Terrorism (Community Protection) and Control of Weapons Amendment Bill 2024

18th of March 2025, 3:52 PM
Parliament of Victoria | Legislative Council

David ETTERSHANK (Western Metropolitan):

I rise to make a contribution to the Terrorism (Community Protection) and Control of Weapons Amendment Bill 2024. The proposed changes to the Terrorism (Community Protection) Act 2003 enable the Countering Violent Extremism Multi-agency Panel to provide more holistic, therapeutic care to those vulnerable to radicalisation and provide early intervention services. These are fairly uncontroversial, and we have no issue in supporting these changes.

The reform to the Control of Weapons Act 1990, however, are unsupportable from the Legalise Cannabis Victoria (LCV) standpoint. These broad changes are, frankly, disastrous. They are dangerous, they are excessive and they are unnecessary. The existing designated search area powers are already significant. They allow police to stop and search any individual within a specific declared area without a warrant or any reasonable grounds for doing so. Human rights advocates and other stakeholders already have concerns about the way the existing powers are used to target certain communities. These changes in this bill will dramatically broaden those powers.

Firstly, the bill increases the time the Chief Commissioner of Police can declare a designated area – that is, an area where police can stop and search a person without a warrant and without any justification – from 12 hours at a time to a staggering six months. It lowers the threshold for declaring a planned designated area from one where multiple previous incidents of violence with the use of weapons have occurred to an area where there is no evidence of incidents of violence or disorder having previously occurred. Under clause 55 the chief commissioner need only be satisfied that there is a likelihood of violence or disorder involving weapons occurring in that designated area. It sort of sounds potentially reasonable, but what is this concept of ‘likelihood’ based on? Well, we will never know, because the commissioner does not have to make that information public, nor are there any proposed criteria to test the accuracy of that information. So there is no transparency, no obvious reason, no public vision of the problem – none; nada.

To add to our concerns, the minimum time that must elapse from the end of a declaration of a designated area to the beginning of another one in that same area has been reduced from 10 days to 12 hours. This means that certain areas could essentially be subject to continuous day- or night-time monitoring for six months. The bill allows for a planned designation of an area to operate during any time before and after the event that the chief commissioner considers reasonable. There are no guidelines around what might be considered ‘reasonable’ when applying this extension, and again, the chief commissioner is not required to disclose the information on which that decision was based. It is entirely subjective, it is entirely opaque and it is entirely at the discretion of the chief commissioner. These unnecessary and unjustified new powers stem from the same fear-driven reflex as do the bail reforms the government is currently ramming through the Legislative Assembly. They are certainly not based on any evidence of improved community safety. They are based not on what is objectively reasonable, but rather, on what the chief commissioner believes to be reasonable. It is entirely up to the chief commissioner’s discretion. And do we really need to give police yet more discretionary powers? They are not exactly famous for wielding them with restraint.

Putting aside the fact that police already have sufficient powers to declare designated areas and to stop and to search people, there is no evidence to show that these searches are effective in preventing crime or making the community any safer. There is no evidence whatsoever. In fact, it is to the contrary. Liberty Victoria’s rights advocacy project looked into searches conducted in designated areas between January 2021 and January 2023. Over that two-year period Victoria Police conducted nearly 24,000 warrantless searches of individuals in 61 designated areas. Of these 24,000 warrantless searches, only 250 led to objects or substances being found. That means around 1 per cent of those searches turned up anything, so hardly a raging success. And we are not even sure that during those 250 searches any weapons were actually found. It is far more likely they turned up the odd bag of weed and a few pocketknives – maybe a slingshot if they were lucky. Anyway, in 99 per cent of those searches the person undergoing the search was being subjected, for no reason, to an invasive and humiliating public search when they were not guilty of any crime. What do these operations cost the taxpayer – all for a possible 1 per cent success rate?

There is the issue of these new powers being used on overpoliced communities, which we know happens already. Stakeholders we met with are very concerned that the new laws will lead to an uptick in racial profiling, and let us face it, those fears are held with very good reason. The racial profiling data monitoring project was established to monitor Victoria Police’s so-called ‘zero tolerance’ policy on racial profiling. Despite these policies being in place, and being in place for around a decade, data obtained by the project showed that First Nations Victorians are still 11 times more likely to be searched by police than white Victorians – 11 times more. This fact was reinforced in the evidence given to the Yoorrook Justice Commission, which called on Victoria Police to address the systemic racism and the unequal use of discretionary powers in its ranks, specifically in relation to First Nations people.

Smart Justice for Young People data also confirms that police searches disproportionately target over-represented groups of young people, including Aboriginal young people, young people from racial minorities and children in out-of-home care. But here is the kicker: despite police in Victoria disproportionately subjecting certain groups to searches based on their appearance, based on their age and based on their perceived racial background, the actual find rates for illegal weapons, drugs or other illicit items are actually lower with those groups than when they search those they perceive to be Caucasian. That is shameful. We know the harms associated with being repeatedly stopped in public and searched by police for no reason, not the least of which is having to deal with criminal charges.

Werribee train station in my electorate is often declared a designated area. Recently we heard from one of our community legal centre representatives about a young person picked up during a search for having a pocketknife in his bag – one of those Swiss army knives – and that pocketknife was identified as a weapon. The community legal centre was able to get the charges dropped against this young person, who was in their final year of school, but that person had to cope with all the stress of dealing with the justice system when really they should not have been charged at all and should not have been searched. They should have just been doing their VCE. Surely a schoolkid with a pocketknife should not be the target of these searches. Really, is that what we have come to? Is that really the optimal utilisation of scarce police resources? It beggars belief. It is a ridiculous waste of police and is a ridiculous waste of court and legal resources, and we are about to enable that to happen more often and with less due process. It is shameful.

Yes, these searches do have a disproportionate impact on people of colour, on young people, on vulnerable people and on people who are just in the wrong place at the wrong time, but make no mistake, this kind of overreach is an infringement on everyone’s rights. We all suffer from the loss of these rights. Police already have sufficient powers and already have too little oversight. I ask: what is the point of these reforms other than to relieve police of doing a bit of paperwork? Let us be clear: police already have these powers. All these changes do is make it more convenient for police. It is to make it easier for them to exercise those powers, and that is wrong.

These reforms, plus the overly hasty tougher-on-bail laws, show a government floundering in thrall to the fearmongering of the right-wing media cabal and coming up with policy on the run to placate it. The reforms leave the community no safer, while marginalised, vulnerable people, young people and overpoliced multicultural communities continue to feel the brunt of these discriminatory practices – and for what? As I mentioned earlier, the success rate of stop-and-search powers used in designated areas is 1 per cent. There appears to be a creeping erosion of civil liberties right across this country. It is beyond depressing that we are joining this race to the bottom in terms of protecting our civil liberties. Is that 1 per cent success rate really worth the continual targeting of overpoliced communities, the profound breaches of human rights and the harms experienced by those targeted by these searches, not to mention the incredible cost of these operations and subsequent legal matters? We say: no, it is not worth that, and no is how we will be voting on this bill.

[Council divided on the bill]

[Bill passed 29-8]