Tim Wilson (Goldstein, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That this House:

(1) notes that:

(a) there has been a significant increase in crime in Victoria;

(b) the latest figures from Victoria's Crime Statistics Agency show that the total number of offences reached 535,826 during the past financial year, an increase of 13.4 per cent, with assaults increasing by 11 per cent, robberies by 14 per cent, and aggravated burglaries by 7 per cent;

(c) Victorians increasingly feel unsafe in their homes and on their streets;

(d) the Victorian Government has lost control of the Victorian justice system; and

(e) Victoria has the most lenient bail laws in the country, a contributing factor in the prevalence of crime; and

(2) calls on the Victorian Government to:

(a) start taking crime and community safety seriously;

(b) dramatically strengthen Victoria's bail system;

(c) fix the crisis in the youth prison network, which has seen unprecedented riots and breakouts; and

(d) dedicate more resources to community safety and Victoria Police.

I have to say, I move this motion with great disappointment, because it reflects a problem now faced by the great state of Victoria, where crime has become an endemic part of our culture in a way that we have not known before. In fact, when this motion was originally presented to the chamber, the Victorian Crime Statistics Agency showed the total number of offences reached 535,826 during the past financial year, which was an increase of 13.4 per cent. I do not have it with me right now, but I do know that only last week new data was released that showed crime has continued to rise in the great state of Victoria.

In particular, the nature of the crime is shifting. As members may be aware, recently there was a terrorist incident in my electorate of Goldstein. I think that brought home to everybody not just the problems with crime but the violent nature of the crime. We are seeing home invasions, people attacked and carjackings as well as terrorist incidents and deaths. Tragically, in Victoria we have seen assaults increase by 11 per cent, robberies increase by 14 per cent and aggravated burglaries increase by seven per cent.

I am not alarmist on these issues. One of the great things about living in this country is that we have traditionally had low rates of crime, but what we are seeing is a relatively rapid increase in the rate of crime, and it is having a human effect. I talk often to constituents who are concerned about the rate of crime now within my community or neighbouring communities and how much it has an impact on their sense of safety, particularly for older Australians. Older Australians, from the first position, have always lived in a relatively crime-free society, but in addition to that are increasingly fearful of leaving their homes or being exposed to the risks of what happens when they confront somebody who wants to break and enter their home or may do something like break into their car.

Surely, I would have thought that all members, regardless of your views and political persuasions, would accept the principal obligation of every government is to protect citizens from undue harm. The crime wave that has swept across the great state of Victoria continues to cause angst and fear for that harm. We have been forced to confront the idea that our communities are no longer safe and harmonious. We have now exceeded half a million offences during the past financial year, as I read out before. Only a couple of weeks ago, we had the tragic death in my electorate, as I said, of Kai Hao, who was murdered by a man who should never have been walking our streets. This is the reality. A lot of people are asking, including the Prime Minister in his leadership after this incident, why this man was on bail and whether there is now a crisis around bail. I know COAG is now acting to reform the bail crisis that is not just in Victoria but across the country.

Particularly, I think we have to look very clearly of the role of the current state government, led by Daniel Andrews, who has actually been far too dismissive of these risks and the impact it has on community safety, as well as the justice system. I am not going to try to pretend there are easy answers. Having proper engagement programs to ensure that young Australians have pathways for constructive involvement with their community is very important. As the saying goes, idle hands do the devil's work. That is why we have to make sure that we do have the social and support infrastructure in place to make sure that we do not have people committing crimes.

It is also hard to ignore the problems with sentencing, bail laws and the watered down and closed police stations that we now have. The Premier has promised to tackle the violent youth gangs who have consistently terrorised Victorians, but clearly has not made the progress that I am sure even he concedes he would like to have achieved. As I said, I have examples of carjackings just outside of my electorate and far too many examples are now occurring—in fact, one only relatively recently—within my electorate as well. There is clearly a need for bail law reform, and I recognise the leadership of the Prime Minister and also of COAG in bringing that about at their recent meeting. But we need more leadership at the state government level.

This is what I hear from my constituents. Just to quote Jonathon, who lives in my electorate. He wrote three separate letters addressed to the Victorian Minister for Police. He wrote: 'This is not the Melbourne I grew up in. It seems that having home invasions and carjackings are now the norm and we are expected to accept it.' This is not a reality that I will accept and neither should any other Victorian member of parliament. The tragedy of this is Jonathon has written these letters, but the state government and the ministers have not even bothered to reply. (Time expired)

Andrew Hastie (Canning, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is there a seconder for the motion?

Ted O'Brien (Fairfax, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Yes.

