15th of October 2024, 3:50pm
Parliament of Victoria | Legislative Council
David ETTERSHANK (Western Metropolitan):
I rise to make a contribution to the Criminal Organisations Control Amendment Bill 2024 on behalf of Legalise Cannabis Victoria. As the name suggests, the bill is amending the 2012 act to allow for a more robust response to the activities of criminal organisations, notably outlaw motorcycle gangs, amongst others. Firstly, the bill amends the unlawful association scheme. It lowers the criminal threshold for issuing an unlawful association notice, allowing police to issue notices to a broader range of people for lesser offences, with more severe penalties for breaching them. It also replaces the existing declarations and control orders with new serious crime prevention orders. The bill bans adults from knowingly displaying the insignia of certain organisations in public. Finally, the bill seeks to prohibit members of prescribed organisations from entering Victorian government worksites.
I will say from the outset that Legalise Cannabis cannot support this bill in its current form. Given the bill’s very easy passage through the Assembly, however, I doubt that our votes will decide much in this chamber on this matter. Nevertheless, it would be good to see some more guidance and clarity around parts of the bill for the benefit of the legal community, so we will have some questions during the committee stage.
This bill, once passed, will again hand yet more power to Victoria Police to restrict a person’s civil liberties and basic rights. The existing legislation already gives police substantial powers to restrict individual freedoms of association and political expression and, as Mr Mulholland noted, has not been used. Victoria Police are not known for wielding power with restraint or consideration. Where is the case for handing even more extreme powers to them? There is already insufficient oversight of police conduct. How is IBAC, the agency responsible for overseeing police misconduct, supposed to take on additional oversight when it already struggles to fulfil its current brief? As it is, less than 3 per cent of police complaints are investigated by IBAC; the rest are reviewed internally. And how is IBAC supposed to objectively oversee a scheme which relies on Victoria Police’s self-reporting on how that scheme is operating?
The Victorian Inspectorate noted the dangers of an institution that relies on the self-reporting of its members – the risk of corruption, the unwillingness of Victoria Police officers to act against their own, the conflicts of interest it engenders. It is highly problematic. Stakeholders we have met with have also expressed alarm at the creeping authoritarianism that appears to have been enthusiastically embraced by both sides of politics over the last two decades. Police can exert extraordinary control over individuals’ lives in circumstances where they have not committed a crime or they have done their time and are entitled to move freely and associate with whoever, and we see these laws being frequently abused. It is what happens when you hand unchecked power to the police.
Indeed this bill reminded me of formative events in my distant past, when another instance of police being handed extraordinary powers spurred my first foray into political activism. In 1977 Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen announced a total ban on street protests, handing power to the police commissioner to approve or reject any application, no questions asked. The gathering of two or more persons without a permit constituted an illegal assembly. As an idealistic uni student, I was incensed by this violation of my democratic right to protest and even more appalled at the state handing extreme powers to police to uphold this violation, so I went along to the march with a bunch of mates, ostensibly to fight for our right to assemble. All sorts of people showed up that day; 400 were arrested, myself included. And 50 years later, here we are. While this bill is not the sledgehammer or nutcracker that Bjelke-Petersen tried to use back then, it is nonetheless a blatant expansion of police powers and the control order regime. As the saying goes, ‘History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.’
Turning to the changes to the unlawful association scheme, these reforms remove the need for an individual who is subject to one of these notices to have been previously convicted of an indictable offence, allowing the police to issue notices to more people for lesser offences. The prerequisite that the association is likely to lead to the commission of a crime is changed so that police need only be reasonably satisfied – so based on a vibe, for example, that a notice will prevent or inhibit the establishment, maintenance or expansion of a criminal group or a criminal network, thereby preventing criminal conduct. Similarly serious crime prevention orders can be used to impede an individual’s ability to associate with who they like, to travel, to use certain telecommunications devices and to prevent them from engaging in certain business activities without that individual ever being charged with a crime. I am reminded of the movie Minority Report, pre-emptively criminalising conduct that has not yet occurred and may never occur. It is quite chilling, in my opinion, and without more robust police oversight the scheme is ripe for abuse.
