Thursday, 1 August 2024

Bills

Youth Justice Bill 2024

Second reading

Debate resumed on motion of Anthony Carbines:

That this bill be now read a second time.

Brad BATTIN (Berwick) (11:07): I rise on behalf of the opposition to start our contribution to the debate on the Youth Justice Bill 2024. In doing so I will be going through different parts and different elements of the bill. As most people would understand, this bill has over 1000 clauses and is over 1000 ‍pages, and to address every clause in a 30-minute period would be quite difficult with the amount of time we have. I will give it a go, though. This bill originally came from a report that was published in 2017 by Penny Armytage and Professor James Ogloff AM onmeeting needs and reducing offending. The Youth Justice Review and Strategy was classed as a landmark strategy at the time on what we needed to do with youth justice. This report originally stated:

The Review provides an opportunity to redesign the system to create an evidence-based response to youth offending and youth crime that is reflective of the needs and attitudes of young people and the broader community.

I think a really important part we have to consider is that it was also about the community’s views; it was not just in relation to outcomes for young people but how it impacts the whole community. Since that review we have seen widespread support for some of the things that have been put forward in the past, but the Allan Labor government has really done very little when it comes to youth crime here in our state. I will go into that in more detail when we start to see what is happening with crime in Victoria, but we do note that because of this lack of change there has been no real change to the youth justice legislative framework. There have been seven years of inaction, seven years of a government failing to address the root causes of youth crime and failing the youth justice system, and as I said, the results speak for themselves. Youth crime continues to rise, violence is getting worse, knife crime is increasing and people feel less safe in their homes. This is not coming from us, this is from speaking to victims in the community.

I have to say, when it comes to the spin from this government, the date of releasing this particular bill could not have been any better when you are talking about Labor spin. It came the day before the crime statistics came out in Victoria with the largest increase we had seen for a long period of time, particularly around youth crime and youth violent crime.

It is important to note that when the government talk about diversion in this bill we have got to be very cautious. Diversion away from custody and diversion so that a person cannot commit a crime are two totally different things, and I think with what the government is putting in place there are going to be zero outcomes and zero responsibility for a cohort of young people.

While this bill addresses one specific area around raising the age to 12, the government is on record saying that the goal is to raise the age of criminal responsibility to 14 here in this state. They were originally going to put it in the bill. I think they have jumped at shadows a bit in that, and they have changed that. We have some concerns about raising the age, at this time, up to 12. There is a red flag, and there is much the government could have done with the new legislation. They should have put victims first. We should be improving safety and we should be delivering on the main goal of the report and the review, and that is to stop young people committing crimes, not pretend it does not happen.

What is the bill about? The bill creates a standalone Youth Justice Act by removing the youth justice provisions from the Children, Youth and Families Act 2005 and placing them into one simple new act. The bill is set to raise the age of criminal responsibility to 12, and it will also set out new transport powers for Victoria Police for people who are aged 10 and 11. At this stage I would like to move, on behalf of the opposition, a reasoned amendment. I move:

That all the words after ‘That’ be omitted and replaced with the words ‘this house refuses to read this bill a second time until:

(1) a comprehensive, fully developed and fully funded program to target and divert at-risk individuals and cohorts of young people to prevent crimes occurring is agreed to by all stakeholders;

(2) community safety concerns about the current level of youth crime in Victoria are addressed; and

(3) further assessment of and consultation on more binding powers to manage young people where it is deemed their behaviour poses a risk to the safety of others is completed.’

There are many reasons why I have moved this reasoned amendment, and none more so than to ensure that we do put community safety as a priority. It is important to note the goal of this system and what should be that goal. Every one of us in here wants to make sure that our community is safe, that we prevent crimes occurring and that we are supporting those who need it, and this in turn will put less people in jail. That is our ultimate goal.

Ten years into the Allan Labor government holding office, the results speak for themselves. The level of inaction is borderline offensive. Point (1) in the reasoned amendment is perhaps the most important element of the Armytage–Ogloff review and is a reform that should have started straight after the review was released. If this had been done at the time that the review was released in 2017, not seven years later, we may have actually seen the impact of this on some of the changes in crime that we are seeing now.

Chapter 4 of the review is about diverting children away from the justice system. This should be the goal of all crime prevention. Every program should be designed to work with these young people. However, they must be held accountable still; the young people must be held accountable for their crimes and actions. You cannot divert all young people away from a custodial sentence. You need only look at the Labor government’s decision to weaken the bail laws here in our state, and we are seeing the outcomes of that today, where young people who get bail continually repeat violent crimes. We have some serious questions on this bill and the failure to address specifically chapter 4 of that review.

Where is a comprehensive strategy – we have not seen it – about targeting at-risk youth from this government? There is none. We know it is a fact that the Allan Labor government, instead of working to prevent crime, is cutting funding from crime prevention here in Victoria. In the recent state budget the Allan Labor government cut $20 million from crime prevention, at a time when crime is reaching record levels here in our state. This cut directly impacts on delivering these programs. It is cutting money for community-based offender supervision. It is cutting money for youth diversion programs. This is because the government have managed to lose control of the budget and they have got to find ways to make savings. The savings that they are talking about now, by cutting funds for crime prevention, in the long term will cost Victorians millions if not billions of dollars. The cost to keep a young person in custody is nearly $6000 per day. It is cheaper to send 40 kids to Scotch College here in Victoria than it is to keep one locked up for a 12-month period. If the government was smarter in this and had done this earlier, it could have had crime prevention models in place and used that money and diverted it to crime prevention here in our state. This bill, which should be for a youth justice system to address the reasons for offending and also should address the community’s concerns, has failed on both counts.

Point (2) of my reasoned amendment focuses on community concerns around the rise in youth crime, especially violent crime. I will go through some of the statistics, but I will also go through some of the facts that are out there at the moment. On 13 January Ashley Gordon, a young Victorian doctor, was fatally stabbed by 16-year-olds. In the article in ABC online Dr Gordon’s sister Natalie Gordon said the family were still struggling to make sense of what happened:

“This has affected more than our family,” Ms Gordon said.

“This has affected his patients, his friends – it’s reached our entire community.

“I don’t want anyone to feel what we are feeling.”

In this article the family, friends and community who knew Dr Gordon are not just calling for the Bail Act amendment to ensure that bail is fixed so it does not happen to anyone else, because these offenders were on bail, but also saying to the government, ‘Please ditch your push for raising the age to 14.’ We as a Parliament must be supporting these voices, these families, these communities. The Allan Labor government must explain to the Gordon family why they still refuse to fix the bail system and ensure that there is no-one else left in the same position as the Gordon family, who lost their loved one Ash Gordon.

On 2 July William Taylor was another victim of the youth crime crisis in Victoria. Mr Taylor was tragically killed when a stolen car crashed into him while being driven by a 17-year-old. According to the Guardian of Thursday 4 July:

Prosecutors asked the court for 12 weeks to prepare a brief, but the children’s court judge asked what evidence they had to prove he was the driver of the Jeep.

The prosecutor said police seized a pair of white shoes from the boy’s home when they arrested him, which she alleged the driver was seen wearing in CCTV footage of the collision.

She said they also seized a mobile phone, which she alleged was used to make a call near the scene.

…

She said one of the two girls arrested told police the 17-year-old was the driver …

So we have got a witness to it. It was alleged that this vehicle, the Jeep, was stolen in an aggravated burglary just days prior. He was bailed, only to breach that bail within the next 48 hours, and Victoria Police had to use up important resources to go and find him. Again, that was a terrible message to the family who had just lost a loved one – that it did not matter – and the judge made a decision based on the laws in place from this government to grant bail to someone like that.

The youth crime statistics in our state we have all seen. They come from the crime data statistics which come out every three months. There has been a 20 per cent increase in criminal incidents by youth offenders – a 20 per cent increase – in the last 12 months. Aggravated burglaries increased in that time by 18.4 per cent – 18.4 per cent. What is worse than that is since 2014 aggravated burglaries have increased by 146 per cent across our state. It is not just in one area, it is not just in one community; it is happening across the whole state. Mildura had the number one amount of aggravated burglaries. Berwick was number two in the number of aggravated burglaries. We have got aggravated burglaries through the west and the north. They are not just after specific cars, and they are getting more and more violent. It is simply not the time to change some of these laws. We should be putting in place programs and investment to ensure these young people have a genuine opportunity to not commit the crimes in the first place. On top of this, in the last six years 137 people have been injured by cars stolen in aggravated burglaries, and this rate continues to increase. It increased by 53 people in the last 12 ‍months – an 82 per cent increase in the number of people who have been injured by stolen cars – and a lot of these stolen cars are coming from aggravated burglaries.

The concern for the Liberal and National parties is that the biggest obstacle preventing real change is the lack of admission that there is an issue here in the state, and the government continues to do it. In July the Deputy Premier claimed Victoria has some of the toughest bail laws in Australia. I invite the Deputy Premier to join me to explain to the families that I have mentioned in the past who have lost loved ones or to sit down to explain to the many other victims of violent crime how the bail laws protected their families. Did the bail laws live up to the expectations of community views? The simple answer is no.