Mark Dreyfus (Isaacs, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Attempts by this government to politicise the judicial system and police enforcement in this country are becoming a disgracefully common occurrence. I am shocked and disappointed that the member for Goldstein has chosen to continue the degradation of our democratic principles in his pathetically dishonest motion today. He should have learned from the example of the three senior ministers of this government found themselves in court last week.

We gain nothing, absolutely nothing, from attacking either state or federal jurisdictions with spurious allegations that they are somehow soft on crime. It is an insult to our hardworking and incredibly brave police officers, to our independent judges and courts and, indeed, to the state and territory attorneys-general to suggest that they are focused on anything other than keeping Australians safe while upholding the values and freedoms that Australians hold dear.

The member for Goldstein makes a series of sweeping statements in this motion. He has made a few more here this evening. On what basis does he say that:

Victorians increasingly feel unsafe in their homes and on their streets …

How dare he make such a generalisation, which can only be designed to whip up fear and division in Victoria. The exploitation of fear to try to gain some partisan political advantage, as this motion is clearly intended to do, shows just what kind of politician the member for Goldstein is.

The member for Goldstein also makes a number of incorrect statements. In fact, they are ridiculous statements. It is blatantly untrue—and again I quote—that 'the Victorian government has lost control of the Victorian justice system' or that 'Victoria has the most lenient bail laws in the country'. Victoria's bail laws are already tough, and, in the wake of the Bourke Street tragedy, state Attorney General Martin Pakula announced a series of reforms which will make Victoria one of the toughest states to get bail in in the country. A report by Justice Coghlan earlier this year found:

The number of people received into adult prison on remand in 2015-16 was 70% higher than in 2010-11 …

He continued:

The data also shows that bail is refused more often now than five years ago.

That is right: five years ago, when there was a Liberal state government in Victoria. The report found that Victoria's bail system is already arguably 'the most onerous in Australia'—that is a direct quote. Nevertheless, the Andrews government has chosen to embark on some further important reforms.

Let me help the member for Goldstein with some other facts—though, having received his training at the institute for paid advocacy, it is no surprise that he seems to have very little interest in them. The Victorian government announced the single largest investment in police in the force's history in the 2017-18 budget—that is just last month—including a funding injection of $2 billion which will pay for more than 3,000 new sworn police officers. This is part of an effort to roll back the rising crime trend that began under the former Liberal state government. The crime rate rose each year under the previous coalition state government, following 11 years of a declining crime rate under Labor. Turning around a long-term crime trend does not happen overnight, but the Victorian government is committed to reducing crime and protecting the community.

But there is a larger issue here. Politicians conducting a slanging match over community safety are the last thing that Australians want to hear when they feel they are under threat. Honestly, what does the member for Goldstein wish to achieve in moving this motion today? If the member for Goldstein has something positive to offer in the fight against crime, he is welcome to put it forward, but baseless accusations of the type that he has made today do not serve the people of Victoria any more than they serve anyone anywhere else in Australia.

I was shocked by the swiftness with which the Prime Minister tried to attack the Victorian government in the aftermath of the recent Brighton terror attack. The name of the innocent victim had not even been released before Mr Turnbull took a cheap shot at Premier Daniel Andrews. There is a time for politics, and there is a time when politics should be put to one side. The fight against terror is clearly a time when politics should be put to one side. The Australian community gains absolutely nothing in these sorts of partisan political attacks. The member for Goldstein should be ashamed of himself for putting forward this motion, and perhaps next time he speaks in this parliament on this subject he will actually have some constructive proposition to put forward.

Julia Banks (Chisholm, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to discuss the serious surge in crime in Victoria which has been allowed to flourish under the Victorian Labor government. Thousands of Victorians have been directly and indirectly affected by this crime surge, and, moreover, thousands of Victorians will continue to be affected directly and indirectly by crime that has happened recently in Victoria. The latest crime statistics show that, since the inception of the Andrews Labor government, violent crimes from murder to assault, rape and aggravated robbery have significantly increased. The Labor government continue to drag their feet and are not addressing the crisis, given this surge of violent crime. Rather, Labor continue to defend the status quo on sentencing, bail and reform and will not support the Liberals' mandatory sentencing policy view.

Repeat violent offenders should serve mandatory jail time and not be out in the community committing more violent crimes. In Victoria, attempted murder is up 141.2 per cent; rape is up 14.4 per cent; assault is on the increase by 33.6 per cent; and there is an increase in aggravated burglary of 65.89 per cent. There have been gang crimes, carjackings, burglaries of jewellery stores and the horrific Bourke Street attack. In my electorate of Chisholm alone, a neurological surgeon was bashed outside the Box Hill Hospital with a one-punch bash.