Only last week we learned that Victoria Police still employ racial profiling despite the fact of this being banned in 2015. The Centre Against Racial Profiling has used FOI data to track how the ban on racial profiling was working. They found that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are still 11 times more likely to be searched by Victoria Police than non-Indigenous people, and people perceived as African were eight times more likely to be searched, and of course we know that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are already subject to overpolicing and over-representation in the justice system. Victoria Police have a problem with systemic racism, and in the absence of a statewide monitoring scheme and some robust oversight they do not appear to have an appetite for monitoring or enforcing their own zero-tolerance-to-racism policies. As I have noted, there are significant concerns around IBAC’s role in overseeing this scheme. The Australian Lawyers Alliance warned that:
The proposed plan to give IBAC further monitoring tasks simply increases the strain on an organisation that already cannot cope with its current police misconduct remit.
We will be asking some questions around the oversight of these schemes in the committee-of-the-whole stage. We will also be asking some questions about the ban on the public display of insignia of certain organisations. Legal stakeholders we have spoken to are concerned that the legislation is vague enough to capture people who are not the intended targets of the legislation, including members of political organisations or protesters, and again that there should be more oversight. They would like to see some tightening of the definitions in the bill.
Turning to the prohibition of members of prescribed organisations from entering Victorian government worksites, we are opposed to this provision, particularly as there is very little detail about how these organisations will be prescribed. Building sites are possibly one of the few remaining places where someone with a previous criminal record can find stable work and turn their lives around. Restricting these people’s capacity to earn a living and depriving them of the other protective factors that a job provides may in fact force them to seek out the very criminal connections they are trying to leave behind just to earn some money. Stakeholders would like to see this legislation tightened, particularly around definitions. The intent to target serious criminal gangs could be more explicit to give the legal community more direction around how the law should be applied in court.
As I noted at the start of my contribution, we cannot support this bill in its current form. Serious organised crime is obviously an issue in Victoria, but I am not convinced the legislation will have any effect on thwarting crime. A better way to protect our communities and to tackle serious organised crime in Victoria would be to cut off their source of funding.
As I noted in this chamber only last month, illicit cannabis is a boon for organised crime, aptly described by a senior New South Wales police officer as ‘the jet fuel of organised crime’. According to our own Parliamentary Budget Office, illicit cannabis pulls in around $1.25 billion a year in Victoria alone. By conservative estimates, Victorians consume about 8 tonnes of illicit cannabis each year. Indeed only a couple of weeks ago a Victorian with a link to organised crime was charged with trafficking cannabis between Victoria and New South Wales. Police seized 58 kilos of cannabis worth about $600,000, which is but a drop in the ocean. With the money we could save on policing, not to mention detention and court resources, we could prevent a lot of serious criminal activity and do a lot of good in this state as opposed to passing ever more reactionary legislation that hands more power to the police.
Voted for: Ryan Batchelor, Melina Bath, John Berger, Lizzie Blandthorn, Jeff Bourman, Gaelle Broad, Georgie Crozier, David Davis, Enver Erdogan, Jacinta Ermacora, Michael Galea, Renee Heath, Ann-Marie Hermans, Shaun Leane, Wendy Lovell, Trung Luu, Bev McArthur, Joe McCracken, Nick McGowan, Tom McIntosh, Evan Mulholland, Harriet Shing, Ingrid Stitt, Jaclyn Symes, Lee Tarlamis, Sonja Terpstra, Gayle Tierney, Sheena Watt, Richard Welch
Voted against: Katherine Copsey, David Ettershank, David Limbrick, Sarah Mansfield, Rachel Payne, Aiv Puglielli, Georgie Purcell, Samantha Ratnam, Rikkie-Lee Tyrrell
[Bill passed 29-9]