Justice Legislation Amendment (Police and Other Matters) Bill 2025

Parliament of Victoria | Legislative Council | Second Reading
2 December 2025

David ETTERSHANK (Western Metropolitan Region):

I rise to make a contribution to the Justice Legislation Amendment (Police and Other Matters) Bill 2025 on behalf of Legalise Cannabis. The bill expands police and PSO stop and search powers, it further restricts the rights of protesters and it changes the rules around the destruction by police of seized drugs and drug-related equipment. We will come back with some questions about that in committee of the whole.

It is the government’s latest regressive so-called ‘tough on crime’ bill. This one implements an unnecessary and harmful expansion in police and PSO powers and seeks to further erode our civil liberties – the edge of the wedge driven further into our democratic hearts with each populist stunt.

Over 90 new police powers have been introduced in the last five years with no corresponding increase in oversight, a seemingly endless recycling of old laws that have proven to be ineffective, discriminatory and expensive, all in the name of community safety. But this is about a government attempting to shore up its re-election chances and a Premier who jerks reflexively at every Herald Sun headline and seems to mistake legislating for leadership.

I confirm from the outset, as you may have already guessed, that we will not be supporting this bill. Our vote makes little difference, as the bill has been enthusiastically endorsed by the opposition, and it is really getting harder and harder to distinguish between our two major parties on some of these issues. It seems that, if anything, the opposition feel the government’s authoritarian overreach does not quite extend far enough.

The bill hands more power to police to stop and search people without a warrant and without suspicion in key transit points outside a designated area – at bus stops and train stations or perhaps further on. America’s justice system has many, many flaws, but the concept of probable cause and due process are enshrined to a degree that the police powers proposed in this bill would be struck down there.

There are practical considerations as to why this is a bad piece of legislation as well. It weakens safeguards for children and people with an intellectual impairment by removing the requirement that a parent, guardian or independent person be present for a search –

[Mr Limbrick interjected]

Yes, Mr Limbrick, it is disgusting – requiring that only another person be present, and that person can be a police officer. Random searches are also incredibly inefficient. Only 1 per cent of random police searches yield anything. Targeted ones have a slightly better hit rate of around 17 per cent, but it is still a lot of money for a pretty poor catch rate. There is gross potential for scope creep and misuse, particularly around police pre-empting criminal offences with no requirement to prove criminal intent.

We know these laws will disproportionately impact First Peoples in Victoria, along with all the other usual suspects. The cognitive dissonance of this government once again is stunning.

Last month they passed the historic treaty bill – well done – and next week they will deliver an apology to our state’s First People, one that will acknowledge the responsibility of predecessors for laws, policies and practices that contributed to injustices against First Peoples in Victoria. But that is apparently as far as they are prepared to go.

The Minister for Police himself told the Yoorrook Justice Commission about the challenges of combating racism, discrimination and unconscious bias in our police force, yet the use of excessive and illegal force continues against people from those communities and other marginalised communities with inadequate oversight.

It is very disturbing, given the Centre Against Racial Profiling has found that profiling of Aboriginal, African, Middle Eastern and Pasifika communities has in fact worsened since the practice was outlawed by Victoria Police in 2016. Let us face it: police have never been known for using increasing powers lightly.

Protective services officers hold these same biases, these same patterns of racial profiling and targeted behaviour towards people who are homeless, people with mental health issues and people living in poverty. The difference is that PSOs get a mere 12 weeks of training. Youthlaw rightly notes that PSOs are not known for de-escalating situations.

Sending them into more public spaces where children and teenagers hang out, like shopping centres, will intensify situations that should never involve force, let alone a firearm. Youthlaw’s clients are young people who are already overpoliced, traumatised and unfairly targeted. They are disproportionately stopped, questioned and searched, too often without any lawful basis.

VALS, the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service, also noted PSOs’ contribution to unsafe environments for vulnerable communities, Aboriginal people and those experiencing social disadvantage over the years, and we are going to let them loose into yet more public spaces, fully armed with guns, tasers and OC spray and with the power to arrest and hold people. Seriously? It is profoundly concerning.

The government barely consulted with Victoria Police and not at all with the legal sector. They ignored Aboriginal community groups, entirely contrary to their newly minted treaty. I mean, how does that work? Jeremy King represents people making civil claims against police after failing to receive any remedy from our police complaint system. His firm, Robinson Gill, receives many complaints about PSOs, and he has no doubt that the increased use of PSOs will see a rise in complaints and a rise in claims.

Moving on, we find ourselves again debating protest laws for the second time in a matter of weeks. I said it then and I will say it now: it is our right as citizens to protest. It is a basic right, and the right to protest in Australia is protected and should be celebrated. As I mentioned just the other week, I cut my political teeth in Queensland protesting Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s anti-protest laws – laws handing police powers to approve protest applications and to declare a gathering of two or more people without a permit to be illegal. I found myself musing over how far off Victoria might be from introducing something similar if this sort of legislation goes through.

Anyway, I was one of thousands of Queenslanders who went to the protest marches, and I was duly arrested and charged a dozen or so times and beaten up by the Queensland police a couple of times, and I have never regretted my actions, because it is about liberty, it is about democracy and it is about justice.

This bill proposes handing Victoria Police extraordinary powers to arrest and harass protesters where there is no danger to the public. I acknowledge some slight government amendments to soften the face covering offence, reducing it to an offence for not removing a mask when police ask you to, and some exemptions. But this is a gross violation of our rights and another example of that creeping normalisation of police being able to arbitrarily interfere in our autonomy and in our privacy.

I am so sick of government and police spruikers saying, ‘Well, if you haven’t done anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about.’ This whole spin is based on the false premise that the sole purpose of people’s privacy is to conceal wrongdoing. It denies the possibility that someone may just want to conceal personal, embarrassing or sensitive information, and that should not be an offence.