In fact we saw in Mount Waverley a memorial service with a large gathering of the wonderful Chinese community in Chisholm, who held a service for the grieving devastated parents of the victim of the Brighton siege, a hardworking family man who was shot down and killed by a man known to police, who had an extremely violent history and should never ever have been out on parole. It is exceedingly unthinkable that the victim's killer was on parole. How many times do we have to hear on the news every time another crime is committed that the man was known to police? It seems that every day in Victoria there is news of another significantly violent crime.

Whilst the primary suspects of this crime wave are members of the Apex street gang, following investigation by police, other street youth gangs have also now been identified as engaging in similar conduct. In other words, the Apex gang is one gang of many youth street gangs that are terrifying our streets. These youth gangs' high-risk criminal offending involves aggravated burglaries, the theft of luxury vehicles from Melbourne homes, home invasions, assaults, on-the-street carjackings of luxury vehicles, and all of this has become all too common place. These street gangs predominantly utilise weapons and firearms in the process of offending.

Victoria's bail laws in particular are generally considered to be the nation's weakest. We were promised a review of them by Premier Andrews and some action but of course we are still waiting. Commonwealth agencies have assisted their state law enforcement counterparts in Victoria to the extent that they can, acknowledging that this is very much a matter for the Victorian government and its police force. But alas, they either turn a blind eye or prefer Labor's do-nothing approach rather than tackling the problem head on.

By contrast, as our Prime Minister has said, the Turnbull government will continue to do everything it can to keep Australians safe. That is our absolute priority. The Turnbull government has brought in the biggest changes in a generation with respect to terrorists who commit the most heinous and horrific of crimes, as we have seen in Manchester, London Bridge and at home in the bayside suburb of Brighton. The Turnbull government's approach has enabled our agencies to prevent 12 planned terrorist attacks, including mass casualty attacks and one that was disturbingly planned around Christmas time in Melbourne's Federation Square.

The Commonwealth government is committed to making our community safe and supports crime prevention initiatives to address antisocial and unlawful behaviour through the $50 million Safer Community Program. Importantly, the coalition government committed at the 2013 and 2016 elections to toughen up penalties for gun related crime. The government has introduced legislation to increase the existing maximum penalties for firearm trafficking and, crucially, to implement five-year mandatory minimum sentences. This sends the strongest possible signal that we will not tolerate gun crime on our streets. The Turnbull Liberal government will always maintain that our No. 1 priority will be to keep Australians safe, no matter what the domestic debate is. But it is about time that Labor stopped being soft on crime.

Richard Marles (Corio, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration and Border Protection) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I associate myself with the comments of the member for Isaacs but in so doing I share my concern with him about the way in which this issue has been politicised by the motion which is currently before this chamber. I would like to refer to a number of the comments that have just been made by the member for Chisholm. The member for Chisholm has outlined her concern around a range of crimes that have occurred that she has described. Of course any person shares the concern and the outrage associated with those crimes, the people who perpetrate them, and shares empathy, concern and consideration for those people who have been the victims of those crimes. But nothing is made safer, we do not make our communities safer by needlessly politicising areas of policy which do not require it and by seeking to make political mileage in circumstances which are blatant and crude, which is what we are seeing now.

The contributions that we are hearing from the other side in their description of the way in which Labor is behaving to the question of crime is just plainly wrong. The member for Chisholm is right in describing that there have been a number of measures which have been undertaken by the Turnbull government around counter-terrorism but all of them have been done in a bipartisan way with Labor. We are the party that has ensured that all of this has been placed above the political fray so that we can be acting in the national interest to make Australians safer. That is actually what we need to be doing across the board.

In my constituency there is a real concern around the question of crime, as there would be in constituencies all over the country. That can be from the reports we see in the news in relation to acts of terrorism, to serious crimes people are also watching on the news, to smaller crimes such as graffiti people see around their neighbourhood. All of that is a matter for concern. What makes people feel far less safe in their house is when matters are needlessly politicised for political gain and when the positions of both parties—the position of Labor, in this case—are being totally misrepresented around the question of dealing with crime.

Here are the stats. We see in this motion a suggestion that there has been a 13.4 per cent increase in crime—which in fact is not right—over the last financial year. The increase is around just four per cent. Indeed, there has been a stabilisation in relation to significant crime, where the offence rate has risen by only 2.5 per cent in the last financial year. Bear in mind, Deputy Speaker, that throughout every year of the former Liberal government we saw an increase in crime. In terms of the total amount of crime there was a 21 per cent increase during the period of the last Liberal government, and a 14 per cent increase in terms of the rate of crime. So if we are actually going to look at stats the reality is that crime rose during the last Liberal government. It has been stabilised under this government.