When it comes to raising the age in this state, I have been on record talking about how I would love to have no young people in jail. That is an ideal, an absolute goal, that I think everyone should be targeting. How awesome would it be to have no need to have a youth detention centre in our state? It is an outcome that I know I would want and, Acting Speaker, I am very confident that you would want. I am very confident everyone in this house would want to never have a youth justice centre. However, the current circumstances show we do need them.

Young people who commit crime and knowingly do so should be held to account, and there are current laws to protect those that do not have the capacity, the doli incapax. There was a case in Victoria just this year, which was highlighted in the Age on 16 May 2024, where a statement from the Director of Public Prosecutions after the charges were dropped said:

It was the director’s position that there were not reasonable prospects of a conviction in this matter because the prosecution would not have been able to rebut the presumption of doli incapax …

This highlights that we already have the protections in place for those young people who are 10 to 14 and older if they do not have the capability to make a decision between right and wrong. These safeguards rightly operate here in this state already. They are rightly there to protect young people who are not in the position to make a decision or to understand the consequences of their decision. They are there to protect those kids that we have already seen – some of those with mental health needs, some of those with a limited capacity to make decisions because of their IQ et cetera as well. These protections are already there.

But this bill means a person aged 10 or 11 can never be held to account for a violent crime. They cannot be forced into a prevention program. They can be forced to go through the justice system. They cannot be put into a position of a diversion. They cannot be put in a place where we can use other community facilities to give them the best opportunity and the tools they need moving forward to ensure that they do not commit crime long term. So whilst I have said before my absolute goal is to have no young person in jail, we need to have a system where when any person enters or should be entering the justice system, we can use wraparound services and, if need be, force these young people into these wraparound services to give them the best opportunities going forward. That is gone once this bill goes through. The stats are clear. It is just not the right time to change this, and we believe that we must have the responsibility there.

Rather than just being negative, I want to talk about some of the positive things that we could look at where we can make that change. I had the pleasure of going over to the UK in Cheshire, where they are actively working with young people. They take health services and council services, and they use all the local organisations that they can that deal with young people, whether it is not-for-profit or paid services through the state, including government and including justice. They get the highest risk young people, and they put wraparound services on each person. They had 15 when I was there – 15 kids at extreme risk of committing crime. Of those 15 with the services they provided, those services then bleed out and help other people that they are associated with, or they identify the issues in the home and they directly work with those young people at home. They do not remove the responsibility. They do not say these kids cannot get forced into some of these things. They put the practices in place to ensure that these young people – these young kids – have every opportunity to get the tools they require to succeed in life.

This is after a 30 per cent crime rise in Victoria when – and the Chief Commissioner of Victoria Police has even stated this – crimes committed by 10- to 13-year-olds rose by 22.5 per cent and offences by 10- and 11-year-olds rose by 65. The Victorian police commissioner does not support raising the age to 14. Victoria Police do not support it and the Police Association Victoria does not support it, and I think we need to have those voices heard in this argument. We need to understand that there are already practices in place to protect young people who do commit crime. As I have said, one of the things I think that we must be very, very cautious about with those 10- and 11-year-olds is that we as a Parliament, we as a community, do not remove the responsibility for them of committing the crime. There are other ways around it where we can ensure they get the services they need. What this bill will do is remove them, and we will not be able to have that opportunity for them.

The transitional provisions for this do create some issues and concerns for us, and people who have read through the bill will understand. In part 19.1, any criminal offence committed by a 10- or 11-year-old person before the commencement date is rendered null and void, so effectively the charges that were there will no longer be there. The police cannot lay charges even if an investigation has commenced for anyone who is 10 or 11. Court proceedings must not be started. If they have been started, they must immediately cease. For anyone serving a custodial sentence or any other sentence, that sentence must be stopped. What a risk. If we have got a young person who is 11 years old who has gone through the justice system and is not in custody but is currently working through having support services because the court has put them in place, we are now saying to them, ‘You don’t even need to complete your services.’ We are now saying to them, ‘You don’t even need to complete that with the extra support, and you or your family can say, “No, we’re not interested anymore.”’ That is a negative outcome from this bill. The resulting message is giving effectively a green light to some of these things and creating what I would call a new norm. Whilst for 10- to 11-year-olds the concern from some will probably be less, the government’s aim is to push this up to 14, and we are seeing some of these violent crimes from 12- and 13-year-olds right now, so much so that the police commissioner came out and spoke about it.

There is a whole section in the bill in relation to Aboriginal children and young persons, and there are a number of sections of the bill that set up youth justice matters specific to Aboriginal children and young persons: part 1.3, division 3, ‘Guiding youth justice principles and matters specific to Aboriginal children and young persons’; part 2.3, ‘Aboriginal youth justice agencies’; and part 7.1, clause 210, ‘Additional sentencing principles for Aboriginal children’. Clause 59 will allow the secretary to delegate specific functions to an Aboriginal youth justice agency to perform, although it is not clear what these powers are. The Scrutiny of Acts and Regulations Committee (SARC) has noted the effect of clauses 59(1) and 61(1) may be to permit the secretary to authorise the principal officer of a registered Aboriginal youth justice agency to exercise a function or power of the secretary under the act.

I believe we should all be seen as one under the same law. We are living in the same country with the same law; everybody should be treated equally when it comes to the eyes of the law. I think it is very, very important. In saying that, we have been supportive of Drug Courts and Aboriginal courts in Victoria, but if you are going to take it that we are creating an entirely new youth justice system for Aboriginal children compared to non-Indigenous children, I think you are starting to go a step too far and you are putting greater risks in there. As I said before, when you are talking about raising the age, particularly with kids with Indigenous backgrounds – we know that there are too many kids particularly from Indigenous backgrounds who are in the justice system and particularly in custody – we also need to know that the programs in place for 10- to 14-year-olds, if they do commit an offence, are there to give them the best options moving forward, to give them the best tools, to enforce education, to enforce that they go to programs for improvement and to give them the opportunities to go back to the heritage backgrounds that they have and work with their local community groups and work with their local elders, but it cannot be in a separate justice system. We should be bringing these powers into the youth justice system so they have got the power in there, not separating them and creating an entirely different program for one cohort of children compared to another. I think it is a great risk that we have.

A big concern we have is around victims of crime, and we have always said that we must put victims of crime first. This bill simply fails. In part 12.4, the ‘Youth justice victims register’, the functionality it is proposed to have in clause 659 falls well short of the adult victims register in terms of the information given, the notice periods and the ability to influence and make submissions to proceedings. Victims on the youth justice register will get very limited information, considering the serious impact on their life, and they will only receive notice when the young person has applied for parole or when they have been given parole. That is different from the adult system, and we are saying it is going too far and that victims need to be treated more respectfully than that. The impact of these changes reduces the responsibility and obligations of a young person after they commit a crime, so it effectively reduces the rights of victims to be heard.

The effect of clauses 142(b), 143(f)(i) and 144(g)(i) may be that the evidence of alleged offending for which a youth warning or youth caution was given or for which an early diversion outcome was finalised is inadmissible in civil proceedings. This is a great risk. If you are taking away the ability for evidence to be admissible – because it is being used with a caution or diversion – in civil proceedings, you are taking away the rights of victims who could be victims of violent crime or extensive damage to property. I think we have to be very cautious where we go from this.

SARC again noted that the inadmissibility of evidence of a child’s alleged offending in the form of warnings, cautions and early diversion outcomes in a civil proceeding against the child may actually infringe on the victim’s rights under section 24(1) of the charter of human rights. If SARC is saying that this could have an impact on the charter of human rights, where a victim who seeks civil remedy from a child has the right to a fair hearing, then these clauses make it difficult or impossible for me to support the bill, especially on behalf of victims here in this state. The statement of compatibility for the bill does not address these matters, which SARC noted when they made their notes on it. The Allan Labor government are ignoring the rights of victims, and we cannot stand by while that happens. This government has learned nothing from the victims of serial killers held in our prisons here in the past. The Attorney-General was quick with a media release, stating:

The family and friends of Natalie Russell, Debbie Fream and Elizabeth Stevens continue to suffer and grieve.

She also said:

We’ve listened to victims and their families …

The Minister for Youth Justice stated in Parliament on 29 August 2023:

We are committed to a victim support system that respects victims’ rights and helps them to fully participate in the justice system.

Yet now in this bill, even with the government’s own SARC report, they have gone against the human rights charter and they have taken away those rights from those victims. Again, it is not something we can support.

The other thing in this, when we talk about youth justice, is we note that the government, who one day were saying, ‘Not a youth crime crisis, not an issue here in our state; we can’t see where the real problems are,’ went the next day to an urgent meeting, trying to call in all people in relation to youth justice to have a talkfest here in Melbourne. Considering the government have been consistent with the message that there are no youth crime issues, we found it very interesting that they wanted to call everyone together for a talkfest in the state. One of the problems with that talkfest is no-one knows actually what happened and no-one knows what the outcomes of that meeting were. There was no agenda released. The government failed to deliver any actions that focused on reducing crime from that. It is more about removing responsibility from young people aged under 12 and obviously then pushing it up to 14.