Why shouldn’t someone who has been subject to gender-based violence, stalking, doxxing or other violence be able to protect themselves and their families by preserving their anonymity while protesting, or those who wish to protect themselves from racial profiling or, God forbid, from the unlawful and indiscriminate use of OC spray and tear gas by police? Police already have powers to remove face coverings if a crime is reasonably suspected, so where is the justification for these further powers? Where is it?

A member: Intelligence.

Or the lack of intelligence.

And then we have the new lock-on laws. People who intentionally lock or affix themselves to something in a protest face up to a year in prison or a fine of 120 penalty units – that is over $24,000 – or both. I recently walked past Trades Hall, where there now stands a beautiful life-size bronze sculpture of Zelda D’Aprano, the historic unionist and campaigner for trade union and women’s rights and I am sure an inspiration to many people in this Parliament.

Looking at that statue, in one hand Zelda holds a placard with the words ‘No more male & female rates. One rate only’ – equal work, equal pay. In the other hand, heaven forbid, she holds a chain, and it was with a chain that she attached herself to the doors of the then arbitration commission to protest the glaring wage inequality for women.

That was in 1969. Today this Labor government, without a ‘u’, would have locked Zelda up for a year and fined her 24 grand. Even Henry Bolte, the then Premier, would not propose such outrageous punishment, yet this Labor government will not only do it but positively brag about it. It is appalling. Those on the government benches should be ashamed. Your actions betray hundreds of years of protest by the labour movement, by the women’s movement, by the anti-war movement and by the environmental movement, all of whom have had recourse to this method of calling out justice.

Let us recognise that, by its very nature, locking on is a peaceful form of protest. We are talking about Violet Coco, not Violent Coco. Protest is disruptive, but it is also an integral part of our democracy. It may occasionally be inconvenient, and I am sure we have all sat in our cars as a demonstration passes. We may agree or disagree with their cause, but we must respect the right of those people to express their heartfelt concern. As the philosopher, author, Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel said:

‘There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.’

Sometimes you have just got to get people’s attention, and sometimes it takes a bold action to capture the public’s attention. It would all be much easier if everyone just stayed at home, but where would that have got us?

Let us recognise that once these powers are implemented, they are rarely or never ceded. For that reason many of us are concerned about the recent announcement of a six-month designated area being declared for the City of Melbourne. It is possible that these combined actions may reward the government with a boost in the polls – temporarily. Locking away more people in our overcrowded jails and remand centres may clear the streets a bit, and they may be able to scare enough kids away from shopping centres over the Christmas period.

Who knows, the government might even be able to ride that bump all the way to the next election, but it will not make any difference to crime and violence in the long term. The shameful thing is that the government knows this. They know it because all the evidence shows that these types of policies are ineffective and they are expensive, yet they are still going to do it, and they know there are things that do work.

I understand the Premier was so taken by the remarkable work of the Scottish violence reduction program that she announced that we will be using that model to start our own violence reduction unit here in Victoria. I am not sure she entirely understands the Scottish model.

That model is a holistic, system-wide approach to keeping young people out of jail. It is well resourced, it is evidence based. It requires that all sectors – schools, health, social work, homelessness services and police – work together to engage children with those foundational supports when they are first starting to show signs of disengagement. Its success has been in breaking the cycle of youth incarceration, not in finding further ways to incarcerate young people. It is cynical, it is tokenistic and it is a deplorable move by the government.

I would draw the chamber’s attention to the reality that with a $2 billion budget the police allocate less than 1 per cent to crime prevention. I think that says it all. It also says that a $20 million violence reduction unit is going to make almost no difference at all.

Before I finish, there is another clause that Legalise Cannabis Victoria is interested in. For various reasons the bill will authorise Victoria Police to destroy drugs and drug-related equipment subject to certain safeguards for fair trial rights. These safeguards include the ability to seek an independent analysis of samples and the retention of sufficient samples for forensic evidence for, say, the duration of any court proceedings or appeal periods. However, it is not clear how these changes will impact someone who disputes their charges on the ground of, for example, the weight of a seized cannabis plant.

The initial weight may include the entire plant and root system, soil and all, and the water content of a freshly harvested plant can double the weight of the plant. The only sellable part of the cannabis plant is the dried flowers, and those can weigh less than a third of the entire plant. The difference in weight can mean the difference between a personal use quantity, a commercial quantity or a trafficable quantity, and that is quite a dramatic upscaling of offences just for being a good gardener and having the right soil conditions. We will be seeking some clarity on this clause in the committee-of-the-whole stage.

While we are talking about police resources, why are we continuing to waste them on policing cannabis? The 2025 Penington cannabis report has once again highlighted the ridiculous sums of money we waste. They write:

‘Prohibition of personal use cannabis continues to absorb billions in enforcement while failing to reduce cannabis use, instead funnelling everyday Australians into the criminal justice system.’

We all know we cannot arrest our way to a safer community. Our Chief Commissioner of Police has said as much repeatedly. If the government is serious about community safety, it needs a different approach. It needs to fund those vital supports that help young people – youth workers, mental health supports, housing and early intervention – rather than continue to push them through the revolving door of the justice system.

This is the world we have made, and young people are a part of it. They deserve support, not surveillance, and they do not deserve vilification. They certainly deserve better than to be sacrificed as fodder for the government’s election campaign. We do not create community safety by placing ever more restriction on people’s lives and by handing greater power to the police. It has not worked to date, and it will not work in the future.

As Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt wrote in their work How Democracies Die:

‘The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy – gradually, subtly, and even legally – to kill it.'”

I urge members to consider carefully what you are voting for today and to oppose this bill.

[Council divided on Bill]

[Bill passed 30 votes to 8]