We hear claims suggesting that parole is easy in Victoria and that the Victorian government and judicial system is soft on parole. Yet the reality is that from the time of the Napthine government the number of those on parole has dropped from 1,700 to 800—more than halving the number of people who are on parole. That occurs by making it far harder to get parole. We also need to bear in mind that parole plays an important role within our society and within our corrections system by providing an incentive for those who are within the corrections system to behave more appropriately, as well as giving rise to more graduated integration of those who have left the correctional system into our society. I do not think anyone is suggesting that we should be doing away with parole. The reality is that compared to the situation as it was during the last Liberal government the situation in Victoria is far tougher in respect of parole numbers now.

Add to that the fact that under the Victorian government's community safety statement made in December last year we have seen a $2 billion investment into new officers and resources throughout Victoria—the single biggest investment in Victoria Police's history. In my constituency, in Geelong, what that has given rise to is 32 new police and a whole range of programs which have involved increased resources, increased patrols across the Bellarine and in the Geelong CBD, and an additional $700,000 being provided to specific intervention programs to work with young people who are at risk of offending.

There is a lot of work being done in relation to this. It is absolutely essential that we take the politics out of this issue. (Time expired)

Damian Drum (Murray, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The sheer fact is that Victorians are now feeling the full brunt of having had a Labor Party in the state of Victoria as government over 14 of the last 18 years. So this concept that somehow or other Labor are not soft on crime and that Labor are somehow putting in place magistrates that are dealing with community expectations is absolutely laughable. The fact is that no Victorians feel safe in their homes, especially in those eastern suburbs. People in Victoria feel unsafe in their cars and even walking down the street. What has happened is that there is this very small but very dangerous cohort of youth throughout Victoria—the eastern suburbs of Melbourne particularly, but sometimes in the western suburbs—conducting their raids in this totally unlawful and absolutely carefree manner, with absolutely no regard for the law. We see that so many of these perpetrators have been released on bail for previous crimes. This is a theme that has happened time after time, where people are arrested for committing some horrendous crime and then we find that they had been released on bail for other crimes. The community response is that it is simply unbelievable that these people could be walking the streets as free people.

The biggest issue is that the Labor Party, both here and in Victoria, do not think that there is a problem with the crime wave that is currently going through Victoria. They do not think it is an issue that so many of these perpetrators have been let out on bail and also that there are these amazing, lenient sentences that are totally outside of what we would call normal community expectations. Attorney-General after Attorney-General has appointed magistrates to the bar in Victoria for 14 of the last 18 years. It is no wonder that we have this most-worrying situation where the sentences that are handed down in the state of Victoria so often do not meet community expectations.

The other fact that I know first hand, because of my experience in the Victorian state parliament, is that the state Labor Party have to be pulled, kicking and screaming, to put extra police on the job. Going to the last election, the coalition put forward a policy to put on some 2,000 extra police. The Labor Party put forward 300 to 400 extra back-office staffers as their law and order policy and their contribution to fighting crime. It was a totally inadequate response to what was happening in the real world. The Labor Party ridiculed the protective services officers throughout Victoria, the 940 PSOs who were employed to look after our train stations from six o'clock every evening until they knocked off with the last train. The Labor Party thought they were a great joke and ridiculed them at every opportunity, calling them plastic policeman and wondering what they were going to do when they saw somebody committing a crime.

Of course, the Labor Party get themselves in the situation where they do not know what to do with their own policies when they find themselves in government. The 300 or 400 back-office staffers that were supposed to fix the whole problem of the Victorian police force—the statistics of some of the crimes against individuals show stark increases. The extent and damaging nature of some of these crimes are quite horrendous. The lack of respect and any regard that we see with the youth prisons at Parkville and also at Malmsbury is quite staggering. Then we have a Labor Party in the federal parliament and a Labor Party in the state government who refuse to acknowledge that there is a problem at all. And we wonder why motions like this get up. I commend the member for Goldstein for his motion. (Time expired)

Andrew Leigh (Fenner, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am sure it has escaped none of us in this chamber the irony of a Liberal member bringing forward a motion calling on the Victorian judiciary to be tougher at a time when no fewer than three ministers are facing charges before a Victorian court for scandalising contempt. But it is vital in this debate as in all debates that we begin from the facts.