As I said before, there are other things we can do. It is really important from an opposition and from a government perspective that we look at alternatives from around the world, not just here in our state, at some of the things we can do. In Japan young people diverted from the justice system can attend small-scale specialised schools for their bespoke needs, and in Victoria we are very lucky to have some of these schools. David Scott School, which I have had the pleasure of visiting, is an amazing school with fantastic outcomes, and I know the member for Frankston would know the David Scott School; it is down in his electorate. It is a brilliant school that achieves amazing goals. I have worked with kids in special schools and I have worked with kids in state schools, and obviously as a police officer as well. You have to sometimes judge what a positive outcome is. When you walk into these schools, not every kid wants to go through and get their VCE and get an amazing result and go on to become a doctor. We have got kids in these schools that just want to be accepted and then get through a system where they can feel they have developed some skills to go and find gainful employment or go and support others who have been in a similar position, whether it is from drugs or mental ill health. When you have schools like David Scott, who do an amazing job of that, then the evidence is there.

We have got Cire school in Berwick, which I know is also in the Yarra Valley. These schools, these programs need more funding. They need to be able to grow. They need to be able to give opportunity for the courts to divert these kids away from the justice system. Going to Parkville College at Cherry Creek is not a positive outcome; getting them into a school in the community where they can gain skilled employment and they can gain the skills they need for the long term is a positive outcome, and I think that is where we have got to be heading. This bill is not heading towards that. It is heading away from actually taking any responsibility at all.

As I said before, Cheshire have a targeted program for what they do. Various states across the US run programs. Their whole desire is to keep young people out of the prison system through the US. Whilst here we hear much about crime in the US and we hear a lot of negatives, there are also some really positive stories about them closing prisons, about ways they are dealing with young people when it comes to mental ill health and drug use, where they actually focus on the issue and they focus on the cause that is creating the crime. If you look at the 24/7 sobriety program in Florida, it is solely designed around: if a person commits crimes when they are drunk, then we need to work out how to not get them drunk. If a person commits crime because they are stoned on drugs, we have got to put programs in place to stop them getting stoned on drugs.

I think if we are going to be looking at justice reform through our state, that justice reform cannot be saying, ‘You’re not going to be held responsible for anything.’ It has to start saying, ‘You will be held responsible, and part of that responsibility and the outcome is we’re going to put you on these programs where either you’re going to, via you, support yourself to get better or, if required, the government or other organisations can step in and offer you that assistance,’ because if they come out of those programs better and committing less crime, we kind of all win. We do not need to worry about making the changes and not making them responsible. We need to actually say, ‘You are responsible for your actions, and we are going to put things in place to protect you.’

Another stage of this is the police powers, and there have been raised with us some concerns around the police powers. It is actually very interesting. I do not think anyone actually supports these police powers. There is a group that say they are too far and a group that say they are not far enough. I have not had one person that has said, ‘Well done. Congratulations on these.’ In saying this, saying there will be an increase in the age – I get that. Taking that out of it, I think there have to be powers in place to move young people, so we are supportive of the fact that we have to have those powers.

The concern raised with the Police Association Victoria is the amount of hours it is going to take in paperwork each time a young person is moved or relocated. There is actually more paperwork under this system than there was to charge a child, so it is going to take police resources off the street. There have got to be protections put in place to ensure that Victoria Police understand the limitations on them. Their search powers will be gone, so if a young person goes in and steals items from a shop, there are no more search powers to search for the stolen items. If you are going to put a young person in the van to move them for their safety or for the safety of others, you do not have a search power anymore to search them for a knife, because they have changed it from being able to do a safety search to now the search being only on reasonable belief, and by definition of ‘reasonable belief’ you have to have basically enough evidence to say the person has most likely got a knife on them. Well, you cannot do that when you just find a kid in the middle of the street. You cannot just guess it, so you are putting police at risk of being sued for searching for their own safety and for the safety of the young person. So we need to actually readdress that and in my view rewrite this bill to ensure that police have that protection, because we are going to be asking them to move them. The other part of this is there are already laws in place for how people under 10 are dealt with by Victoria Police. Now we are going to have under 10, then 10 to 12 and then 12 and onwards. We are going to have three different elements for police to guess which element they are going to use for moving a person on to make sure they are protected. It is a lot to do.

In conclusion – and I look forward to hearing the member for Malvern and the positions that he is going to put up as well – we have got to make no mistake: this bill is not about youth and crime, it is a function to divert people away from the justice system. But what we are saying is we need to make sure we hold people accountable. The Victorian opposition, when we go through this, cannot reasonably support this bill in its current state. We will be opposing the bill when it goes to a vote. We would ask for support for the reasoned amendment and to have a focus back on how we ensure people are responsible for their actions and that the outcomes are a government and organisations supporting young persons to not commit crime in the future.

Nina TAYLOR (Albert Park) (11:37): I think what is really critical about this very comprehensive legislation is that it is providing a robust end-to-end framework for Victoria’s youth justice system, and actually at its heart what is driving the reforms here is community safety. That very much underpins this evidence-guided legislation. I think this is the next step when we are developing modern and effective responses to youth offending. They are nation-leading reforms, and they are building on all the mechanisms that have been put in place to date to drive down the number of young people engaged in youth justice. I think an important element here as well is making sure that there is a developmentally appropriate way of responding to Victorians as they mature from young people into adulthood. Hence evidence has shown that simply treating youth offenders the same as adults does not result in the outcome that we all want, which is to enhance community safety.

I am going to speak to one of the critical elements of this bill, and that is raising the minimum age of criminal responsibility, noting that Brad Battin, the member for Berwick, a former police officer, is on record back on 27 May 2021 in an article titled ‘Liberal MPs break ranks in push to raise age of criminality to 14’. At that time I am just saying, factually, this reported that the member:

… a former police officer and former Liberal spokesman for youth justice; former president of the upper house Bruce Atkinson; and former Liberal spokesman for child protection Nick Wakeling have split from their party’s official position, urging the government to end the “draconian” law and keep children under the age of 14 away from the criminal justice system.

I think that that is interesting in the context of the discussion we are having today, that we can see that perhaps those opposite are not necessarily all on the same page with regard to the approach that is taken to best divert youth offenders away from a life of crime and to keep our streets safe.

When we talk about the minimum age of criminal responsibility, on the one hand Victoria will be the first state to raise the age of criminal responsibility from 10 to 12 years of age, but I think it is important to note that that particular age range has not just been randomly selected, and there has been an incredible amount of work put in to make sure that there are appropriate supports and caveats around these changes, because we all want to drive the best possible outcome for our community.

I just want to note that we know that serious offending by 10- and 11-year-olds is very rare, as is the situation where a 10- or 11-year-old would come before our courts, and it is rarer still that a child that young would receive a custodial sentence. We thankfully do not have any children in the system of this age, and with these important reforms we never will again. But further to the point of how you approach a person of that age group 10 or 11, we should say that while some may disagree with this particular approach that we are taking here today – and I want to come back to the evidence, because that is pivotal and is absolutely critical in such a delicate and what should be a very nuanced space – the evidence tells us that this approach does not work. This is because very young children typically lack the maturity to form criminal intent, and their charges end up being withdrawn or not proven. So how does that help keep the community safe, so to speak? How does that help a young person who has got themselves into a difficult position or a dangerous position to divert to a better pathway?

I should say in the rare situation in which a 10- or 11-year-old does engage in criminal activity it stems from something going horribly wrong in their lives, and this warrants a response of help and support, one that is not best done through the criminal justice system – that is what the evidence shows, and I think it is really important that that is made clear through this debate – but instead through support services with age-appropriate services. Another important caveat that does not mean in any way resiling from consequences is that accountability is actually built into this bill, as is a victim-centred approach. I think that is what I was saying from the outset about an end-to-end focus, because we are looking at the whole spectrum of impact and consequence: the tragedy of a young person entering a life of crime and, the very worst outcome, ending up incarcerated and having committed an offence which forever condemns their life, as well as the respective Victorian that they have impacted, or Victorians, as the case may be. Hence the imperative to make changes based on evidence, and I am reiterating that point because this is not simply ‘tough on crime’ and it is all better. If only it were so simple to be able to rectify behaviours that are inappropriate in our community with such words.

I agree with the member for Berwick that there is only so much that can be transacted in the time available, so I am going to zone in on just a few key points. Something that is also a risk when you are raising the minimum age of criminal responsibility is those who may seek to exploit those who are in that age group – that is, 10 to 12. They are important caveats that have been built into the bill. So raising the age of criminal responsibility must be done in a way that prevents the exploitation of young people in criminal activity. This is why the bill proposes to make a series of changes to the charging framework of recruitment offences involving young children. Certainly that would be a concern of mine but for the fact that these caveats have been built into the bill. This includes amending the definition of ‘criminal activity’ for the offence of recruiting a child to make it clear that this includes conduct by a child who is under the minimum age or is presumed incapable of committing an offence because of the doli incapax principles. In practice, what does this actually mean? This means recruiting or inciting a child under 14 to commit an offence, or even conspiring to, will still constitute criminal activity for the purposes of prosecuting an adult charged with the recruitment offence. So you can see there is a reason why this is a very comprehensive and a rather large bill – because there has been so much research, so much evidence and so much consultation to ensure that we drive the best possible outcomes for our community.

