Wednesday, 28 August 2024

Corrections system

Renee HEATH (Eastern Victoria) (18:28): (1098) My adjournment is for the Minister for Corrections, and the action that I seek is that the minister rectify the disgraceful COVID consequence and remove the emergency management days (EMD) credited to violent and high-risk offenders during the COVID state of emergency. These emergency management days were originally meant for extreme examples where prisoners were denied their normal entitlements. However, because COVID was declared an emergency, prisoners are now getting hundreds of days off their sentences, some more than a year. This is the case for the family of Katie Haley, who learned that her killer will now receive 427 days off his sentence and now will be released earlier than his original non-parole period.

The government was warned about this exact scenario by the opposition when it enacted the COVID-19 Omnibus (Emergency Measures) Bill 2020, and despite the Leader of the Government and now Attorney-General saying ‘emergency management days are not a right’, these EMDs were automatically provided to prisoners during COVID instead of the usual practice of prisoners having to apply for them. Now that some of Victoria’s worst and most violent criminals are getting a year or more off their sentences, something needs to be done. Victims and their families are suffering very badly because of this.

In 2021 the federal Parliament passed legislation to retrospectively remove EMDs and their eligibility for federal prisoners in Victorian prisons. While I do not normally agree with retrospective legislation, I refer to the comments by the federal member for Isaacs and now Attorney-General, who stated on removing EMDs for federal prisoners in Victorian prisons that:

… we do not think those concerns outweigh … the interests of community safety.

Minister, I am asking you to urgently review this legislation and give these families some peace.