Over the course of the last two decades, Australia's murder rate has fallen by a third, our armed robbery rate has fallen by a third, and car theft has fallen by two thirds. Yet, at the same time, our prison population is rising at an extraordinary rate. As of June 2016, 38,685 Australians were behind bars, and on the current trajectory the prison population will soon pass 40,000. If our jail population were a city it would be the 36th-largest city in Australia, larger than Albany, Bathurst or Devonport.

But what matters is incarceration as a share of the adult population. By my estimate, our incarceration rate now is around 207 prisoners per 100,000 adults. That gives us a higher incarceration rate than Canada, India, Germany, Indonesia or Britain. It also gives us a higher incarceration rate than we have had in some time. From looking back through historical archives to see just how long, my analysis suggests that it is not since 1901 that Australia's incarceration rate has been as high as it is now. If we are to reduce Indigenous incarceration and deal with the fact that a young Australian Indigenous man is now more likely to go to jail than to university, we need to recognise the challenge that incarceration poses to Australia. We know that for every prisoner, approximately, there is a child who has a parent behind bars. That now means 40,000 Australian children with a parent behind bars. Prison costs around $300 a day, or around $110,000 a year, which means that Australia is now spending more than $3 billion a year on our jails.

There is another approach to this. In the United States, where around one per cent of the adult population are behind bars, there has been a bipartisan movement to cut incarceration, epitomised in a joint opinion piece last year from Democrat economist Jason Furman and Republican Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who argued that the additional prisoners in the United States tend now to be nonviolent offenders whose imprisonment will have little impact on the crime rate. The two economists point out that, while a father is in jail, the chances of his family falling into poverty rise by 40 per cent and that prisoners develop criminal networks which cut their chance of holding a regular job upon release. That is why, over recent years, we have seen more than 20 states roll back mandatory sentences in the United States, including Michigan in 2003 for drug offences, New York for drug laws, and South Carolina for drugs and other categories.

It is ironic, given that the mover of the motion originally came from the Institute of Public Affairs, that it is the Institute of Public Affairs which is now arguing that Australia needs to learn these lessons from the United States. In a new report, Andrew Bushnell, a research fellow at the free market think tank—not a think tank I think I have quoted in this place before, but even a stopped clock is right twice a day—writes:

Violent criminals must be locked-up. But many nonviolent offenders currently being jailed can safely be punished with home detention, community service, fines and restitution orders.

He notes that the experience in the United States could well be taken note of in Australia as we look to reduce crime and incarceration.

Mark Kleiman, the author of When Brute Force Fails, spoke in this parliament in 2013, drawing out his distinction that this is a system which places, in his view, too much emphasis on severity and not enough on certainty and swiftness. A 10-year sentence costs the community 10 times as much as a one-year sentence, but rarely do people think that it achieves 10 times as much deterrence. In Kleiman's view, we ought to place much more emphasis on certainty and swiftness. That means, as the Law Council has suggested, that we need to beware of mandatory sentencing, which in the Law Council's view can potentially increase the likelihood of recidivism, because new prisoners are inappropriately placed in a learning environment for crime. (Time expired)

Andrew Giles (Scullin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am pleased to follow the contribution of the member for Fenner, but it is disappointing that we are having this debate. I will, in the very short time available to me, set out the reasons why. It was only a few weeks ago that an almost identical motion was put before this House by another Victorian MP, and it makes one wonder why it is they want to talk about these state issues rather than the agenda of the government. Perhaps that is a question we all know the answer to: this is a rudderless government.

It was particularly striking to see the contribution to this debate from the member for Murray, someone I have a lot of time for. It is ironic in the extreme given that he came to this place from the state parliament of Victoria and, indeed, he was a member of the former coalition government under which most crime indicators in Victoria began to rise, a matter he did not dwell on in that portion of his contribution that I was present for. This motion speaks to very little other than the sense of this government needing to create distractions.

The member for Fenner, on the other hand, spoke to some really significant and important matters that members of this place should be concerned about: the costs of incarceration to the community generally and the particularly shocking statistic that an Aboriginal man is more likely to find himself in jail than going to university. These are challenges which we have levers in this place to respond to, as opposed to the chorus of complaint that is contained in this motion.

I note that much of the motion is tendentious and much of it is straight-out wrong. The comments on the need to strengthen Victoria's bail system strike me as inopportune given that strengthening has already happened. On the other matters that it touches on, like the devotion of more resources to community safety in Victoria, please! We know the Victorian government has already attended to these matters through recruiting 2,729 extra police.

Mark Coulton (Parkes, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The time allotted for private members' business has expired. The debate is adjourned, and the resumption of the debate will be made an order of the day for the next sitting.

Federation Chamber adjourned at 19:30