The further point that I do want to go to is with regard to bail and electronic monitoring. The bill will introduce a trial to allow for up to 50 young people at any one time to be subject to electronic monitoring of their bail conditions and provide additional support to high-risk young people on bail who do not have electronic monitoring conditions. This is about making interventions at the earliest possible stage and keeping the community safe while the young person has a matter before the courts. Currently under the Bail Act 1977 a bail decision-maker can and often will attach conduct conditions to a bail undertaking to mitigate the risk that an accused person might pose to the community.

I am just going to zone in a particular nuance that I think is very important when we are talking about the topic of bail. Bail will still be determined by the relevant bail tests and cannot be granted where a person poses an unacceptable risk to community safety. Young people who pose an unacceptable risk to the safety or welfare of another person will not be granted bail, with or without an electronic monitoring device. Ultimately this monitoring is about better equipping our justice sector – that is, the courts, police and youth justice – with more tools to monitor the compliance of bail among young people. I know there has been a lot of discussion about this issue, and we welcome that discussion – that is the point of debating a bill of this nature or otherwise – but it is also important to factor in all elements that are being considered as part of driving community safety.

Michael O’BRIEN (Malvern) (11:47): I rise to put on the record our grave concerns that the government has just got this wrong when it comes to the Youth Justice Bill 2024. This bill is being debated at a time when Victoria is in the grip of a youth crime crisis. The member for Berwick laid out the statistics, but behind every statistic is somebody who has been injured or somebody who has had their life in some cases taken away or their sense of security taken away or their property taken away. These are people we are talking about; they are not just statistics.

In dealing with this youth crime crisis, unfortunately every single action of the Allan Labor government in response has been the wrong one. Every single action has been the wrong response. Bail laws – when you are dealing with a youth crime crisis, bail laws should be strengthened, but Labor has gone and weakened the bail laws. They have weakened them by ensuring that if you break your conditions, that is no longer an offence. They have weakened them by saying that if you commit a serious offence while you are on bail then you do not face an elevated test to get bail again. They have weakened them by saying that bail decision-makers no longer have to consider the likelihood of you committing an offence while you are on bail as being relevant to the test of whether you should get bail in the first place. Bail laws should have been strengthened; Labor has weakened them.

When it comes to policing, to deal with the youth crime crisis you need more community policing. You need more police on the streets. And what has this government done? They have shut or reduced the hours of 43 police stations across Victoria just this year alone, including in my community of Malvern. We used to have a 24-hour-a-day police station. It is now open 8 hours a day. That is fabulous if all the hooligans are working business hours, but not too many of them work from 9 till 5. The fact that they have closed my police station at night means my community feels less safe and is less safe. And it is not just in Malvern, it is at 42 other stations across Victoria as well. We need more police in the streets and policing in the community. This government has cut it back.

We need more efficient courts to deal with young offenders more quickly. We all know that the best way to deal with it is promptly so that if there is a sanction that sanction can be applied swiftly and if there is a diversion it is applied swiftly. It is not fair to the young people, it is not fair to the victims, it is not fair to anybody to have these matters dragging on and on and on, yet we have some of the worst court backlogs of any state in the country. And what has this government’s response been? To cut the courts budget by $19.1 million on 1 July this year. Cutting funding to an underfunded court system, to an overworked court system, to an inefficient court system, is exactly the wrong response at a time like this. If you are talking about trying to divert young people away from bad decisions and bad choices, away from a life of crime, you invest more in crime prevention. But what has this Labor government done? It has cut funding for crime prevention by $20 million – unbelievable. Whatever would make the system better, whatever would make Victorians safer – stronger bail laws, more policing, more efficient courts, more crime prevention – this government has done exactly the opposite. That is why this government has got it wrong with this bill.

As Shadow Attorney-General let me refer to some of the legal aspects of this, including raising the age. What is raising the age? It is saying that at the moment there is an irrebuttable presumption that somebody under the age of 10 cannot commit a crime. That is being raised to 12. For those between 12 and 14 there is a legal principle called doli incapax. That means that the assumption is that a child of that age does not have the mental capacity to be able to know what they were doing sufficient to form what we call the mens rea to be able to be convicted of a crime. But that can be rebutted. It means that if the prosecution can prove that this young person knew exactly what they were doing – not just the act but that they knew that it was seriously wrong, they knew it was morally wrong, they knew what they were doing and they wanted to cause the damage that they caused – in those circumstances where the prosecution can meet that burden of proof, and the burden of proof is at the beyond reasonable doubt level, the highest level we have in the criminal system, only then can a young person potentially be convicted.

By raising the age all Labor are saying is that they are going to deal with 10- and 11-year-olds who know exactly what they are doing and they are going to give them a free pass. At the moment if you are a 10- or 11-year-old and you commit an offence but you do not have the mental capacity to properly comprehend it, the law protects you anyway. That is how doli incapax works. Unless this government are saying that they do not trust our police, they do not trust our prosecutors and they do not trust our courts to be able to apply the principles of doli incapax properly, the government should just come clean and admit that what they are doing in this bill is saying that 10- and 11-year-olds who do know exactly what they are doing when they hurt somebody or when they steal something will be given a free pass and not held accountable at all.

It has been said in this debate that kids should be in school, not in jail. I do not think you are going to find a single member of this place that disagrees. The great news is that there is not one single 10- or 11-year-old in detention – not one. So this bill is not about getting kids out of detention, it is not about getting kids out of jail, because there are not any there in the first place, because we already have systems of cautions and diversions and alternative methods of dealing with children that are appropriate. This is not about getting kids out of jail, this is about whether kids who do the wrong thing should be held accountable at that age to get them on the right track. We say they should be. We say there should be legal accountability for kids who understand what they are doing, who know what they are doing and who do it anyway. Because without that accountability, how are we going to get these kids back on the right track? We will not. They will be emboldened. If there is no consequence for a bad action, it will be done again, it will be done more regularly and it will be done to a higher level, and then you will get to the stage where these kids are 12 – or 14 if the government succeeds in raising the age to 14 – and they have been emboldened by having three or four years of being able to get away with almost murder. What happens then? Apparently the diversion works? No. We need accountability when they do the wrong thing at an early age, not to put them in jail – to get them on the right path. That is what we should be doing as a society. That is why we believe this bill is wrongheaded – because there is no accountability mechanism whatsoever.

Let me just refer to a couple of other matters. In terms of offences, we have had 413 offences committed by 10- and 11-year-olds in the year to March 2024. We are not talking about a couple of people, we are talking about 413 offences, and those are just going to be wiped off the record now. This bill will certainly manipulate the crime stats, but it will not make Victorians any safer. The government has also created a massive problem when it comes to how people like shopkeepers are going to deal with this. We asked the government: what can shop owners or police do if a child of 10 or 11 steals something once this bill passes? The government said:

In terms of the criminal law, it would not be appropriate for government to issue definitive statements about whether or not shop owners could seek to apprehend and detain, use force or take any other action in relation to children in stores.

Bad luck, small businesses, you are on your own. This government is going to create a massive legal problem – what, you have got to check for ID before you hold a child who is stealing from your shop?

When it comes to police, we asked: if the shop owner calls the police, what can the police do? Police would be unable to use force to search the child suspected of being in possession of a stolen item. However, they could recover a stolen item if it is within arm’s reach and force is not required. Well, terrific, kids, put the iPhone down the pants and you can walk out scot-free and the police cannot do a damn thing about it. That is what the government is doing in this bill. So good luck, members, go along to all your small businesses and tell them how you have left them exposed to criminal liability and civil liability through this bill. They have not thought it through.

There are other objectionable aspects of this bill – the idea that in this bill it requires:

… the progressive transfer of authority, resources and responsibilities to an Aboriginal-controlled justice system.

We do not have treaty in this state. If you want to have a treaty, have one and have the debate and put it to the public. Do not use in this bill something that requires the Secretary of the Department of Justice and Community Safety to enable the progressive transfer of authority, resources and responsibilities to an Aboriginal-controlled justice system. I believe in equality before the law. Call me a dinosaur if you will, but I believe in equality. We are all equal before the law. There should not be two separate justice systems in this state, if that is what this bill seeks to establish.

In terms of electronic monitoring, I have made the comment before that rather than being something that young people would be scared of, they are more likely to be swapping them like Taylor Swift friendship bracelets. I refer to the Electronic Monitoring Trial, November 2022, from the Queensland government. On page 4 it says:

… there are also instances and examples provided where young people consider the device to be a badge of honour and have requested the device to show it off to friends.

Well, that is a huge lettuce leaf you are going to be hitting those young offenders over the heads with, when they are actually going to be requesting the devices and showing them off to their friends. The government has got this wrong. The government should rethink it, work with us and actually try and make Victorians safe.

Sarah CONNOLLY (Laverton) (11:57): I too rise to speak on the Youth Justice Bill 2024, and it is interesting to follow the member for Malvern. I do not know if I would describe him as a dinosaur, but I will say some kind words, which I know some of my colleagues will think are unkind words, really: the member for Malvern really is a Liberal through and through. And that is the great divide that is sitting here in this chamber when we are talking about really serious issues involving children ‍– kids, really young kids.

I do want to before I begin my contribution tell a story, that last weekend I was talking to a bloke doing some work on a building site at my house. I will say, member for Malvern, he was not from my part of town, he was closer to yours. I did check that out. I always know who voters are when they come around to my patch. But listen, I will say –

Michael O’Brien interjected.

