Melina BATH (Eastern Victoria) (15:42): Acting President, let me read to you, as I rise to speak on the Corrections Legislation Amendment Bill 2025, some comments that have come from the cultural review of the adult custodial corrections system 2022 report. This is quoting a staff member. It is out of that document, and I am assuming that that staff member, notably, will be undisclosed. They say:
A good day is when no one gets assaulted or threatened.
A good day in this system is when no-one gets assaulted or threatened. The second part of that document that I want to relate to the house is some WorkCover data: staff working in front-end and maximum-security locations are most at risk, accounting for 70 per cent of mental injury claims. It is a good day if you go home without being assaulted or threatened. How many jobs have you been in where that was your primary thought throughout your day – ‘I need to get home without being (a) assaulted or (b) threatened.’ That provides the context – the dangerous context, the risky nature – of the work that people in the correctional system do.
I know my Liberal and National colleagues Mr Michael O’Brien and Mr David Southwick only recently, and I thank the minister for enabling this, were out at a particular correctional facility and in the period of time that they were there – less than a couple of hours, maybe an hour and a bit – there were two emergency alerts that rang through that system. In that short period of time, we will say 90 minutes, there were two emergency alerts, and it just shows the level of risk people are under in that situation and the fraught and dangerous nature of that workplace.
Before I begin my contribution I just want to acknowledge the people who work in that system in my region, Eastern Victoria Region, which has Fulham Correctional Centre. When I first came in here many years ago, I had the opportunity to have a very fulsome look around and tour of that centre. I spoke with many of the guards that were there, and we went into the different sections. It is a different situation and mindset. Truly they were very well prepared and trained for these sorts of situations, but they are always on alert. They are always conscious of what could happen and the double-locking that could occur. They are very mindful of the criminality of the members that are in there, and of course there are different rankings and different rates. But there are always opportunities for people to take a pair of scissors or take some sort of an implement and turn it into a weapon. So I feel for that person that says, ‘I just want to get home without being assaulted or threatened.’
We heard from the former speaker that we are toughening up our bail laws. I feel like this has been semantics ping-pong over the last five to six years. In 2008 the Labor government said that they were tightening the bail laws to be some of the strongest bail laws in the nation, and then back in 2023 they walked some of those bail laws back. I will not have time to go through them today, but they walked them back. They decided they had better soften them. They had been speaking to various people. Maybe they were thinking about the polls. And now we know that, come this month, we are going back and the Premier is talking about the toughest bail laws again in 2025.
A member interjected.
Melina BATH: Tougher-er – much more tougher-er. I do not know. I find it is semantics. I guess you go out into our communities and talk to people in our communities. I raised a constituent issue earlier this week on crime in our streets and the lack of protection that people feel. This is no reflection on our wonderful Victorian police members, who I have the opportunity to speak to and see on occasion down the street. But this particular person was shopping in her regular shopping centre in what I would consider to be and what should be a safe area not far from my office, and she saw crime and theft and came in quite bewildered and scared. That was one microcosm of an example of where people are not feeling more safe under this Labor government, irrespective of the more tough or less tough bail laws that they seem to be pushing.
I think the Liberals and Nationals have been quite strong over the years. In doing the research for this bill, I want to acknowledge that there are amendments to three acts: the Serious Offenders Act 2018, the Corrections Act 1986 and the Sex Offenders Registration Act 2004, all of which we are not opposing. We want to see a greater level of strength in these areas, not only for prison guards but all staff, as my colleague Mr Luu has mentioned – not just guards but all custodial workers, all of those correctional staff. We want to see that occur. If people accept the amendment that the Liberals and Nationals are putting forward, well, all hail, and that is a good thing. But we need to see it strengthened, and that person who made that quote needs to feel that the work that we are doing in here in letting this bill go through this house and the minister will mean there is better safety in our justice system and criminal system.
One thing that I did research, a really important part of this, is the amendment to the parole amendment, just to clarify the application of a couple of parole provisions. One of them was the ‘no body, no parole’ provision, just to tighten it up or to give clarity that there can be licence that when a body is found therefore this no longer applies because the body is identified, found, and that person may well be able to enter into parole, meeting all of the provisions. But I actually went back and checked the ‘no body, no parole’ bill that was introduced by the Liberals and Nationals by the then shadow minister, and a very, very formidable one, Mr Ed O’Donohue. We introduced ‘no body, no parole’ in 2016 in relation to making prisoners ineligible for parole if they did not cooperate to a satisfactory standard in terms of investigations and finding the last known location of the victim. Indeed when I think about this, I could only imagine this must be one of the most excruciating elements of a homicide. If your loved one has not come home or is known to be or considered to be dead and all the circumstantial evidence and the courts have then placed somebody in jail, for you not to know where that person lies, for you to always wake up on a Sunday morning or on a Monday morning and wonder where your loved one lies and in what part of the earth they lie, must be the most horrendous thing. There are some others. I will not go into them today, but that must be one of the most horrendous situations. Where there can be closure for families – we heard one of the former speakers talk about Samantha Murphy; we certainly identify with that family and their pain, and I am sure everyone in this house would seek to have their pain alleviated – we certainly do not oppose those sorts of amendments.
The other one that I wanted to speak to was in relation to Aboriginal representation in the Post Sentence Authority. This is made up of a number of people with various skill sets – legal skill sets and the like – but to include at least one member of that authority who is Aboriginal I think is a sensible addition to this piece of legislation and one that we certainly would support. It also made me think about some of the contexts in which our First Nations people find themselves incarcerated. Just looking at the Productivity Commission’s report into the 2020 – I think it is 2024, but it was released only this week; only yesterday it came into my inbox – Closing the Gap targets, again, all governments at every level should be meeting the objective to focus in on those targets. Sadly, we certainly know that our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians are over-represented in that space. Statistics have come out that for every 100,000 members of the population there are 2304 adults imprisoned – that is the adult imprisonment rate. We also see it in youth detention: per 10,000 head of population there are 26 Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander youths in detention. Really, when you look at that population as a percentage, very, very sadly, it is well, well over-represented. I will offer my support to do everything that is sensible and reasonable and achievable with measurable and demonstrable outcomes to see that those figures go down to a more – well, to go down, period.
In relation to some of the stats, some other stats that are quite alarming to see around the correctional system and to understand are – the stats are out again – that in the past 12 months we have seen 442 assaults on Victorian prison guards, 10 sexual assaults and six serious attacks that required hospitalisation. Again, going back to my starting comments, these are some of the most horrendous and fearful attacks that we could understand, and knowing that these people, our prison guards, are well trained, for that to eventuate it must be quite a graphic and violent space, and all of us want to see improvements on that.
In just a few other comments I would like to make from my electorate, we have seen the crime stats. They are always trending at the moment in the wrong direction. From Bass to Baw Baw to Cardinia to East Gippsland to Latrobe to South Gippsland and Wellington, they all range between 11 per cent and 32 per cent increases – even attacks on the home and in the home situation. That is not good, and this government needs to be held to account for that. I know we have got a new Chief Commissioner of Police. I think the Premier is banking all of her hopes on a cleansing or a transformation. But the reality is, while this government is still playing semantics with bail laws, while it still is having over-representation in our justice system and while we are not supporting our Victorian police with community safety, with resources and with support, it is certainly going to be difficult to get those numbers trending down. I know the Liberals and Nationals are committed to doing this, and we cannot wait for November 2026.
