On July 29, 2026, Tim Read stood before a packed Victorian Legislative Assembly chamber and closed his final speech to parliament with the line: "Politics is hope in motion." The Greens MP for Brunswick, a physician who had spent two decades researching HIV and other sexually transmitted infections before turning to drug-policy and public-health reform in state politics, died on September 19, 2026. He was 64.

Read's public-health instincts predated his medical degree. As a University of Melbourne medical student in the mid-1980s, he took part in the Billboard Utilising Graffitists Against Unhealthy Promotions campaign, spray-painting health warnings over cigarette advertisements, and was arrested for it before he had finished his training. He graduated with a Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery from the University of Melbourne in 1985 and later worked as a general practitioner in Brunswick from the early 1990s, in the same suburb he would go on to represent in state parliament decades afterward.

He then specialised in sexual health, coordinating a public HIV clinic and treating patients through some of the hardest years of the epidemic, before completing a PhD on the epidemiology of sexually transmitted infections in 2014. His research produced dozens of peer-reviewed papers on HIV, HPV and antibiotic-resistant infections, work he set aside when he entered state politics.

Read ran unsuccessfully for federal parliament in 2013 and for the state seat of Brunswick in 2014 before winning it in 2018 by a margin of just 0.6 percent, the first time the Greens had taken a seat Labor had held for more than a century, according to ABC News. He held the seat more comfortably in 2022 and served as the Victorian Greens' spokesperson for health, justice, integrity and science.

In parliament he pushed drug policy toward harm reduction, co-sponsoring Victoria's first pill-testing bill in 2019 with fellow Greens MPs Ellen Sandell, Sam Hibbins and Samantha Ratnam and Reason Party MP Fiona Patten, and campaigning for tobacco and vaping licensing, the decriminalisation of public drunkenness, and a statewide plan to eliminate congenital syphilis and HIV transmission. From 2023 he chaired parliament's Integrity and Oversight Committee, which oversees Victoria's anti-corruption commission, IBAC.

In his final year in parliament, Read campaigned against the state government's plan to close VicHealth, a health-promotion foundation with bipartisan roots. "Cutting VicHealth would be a false economy," he said, accusing the government of "clipping the wings" of the agency for years, according to ABC News. He announced in January 2026 that he would not contest that November's election, and delivered his valedictory address that July to a chamber that included his family and former Greens leader Samantha Ratnam, sitting down to a standing ovation, according to Brunswick Voice.

Victorian Greens leader Ellen Sandell called him "the kindest, funniest and most fundamentally decent of people" and said he was "the most liked MP in state parliament." Opposition Leader Jess Wilson said he "was an honest broker, someone who listened, engaged in good faith and approached every discussion with respect and integrity." Read is survived by his wife, Angela, and their children, Louisa and Martin.

What Read built outlives the seat he held. Victoria's pill-testing framework, the tougher oversight powers written into IBAC's mandate, and the patients he once treated at a public HIV clinic all carry the same instinct that sent a medical student up a billboard ladder with a spray can decades before it ever sent a doctor into parliament: prevention over punishment.