Sarah CONNOLLY: Well, I am a renter, so I hope they got three quotes – the landlord. But what I will say is that he was just a regular bloke, and we were talking about youth crime and youth justice and things that are happening and we were sort of having this big D & M about kids and raising kids and kids going off the rails and kids doing truly horrendous, appalling things to other kids and other adults, and things that we see in the papers in the community. I am not downplaying any of that. And then he sort of opened up and he told me a story about his 14-year-old stepson, who a couple of years ago had completely gone off the rails. He had gone from being completely normal, living in a fully functional household. He had gotten a girlfriend, his first girlfriend – completely random – and his girlfriend, it turned out, was a little bit older and she was on drugs. So there they are, the parents and the stepfather thinking, ‘My 14-year-old, he’s talking about a girl, wow,’ only to suddenly start getting calls – the first call he remembers quite clearly – from the police talking about his stepson getting involved with breaking into cars and looking for money, because it turned out the girlfriend was hooked on ice and had passed that appalling addiction and habit on to the 14-year-old stepson.

His wife was absolutely traumatised. He talked to me about how grateful he was that there were services – diversion services and rehabilitation services – that could deal with his stepson’s addiction, because they had never been addicted to anything in their lives. What a terrible thing that was to have happen to his family. But he was using the services and also working with some of the incredible police programs that are in place involving sport – no, this one was I think something to do with rope climbing. It was something really physical, really intensely difficult. He had to complete this program ‍– he did it with a whole lot of other kids – but along the way he was being mentored by local police. This builder was just saying it was absolutely remarkable. His son is going on to finish year ‍12, I think. We were sort of having this big D & M, all starting from youth justice and crime. No-one wants to see the types of things happening in our community unfolding, and what we need to do is make sure that they are prevented in the very, very first place from ever happening. Those sorts of prevention measures, which I do not think have been talked about in this place today, certainly on that side of the chamber over there, start when a child is born.

To say that the Labor government has done nothing when it comes to preventing crime and youth crime in this state is absolutely outrageous, because the Minister for Children in the other place is doing a plethora of work. Millions are being spent. In fact I was with her on Monday. We were talking to maternal and child health nurses dealing with bubs in the first weeks after they are born, at home with high-risk, vulnerable families in my community. It was really sad talking about new mums and dads that have come from refugee backgrounds and have experienced all kinds of horrendous war trauma and appalling domestic violence and drug addiction. You wonder what kind of start these kids are going to have. That is in the first couple of thousand days. To say that we are doing nothing is absolutely outrageous. This bill is about locking down some of those things.

We want to see a system that works for everyone, and that is why talking about crime, youth justice and bail in this place always gets people’s backs up. They feel quite passionate about it, and I have no doubt that those on the other side of the chamber do feel really passionate about this. My concern time and time again is when we have these types of conversations, we need to have them with the reflection in our minds that every now and then the community is paying attention to what is happening here. I think that if anyone in this chamber took the time to right now get on their phone and check out what the Libs are putting up on their social media, it will be that terrible photo of someone in a hood, masked, doing something illegal. I really hope that those sitting opposite today – the member for Berwick and the member for Malvern; I know the member for Gippsland South would not be doing it ‍– do not put up those kinds of crime pictures saying that Victoria is the most dangerous state to live in, because we know, through the data and the crime stats, that is simply not the case. That is the biggest problem when we talk about crime and when we bring bills like this Youth Justice Bill before the house: we cannot have a sensible, rational conversation.

In spite of all of this, I think that it is important to reiterate this to my community – I spend a lot of time listening to my community and having conversations with victims of crime, with perpetrators of crime and with the people providing the services to try and steer kids clear of getting involved in crime in the first place: I think that we should take some comfort from the fact that we do get some things right in this state when it comes to dealing with youth crime and youth offences. They are not always on the front page, and the likelihood of them being on the front page of local newspapers like the Herald Sun is quite rare; it would be telling a good news story. But they are important stories to tell the community, because they reassure the community that Victoria is not the most unsafe place to live; it is one of the greatest places to live.

As someone who was not born and bred in Victoria, in Melbourne, some people might call me an interloper. I hope they do not. There are many people in my community that I could call that. Melbourne in Victoria is a great place to live, and people choose to come here and be part of our communities and be part of neighbourhoods in the western suburbs that have indeed suffered from systemic social disadvantage for generation upon generation upon generation. So when we come into this place and we want to have a conversation about youth justice, youth crime, these are really complex issues. They should not have simple throwaway three-word slogans attached to them. As the member for Tarneit back in 2018 I had to fight an election with those opposite saying that Tarneit was the most unsafe place to live and raise a family. I think it was actually Peter Dutton who said that. He was on radio, maybe 3AW, saying the people in Tarneit were too scared to go out for dinner. Well, that is absolute rubbish because restaurants in Tarneit night after night are bloody well packed time and time again. But that kind of stigma, that kind of aspersion on a community like Tarneit, set back multicultural inclusivity and understanding differences. It set that back. There were families from our wonderful African community that said to me, ‘You will go to an election, you have talked about youth crime. The Libs have run on being tough on youth crime. But by saying that there is a gang crisis in Tarneit it is kids like my son and my daughter that will be targeted because of the colour of their skin.’

I do not want to see that happen again at the next election. A lot of these conversations and a lot of these slogans – and I guarantee you the social media posts of the Liberal Party will be going off like wildfire today – are detrimental to every community here in Victoria. They are detrimental; they are untrue. While we can talk about violent offences happening on our streets, we also need to be telling the community the truth. This is not the most unsafe state to live in. It is completely irresponsible of those opposite. I commend the bill to the house.

Danny O’BRIEN (Gippsland South) (12:07): I am pleased to rise to speak on the Youth Justice Bill 2024. I am going to give the member for Laverton a bit of credit, but I was a bit disappointed with the last minute or so of that contribution because up till then she had been, I think, very respectful and considered in her commentary on this, because this is an issue where there is a genuine disagreement between those of us on this side, the Liberals and Nationals, and the government. I think the member for Laverton had been respectful of that disagreement on how you handle this issue until the last part about social media posts that she condemned without having seen them and the like, which I think is not the sort of commentary that we should be having on an issue such as this.

Absolutely this is a political issue because this is an issue that the people of Victoria are concerned about – youth justice – particularly at this point in time when we have youth crime at very high levels and particularly violent youth crime at very high levels. So absolutely we should be giving this very careful consideration. We actually should be looking at our values as members of Parliament and as members of political parties as to how we address this issue. To be frank, I think this is a good example of the differences between the two parties, because I think there are two issues at stake here as there are with most crime: there is the issue of protection of the community and there is the issue of prevention of crime – preventative measures, diversionary measures – and rehabilitation if necessary of an individual, in this case a young person. My concern is that this bill does not address either of those adequately.

I give the government credit that they have tried, and we have got a thousand-page piece of legislation here, but I think in the fundamental principles it does not pass muster on those two issues. In particular, a lot of my focus is going to be on the increase in the age of criminal responsibility, which is the one on which I do not agree, and I suspect a very large portion of the public will not agree on that too. As the member for Malvern indicated – and I pay credit both to the member for Berwick and to the member for Malvern for their excellent speeches – no-one wants to see kids in jail. That is not the issue here.

I am reminded of one of the emails that we received some time ago lobbying on this particular bill, and this individual was lobbying in favour of raising the age. They said that kids should not be in jail; they should be home with their parents. It stuck with me because in many respects that is the problem: they are not home with their parents –

A member interjected.

Danny O’BRIEN: or they do not have parents, or they are in a broken home of some description. That is absolutely part of the problem. So I think in that sense that question was wrong – that they should not be in jail, they should be home with their parents. That is where it comes to the issue of the preventative programs and the diversionary programs that I think we need that are lacking in this legislation or in any commitments given by the government to actually provide them, because I do not think you can simply say what this bill does, which is effectively that if something is done by a child between 10 and 12 then the crime did not occur.

The member for Malvern, in reading out the responses from the government to a hypothetical situation of a child shoplifting from a store, has indicated that effectively that is what the government is saying. If they do that and they are caught by the shopkeeper, then nothing actually happened. We are getting into a logical fallacy here of inconsistency in argument. Again, my concern is that there are not the preventative measures here that are necessary, the diversionary programs, and the member for Berwick outlined some of those from around the world that could be done – and it is not easy. I do not think for a moment that it is simply a case of setting up a boot camp for kids out in the Mallee or something. I am not suggesting that is the simple solution. There is no simple solution. Our youth justice system is meant to be a diversionary program. It is not meant to be punitive for most of those young people in the system. It is actually meant to be rehabilitative. But it is not easy.

I have said before that following the member for Malvern on legal matters is somewhat daunting, but he has outlined very clearly the legal principle of doli incapax and the fact that as it stands right now, as I understand it, we do not have any 10- or 11-year-olds in prison or in the youth justice system because of the legal principle of doli incapax – that is, that it is incumbent on the Crown in prosecuting a child to prove that they knew that what they were doing was wrong. As a result, we already have those protections in the system from 10 to 14. That doli incapax rule ensures that the prosecution has to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the particular child knew that their conduct was seriously wrong or gravely wrong as opposed to merely being naughty or mischievous.

