per cent of law-abiding Australians delayed or skipped a script last year because they could not afford it. In the poorest postcodes it was one in 10. Convicted murderers have no such worries.
Opposition police and corrections spokesman Brad Battin slammed the outrageous scheme, demanding an immediate end to taxpayer-funded weight loss injections for prisoners and insisting that a coalition government would prescribe strict diet and physical exercise instead.
“Ben Carroll says he respects taxpayers’ money. This doesn’t look like respect for taxpayers, and it certainly doesn’t look like respect for victims.”
The Court of Appeal has reserved judgement on Patterson’s bid for freedom. Victorian voters have to wait until November to pass judgement on the government that showers criminals with weight-loss drugs while the innocent have to decide between medicines or paying the rent.