It is on that point that I want to go to an issue that is plaguing part of my electorate at the moment. We all have issues of youth crime. We all have issues of crime more broadly, and it is particularly bad in parts of my electorate. In Leongatha and surrounds at the moment there is a massive amount of community concern about youth crime, and much of it comes down to one particular individual, who of course I am not going to name in any way, shape or form, but many people in Leongatha know who I am talking about. This individual has been charged – speaking to police – about a dozen times in the last two months, and every time he is released almost straightaway because of the doli incapax rule. That in itself I think is a problem. This boy has recently turned 14, so he is now above that threshold, but I understand that all of his activities prior to the age of 14 are now being completely disregarded by magistrates.

There is obviously a lot to it that I do not necessarily know. But when it comes to that issue of ‘does the child know what they did was wrong’, I find it extremely hard to comprehend that after being charged a dozen or so times that child does not know that what they are doing is wrong, because they are doing it repeatedly and it is often the same thing. There are instances of car theft. What is of concern to the community is that not only is there car theft, but then there is very, very dangerous behaviour – driving around local streets at 100 kilometres an hour, for example. It cannot be possible that our community accepts that that child after being charged so many times and then released and doing it again does not understand that what he is doing is wrong. That, I think, is something that the government needs to be cognisant of in this legislation and in this space, because it is, to my mind, simply incomprehensible that we can continue to allow that behaviour to occur and not actually protect the community – and indeed protect that child, because certainly there are some problems there.

There are concerns as well in the bill with respect to the retrospectivity of it – part 19.1 – and I share the concerns of the member for Berwick. Some of the practical application of this, where a child’s consent is required for all interventions, just does not seem to make any sense. Police having the opportunity to remove a child from putting themselves in danger is understandable, but some of the other things, again as the member for Malvern has indicated, are of great concern to me. I am concerned that despite all the work that has gone into this and despite the level of detail, the level of review and the thousand pages, we have a clause like clause 25, which indicates at clause 25(d) the role of the secretary in:

enabling the progressive transfer of authority, resources and responsibilities to an Aboriginal-controlled justice system in consultation with representatives of the Aboriginal community on justice-related issues and Aboriginal communities …

I do not understand – it is not the Aboriginal part of it – how you can have legislation that progressively does something. Legislation either is or is not. You cannot say ‘Over time we’re going to do this as part of the law’ or particularly say ‘We’re going to progress to a system that we don’t have yet’ – that is not agreed by the Parliament, for example. That is a symptom of the concern that we have with this.

We have an obligation here in this Parliament to protect the community from crime and ensure that there are consequences for bad behaviour. If it is that there is a child undertaking that bad behaviour, we need to try to ensure that they are on the straight and narrow. I do not believe the bill achieves either of these, and that is why I am opposed to this legislation.

Paul EDBROOKE (Frankston) (12:17): It is a pleasure to rise on the Youth Justice Bill 2024. Just from the outset, I stand here as a representative for my community of Frankston, and I think it is probably reflective of most communities in Victoria that people want to feel safe. There is a balance that needs to be struck here, and that is that we make laws that make people safe, we come down hard on criminals and we make sure that those criminals do not reoffend. However, in the youth justice space that gets a whole lot more complex. We are looking at people who are young. They, as the former member just said, do not often know what they are doing as far as asserting criminal liability goes, and I would hope that most members on the other side of the house believe that young people with flexible neuroplasticity can actually change.

I would be a liar if I stood here and said that I was a very good boy when I was growing up. There were people that put their faith in me, and here I am today standing in Parliament. I stand here today, reflective of my community, looking at both sides of the coin, where we have to keep our community safe, and we also have to make sure we have the programs legislated in place to make sure, one, that people who make mistakes are able to, for want of a better word, reprogram their relationship with their community, which can be done and has been done very successfully – the data suggests that, and that is what a lot of this bill goes to – but also that repeat offenders cannot do what we just heard then. The issue we have is a very small number of repeat offenders who seem to not realise, I think, the gravity of the situation at times and what they are actually doing.

To hear people in this chamber yesterday talking about crime was a little bit educational for me, so I want to just go through some data before I start talking about some other things in this bill. As reported by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, in 2022–23 Victoria had the lowest rate of young people aged 10 to 17 under youth justice supervision on an average day. That is 4.7 people per 10,000, almost three times lower than the national rate. Victoria also had the lowest rate of young people aged 10 to 17 under community supervision, and that is 3.7 per 10,000, and in custody 1.1 per 10,000. Victoria had the lowest rate of Aboriginal young people aged 10 to 17 under supervision on an average day, and that was 41.5 per 10,000, more than three times lower than the national rate of 131.9 per 10,000. That is not saying we have not got work to do. That is why we are here today; that is why we are talking about this bill. All I am trying to do is give a foundation of evidence that we work from in this house so we are not accusing each other of dog whistling; we are working from data that is independent and has been verified so we can actually look at the problem and deal with the problem.

Hearing contributions today, I think maybe one person has asked the question: why are youth offending? I think that is the biggest question we need to answer, because out of that comes the answer to lower youth crime rates, and that equals less victims and that equals a safer community. When I think about why youth are offending – and through various careers I have had different interactions with youth in schools and special schools as a firefighter and even in my current job – often it is because they are disengaged. They are not linked with education, support services or employment, and that could be due to quite a few things. Often what we see, and I think the data backs this up wholeheartedly, is that a lot of these kids that are offending are actually victims themselves.

As the member for Gippsland East said: where are the parents? That is a community issue. Lots of abuse, lots of drug use in the home, homelessness – they are often victims themselves. I think, as I spoke about before, there is a balance here. We need to answer why youth are offending, and I think that gets more and more obvious as we go through the data. But we need to have a look at some of the data from overseas and talk about the developmental trauma that some of these children have. I can only speak anecdotally from one or two kids in Frankston that have offended that I have met, and certainly you can tell there are issues there. You can tell that the way they see their community is not friendly. They do not feel part of their community. I think they have been programmed by life itself to see others as threats and themselves as outside of the community. This is a big deal, but I do not think it is insurmountable; I think it is something that we can actually act on. Overseas there is lots of data on using the lessons of the science of neuroplasticity to make sure that these kids basically have their brain circuits reprogrammed to become part of the community, by care, by education, by a stable environment, by loving parents. It is pretty basic stuff. I just do not want us to overlook that. This bill goes a long way with some of those court-ordered programs and services to actually doing that, especially in the Aboriginal space as well.

I think also when you consider that, you have got to consider the notion that if people feel safe, if they feel like they are meaningfully connected to the community, if they feel like they are in charge of their lives, if they feel like they have got a sense of purpose, they are much less likely to offend, they are much less likely to fall into drugs, they are much less likely to fall into a criminal life. On the other side of that, though, I know that, as someone who meets with lots of families in Frankston who have perceptions of safety that they are concerned about, we need to make sure that people are safe. When I hear of repeat offenders, the answer is not a simple one. We are introducing a pilot of electronic monitoring during bail, and as people said, there are plenty of fences around that one. It is a trial, and I look forward to seeing the data that comes out of it. I look forward to seeing if it stops some of the reoffending and even more so gets these youth reconnected into education and into standard things. You know, we look at ourselves in the mirror and think that is normal, but these kids have another normal, and it is not all we are used to – so bringing them into that.

I think it is a really balanced and broad approach. The bill definitely goes a long way to addressing those root causes of offending and takes strong approaches on high-harm young offenders. We know that it is a small group of very frequent offenders, who, as I have said, I would love to see some of the backgrounds on – what they have grown up with – because I refuse to believe that people are just born and turn out as bad and become youth criminals. I think there is a lot more to it, and this bill goes a long way to making sure that we take that into account. Because it is one thing to address youth crime; it is another thing to bring the numbers down by looking at the generational or cultural issues that we have. As a couple of people have mentioned today, I think family is one of those. We heard mention of Tay Tay at one stage, of Taylor Swift and bracelets. I am not sure where we were going with that one, but I think that victims of crime also benefit under this bill. They still get compensation for crimes committed by people under the age of criminal responsibility. They can participate in group conferencing, giving them more opportunity to hold those who commit crimes against them to account directly as well.

I know, as I said at the outset, I am here as a representative of my community. I have spoken about this bill to members of my community, and they have given their full support to it. They have endorsed it. They believe that this is the right way to go, without any amendments. With that, it is my duty as a member of my community and as a representative to endorse this bill and make sure we support it.

David SOUTHWICK (Caulfield) (12:27): There is no question we have a youth crime crisis here in this state, and it has not happened in the last six or 12 months, it has happened over a decade. We are now in this Parliament with a bill before us that still does not fix the problems that we are seeing each and every day. Just in the last month we had a heartbroken family who had a young trainee doctor, Will Taylor, killed in a Burwood car crash tragedy and then huge anger, rightly so, from the family after the 17-year-old accused of being behind the wheel of the stolen car walked free on bail.

I bring that to the attention of the house because when that happened I received a call from a member of Victoria Police who was one of the first on the scene of that particular situation. There were six teams that were involved in that tragedy, and all he could remember was seeing Will, who was behind the wheel, who was in his dying moments if not already dead, and those six individuals more concerned about a bump on one of the alleged perpetrator’s heads and treating that rather than worrying about the person that they had just killed. He said to me he has a 15-month-old boy and that he has never felt more unsafe now, because of what is going on – and he has been in the force for 15 or 20 years – since when he was behind the wheel when he was on his Ls. That is from a member of Victoria Police, and they are absolutely beside themselves because no matter what they do in terms of their jobs, albeit under-resourced, underfunded, even when they catch people doing these serious crimes, they just get let out on bail and they reoffend again and again and again.

There is no question we need to distinguish between stupid crime and serious crime. For those people that go out and for whatever reason get caught up in the wrong groups and do something for a dare or end up offending, we need to stop that from happening in the first place and do whatever kinds of diversion programs to make sure that does not escalate to serious crime. I note the government has cut $10 million from these kinds of diversion programs and crime prevention programs in the budget, so this government is not serious about crime prevention. They are also not serious about providing enough funding for Victoria Police. We have a thousand police still not properly accounted for in the system, so we have the police desperate in terms of being under-resourced. We have forty-three 24-hour stations that are closed or underdone. So we have a police problem, we have a problem in terms of rehabilitation and thirdly, and probably more importantly, this is the government that only a few months back watered down the bail laws, which allowed people, once they commit a serious crime, to be back on the streets again doing the same thing.

I want to bring to the attention of the house a letter I received a few weeks ago. We held a crime safety forum in Caulfield, and I want to thank Glen Eira council for the work that they did in hosting that forum. I will come to that in a minute. But literally the day before, I received this from a Glen Eira parent. I have raised this a few times: the situation of a young boy, Benjamin, who was on his way home from school with his bag on his shoulders. As he left the school a car pulled up, they dragged him into the car, held him outside of the car, his head smashing against the road, and he was left with brain injuries in intensive care for months and months. It was a horrific situation. The person that committed the offence was out on bail, and we have seen nothing done in terms of this situation of that person being free. This is what the parent said to me:

I, like many parents, was sadly not surprised but extremely disappointed in the decision to free one of the youth who attacked and robbed children outside of Glen Eira College. Of particular concern is the fact that this offender was the main orchestrator, and had so many charges for this offence and previous offences.

I note ‘previous offences’.

As a community I can see that people are not only fed up with hearing about house invasions and robbery and the targeting of young school children, but of these offenders being constantly set free.

People do not understand the impact of this on not only those families – Benjamin and his family – but a whole community. This parent went on to say:

I can only convey to you how disturbing it was having a child who was home sick from school the day of the attack, and having to wake him up to go through his whatsapp class chat to find out if it was one of his friends or classmates who had been attacked. All I knew was that a child the same age as mine had been critically hurt. Fortunately my son and his friends and classmates were able to share their thoughts and feelings on the matter with each other, and the school and police were brilliant in the way that they supported the students.

This is not the school’s fault. This is not the police’s fault. This is the government’s fault for not providing the resources and support and letting these people back out on bail. This is the absolute crux of this letter:

However there was a lasting impact from the day, for example my daughter started year 7 this year and was too afraid to ride to school alone for the first 5 months, other parents I spoke with who had children who were so traumatised that they refused to go to school alone in fear. For my children going out with their friends should be a joy, however it took months for my husband and I and their friends’ parents to relax and we still worry about their safety.

This parent went on to say that they do not want young offenders who have committed small nonviolent crimes to be sent to detention. However, when they constantly and consistently reoffend, then why are, as this parent says, out-of-touch judges not detaining them but putting them back out in the community? I will tell you why: because this government has weakened bail laws, that is why. This government has weakened bail laws, and these people just get out and reoffend and turn people’s lives upside down, turn communities upside down and turn victims’ lives upside down.

I think people are sick and tired of talk. In this bill we have got raising the age. What about having serious time for serious crime? Adult crime, adult time. These are people, young people, that are committing adult crimes. They are not stealing a pack of cigarettes. These are serious, serious crimes and they are getting let out again and again and again, and I think we have got to differentiate from that. Yes, we need rehabilitation. Yes, we need support. But when young people do adult crime, these young people should receive adult time, clear and simple. That is what should happen, and that is not what is happening here in the state of Victoria. That is why our system is broken, and that is why we have a youth crime crisis in Victoria. That is why the Premier and the Labor government are doing absolutely nothing to fix the problem. Talk is cheap, and Victorians have had enough of talk when it comes to youth crime and the youth crime crisis that we are facing in this state.

There are lots of people and lots of examples. Shayne Hood, who has lived experience, is the director of Wounds and Wisdom and the co-founder of 16 Yards. He presented at our safety forum – excellent. He has been through it. He is talking to young people. He is doing some great things. Greg Sher from the Break, a local organisation doing great things, is trying to do stuff to rehabilitate and help young people, including Indigenous people. Where is their support? Where is their funding? We need more funding, we need a plan and we need consequences for those serious crimes. It has not happened in Victoria. It has not happened under Labor. We have seen weak bail laws, weak judges that are not going and doing what is needed and a poor, under-resourced police force that keep doing their job with little resources only to find that these violent criminals are back on the street again. Victorians have had enough of it. They have completely had enough of it. In areas like mine crime is 15 per cent up on last year. Enough is enough.

Dylan WIGHT (Tarneit) (12:37): It is with pleasure that I rise this afternoon to speak on the Youth Justice Bill 2024. With the passage of this bill Victoria will become the first state in Australia to raise the age of criminal responsibility to 12. This is a monumental step forward for youth justice in our state. It demonstrates significant criminal justice reform, shifting from an ineffective punitive system to a modern evidence-based approach. This new approach prioritises addressing socio-economic factors that lead to youth crime and creating positive opportunities for the rehabilitation of at-risk children and those who are already involved in the criminal justice system.

Youth crime is a problem that my community regards with particular concern. The youth crime rate in Wyndham is relatively low compared to other parts of the state. Nonetheless I am very aware of and concerned by the reputation that is often propagated by those opposite and by some media outlets. This is why I am more than happy to stand in this place and advocate for measures such as these which promote evidence-based strategies for reducing youth offending. I am proud that this government, unlike those opposite, are not resorting to desperate tough-on-crime, fearmongering politics, and we never, ever will. This stuff has been shown time and time again to have extremely detrimental effects on vulnerable children, particularly Indigenous children and children of refugee and migrant backgrounds. I am very aware that there are many vulnerable victims of crime in my community that are hurting as a consequence of youth crime.

Many, particularly on the 6 pm news, like to exploit fears about migrants and the poor in my electorate by painting it as a haven for youth crime and gang violence. It is disgusting and deplorable that some in our community would try to exploit racism, fear and trauma. This kind of crude and shameful fearmongering tarnishes the name of my electorate and has a disastrous effect on social cohesion. So often when I talk to people of multicultural backgrounds and civic leaders in my community, they talk about wanting to improve the image of Tarneit. They work hard and are committed to building a positive and inclusive community out there in the outer west. The kind of cynical, race-baiting, harmful politics we hear in some media outlets or on the evening news, and shamefully sometimes from those opposite, threatens to take away from all of that positive effort.

On this side of the house we are backing progressive, evidence-based criminal justice reforms, and I would like to thank all of those in my community, in this place and through the department and minister’s office who worked so tirelessly to put this together. I would especially like to give a shout-out to WEstjustice, who do fantastic work through my community in Wyndham. We know that these reforms based on evidence work. We know that they work. I hope that this bill can continue to be debated in this place and in the media without resorting to some of the tactics that I mentioned in my contribution previously – resorting to discriminatory stereotypes that, as I said, are harmful to our social cohesion and dangerously encourage the further marginalisation of vulnerable youths who may be currently at risk of falling into the cycle of offending.

It is important to recognise that vulnerable children that become involved in criminal activity are still exactly that: children – kids that will continue to go to school, kids that will continue to play sport and kids that will continue to grow up as part of our community. As a parent, I want to know that a child with a criminal background who could be at school or playing footy with one of my boys has received the care needed to overcome that criminal behaviour and perhaps the issues that caused it. Locking them up, shaming them and then sending them back to school simply will not help. Proper care and support will. We are taking action because it is the right thing to do, not just for the children involved but for the safety of our entire community.

Evidence shows that the younger a child is when first sentenced, the more likely they are to reoffend, and their offences tend to become more frequent, more violent and persistent into adulthood. By addressing the root causes of their behaviour and guiding them onto the right path we can ensure long-term community safety, which I know is important to all of us in this chamber, irrespective of which side we sit on. Serious offences by 10- and 11-year-olds are exceedingly rare, as are court appearances and custodial sentences for children this young. Thankfully we currently have no children of this age in the system, and with these reforms we never will again. When a 10- or 11-year-old engages in criminal activity it signals a serious underlying issue in their life that requires help and support, not criminal justice intervention. Support services with age-appropriate interventions are the best response.

Some may prefer a tough-on-crime approach, and we heard the contribution from the member for Caulfield just prior to me. Some may prefer that tough-on crime approach for young children, but evidence shows that this does not work. Young children typically lack the maturity to form criminal intent, leading to charges being withdrawn or not proven. If we do not help these children now, we will spend more resources policing their behaviour as adults to be able to maintain community safety. To be clear, raising the minimum age does not mean children escape consequences. They will still be held accountable, especially for serious harm. Raising the age recognises that the current criminal justice system is just not the best way to hold a young child accountable. Developmentally appropriate interventions and necessary supports are more effective in stopping harmful behaviour, which of course is the goal of this legislation. Our education, child protection and youth justice systems have programs to support young people dealing with trauma, challenging behaviours and complex issues.

Victoria Police as frontline responders have outreach and diversion programs to engage children without resorting to criminal charges. The role of Victoria Police in protecting our communities is of course crucial. We have worked closely with them in developing this legislation, ensuring they can continue to respond effectively to protect community safety, even with children below the age of criminal responsibility. This bill introduces a commonsense approach for police responding to children who pose a safety risk to themselves or to the community. Instead of locking up kids, police will be required to facilitate the transfer of these vulnerable children to a parent or a guardian, the health system or a welfare agency as appropriate.

This piece of legislation comes before this house because it is the right thing to do. It is the right thing to do for children in our communities that may be at risk of going down a particular path because of underlying issues and trauma in their life. It is also the right thing to do for community safety. I have said in this place before that community safety is the number one priority of the Allan Labor government, and putting children into programs that will stop their offending is great. I commend it to the house.

Jade BENHAM (Mildura) (12:47): I rise today to speak on the Youth Justice Bill 2024. This is another issue that is critical in my electorate at the moment and has been very topical since I began in this role. That has been highlighted, and I appreciate all the work that the shadow minister has done on this bill and appreciate too the visit that he had to Mildura, listening to victims of crime, police and other agencies that work in this space. The member for Berwick visited Mildura earlier this year, and he is coming back again very, very soon to do some more work in this space.

If you are familiar with the latest crime stats data, Mildura is again up there; in fact we are up another 9.8 per cent. That does not sound like much, but it is, especially when it keeps going up and up and up and those stats are not coming down. It makes Mildura number one in criminal incidents overall. Mildura is also number one in aggravated burglaries. Mildura is number one in youth crime. What we are down on, though, is people who feel safe walking alone at night. That has come down 24.15 per cent and is probably the lowest it has ever been. That is alarming, especially considering the lack of public transport and other safe ways to get home if you are not driving, because we are very, very spread out. Getting from Merbein to Red Cliffs or from the city heart to somewhere else, even over the river to Coomealla or Dareton, can be a challenge at times, so that is alarming. These are not the things that Mildura should be known to be number one for. We are number one in sunny days, we are number one in food produced per capita, we are number one in a lot of other things – lifestyle. There is a reason why 68,000 of us choose to live there.

A member interjected.

Jade BENHAM: Yes, the local member is obviously an attraction. But our fundamental focus should be community safety. Mildura has been neglected in this space over the past five years in particular through youth crime and youth homelessness as well, which has worsened with the cost of living. It was great to see the members of the Loddon Mallee Homelessness Network on the steps of Parliament. I spent a bit of time speaking with them yesterday about all of the issues and what has created a very visible increase in homelessness over the past 12 months in particular. They did mention that those coming out of institutional settings – it is a really unique part of the world, and I say this all the time – particularly for those coming out of Broken Hill Correctional Centre, which is just over the river, coming back to be with family and that may not work out, so they end up sleeping rough. It was great to get an insight into those sorts of things yesterday.

There is a youth homelessness issue. I have heard various members talk about these children not being able to be at home. We know all this. We know that home is not a safe place for them a lot of the time. We know that there are issues. We know, as the member for Frankston said, that they are probably victims themselves. There are agencies working in this space to rectify that, and we know all that, but ultimately we have to also listen to the victims of these crimes. I have been constantly inviting people into my office and sitting down and listening to victims and victims’ families about the fear that is very, very real on the ground.

Youth justice and how to solve it is not a blanket issue. For some of the agencies, particularly Hands Up Mallee in our part of the world – where, like I said, there is pretty little public transport, especially after 9 o’clock – things need to be community-led. There needs to be flexibility with all of these agencies so they can work together. But when we talk about victims of crime there also needs to be more support for those victims. I had the Sunraysia Indian Association contact me because on New Year’s Eve there was a very distressing arson attack on one of their stores and that really upset the community. The Indian community in Mildura contribute an enormous amount to our community on a very, very broad scale, and the estimated loss was around $200,000. It was determined that the perpetrators – after the police members had done their job – were four teenagers all under the age of 15. They knew what they were doing was wrong. Of course they did. That is not just an act of mischief.

I have also spoken to Matthew Mclean a number of times. We tabled a petition that he had run about the attack in broad daylight on his daughter at an establishment in Mildura, for social media content. Surely that is not okay. They know that that it is not okay. They are doing it for likes, and that is something that really has to be addressed. That petition sought to tighten laws – not weaken them, but tighten laws – around those who film, post and participate in crime for social media content.

Damien McDonald as well – I spoke to him a while ago. He was over in Perth at a Red Hot Chili Peppers concert, which I was very jealous of, and got a phone call in the middle of the concert from his daughters, who were in the middle of an aggravated burglary. One of his daughters was 15 and the other one was 18. He has since been back and met with the member for Berwick and me to talk about the mental health impacts that has had on his daughters and his family as a whole. These are the people that really need support, and fundamentally that is the government’s job, isn’t it, to look after community safety and keep us safe.

These are just some of the victims, some of the cases that I thought I would highlight today, given that I have only got 10 minutes to talk about it. When we talk about the agencies and we talk about police ‍– and I should take a minute because in all of these cases the police responded brilliantly. They are working so hard. The Minister for Police was with me a couple of weeks ago in Mildura to meet with those hardworking members, and a lot of them will have very frank conversations with me – off the record of course, and they make sure that I keep it off the record because they are fearful of chatting to their MP about these things, which is crazy to me.

One quote that has stuck with me and keeps going around in my head is that we bring the perpetrators in – and they are generally a small group of young people that are committing these crimes, but it is having an effect, and usually a negative effect, on others – they come in the front doors of the police station, they go out the back door through the courts and through the justice system and then they are back out on the street, and they call it a washing machine. It is just a cycle that keeps going around and around with little or no consequences. There is no deterrent for these kids to stop committing these crimes that they are doing.

When we talked about organisations in the last couple of minutes, I mentioned Hands Up Mallee. Sunraysia Community Health Services HomeBase is another extraordinary program, and this, along with Hands Up Mallee, is community led. They have got local people working on the ground with local families and local kids, but they have restrictions. For example, there is a bus running to HomeBase, which is a facility that young people can go and hang out in – they can study, they can eat ‍– but that bus cannot run after 5 o’clock. I do not know if you are aware of how things work, but crime happens after 5 o’clock, and young people need a place to go, especially after 5 o’clock and after school, if they are even going to school in the first place. Hands Up Mallee have asked multiple times for the Minister for Youth Justice to visit Mildura, because this needs ministerial intervention, particularly in my electorate.

These agencies – Sunraysia Community Health, Hands Up Mallee, the Clontarf academies, the Koori Stars, Mallee District Aboriginal Services and all of the other agencies that work in silos – cannot collaborate to deliver what could be a really good solution for all young people in Mildura. But because the guidelines and rules are so inflexible no-one puts up their hand up and says, ‘Yes, we can do that. We’re funded to do that; let’s work together.’ There is an inability, and we need ministerial intervention, not laws that are too little, too late, quite frankly. It is all too little, too late, and raising the age of criminal responsibility when you have got arson attacks being committed by people under the age of 15 – some of them are under the age of 12; we know that there are young people running around as young as nine – just will not work. Of course we are opposed to this bill. More work is desperately needed.

Nathan LAMBERT (Preston) (12:57): I did mention yesterday that it is good to be back in this place after a period of parental leave. With your indulgence I would just like to thank Danny Erlich, Esther Erlich, Jack Migdalek, Norma Migdalek and Marion Lambert, my mum, for the help they have provided to Noah, me and our newborn daughter. I should say that that experience of parental leave and indeed the experience of meeting with young children that we all do through our work here is a reminder of where we start with today’s bill, which is with the very fundamental belief that no child is intrinsically a criminal. None of us choose the circumstances in which we grow up. Most of us grow up in average circumstances; some young Victorians do not. Some young Victorians spend the first 10 or 15 years of their life in a succession of child protection arrangements, out-of-home care or experiences of family violence and abuse. It is very difficult for those of us who have not experienced those things to understand them, but I think we can understand that the child did not choose those circumstances. As a Labor Party we believe fundamentally that if someone starts out in very difficult and disadvantaged circumstances, we have an obligation to ensure that that start does not result in an even more disadvantage adulthood, and if we do not do anything, we know it will. That is a key principle behind today’s bill.

Youth justice can be a very tough topic, but I do believe this bill is a hopeful bill ultimately, because it recognises that our formative years are our formative years and we can learn from our mistakes. Young people can learn and grow. Many of us, as the member for Frankston mentioned, benefited when we were teenagers from the generosity of those who let us learn from our mistakes, and I think we have an absolute obligation to extend that generosity to those at-risk children who need it the most. It is a long and complex bill, as the member for Berwick mentioned.

Sitting suspended 1:00 pm until 2:02 pm.

Business interrupted under standing orders.