Thursday, 19 March 2026

 Brad BATTIN (Berwick) (17:10): (1603) The adjournment I raise is for the Premier, and the action I seek is for the Premier to come out to the Berwick electorate and attend one of our crime forums with the local community. I note that the government, today of all days when the crime statistics have come out, have tried to highlight to Victoria that the crime crisis is over. Those are the words they want to use: that crime is on its way down and people are safe across the community. Well, let me assure you that is simply not the case in Casey. In Casey alone, aggravated burglaries in houses have increased 21 per cent; 583 homes in my electorate, throughout Casey, have had aggravated burglaries in the last 12 months. That is 583 families that will never feel safe in their own homes again, and yet the Premier puts a media release out today saying the crime crisis has finished.

Motor vehicle theft in Casey is 31 per cent up; 2014 cars were stolen in the communities in Casey. Again, people are worried about where they park their cars and what is going to happen. We have got aggravated robbery up 18 per cent. The total offences alone are up 14 per cent. Stealing from a motor vehicle is up 18 per cent. Stealing from a retail store is up 40 per cent. Again, it is the community, those people working in those stores, that are the ones that are threatened continuously by thugs in these communities who are coming out there. They are not there for anything else other than violence and theft. They are just the crooks that we have to get off the street that continue to get back on the street.

So my message to the Premier is: maybe it is time, instead of standing in here and putting a media release out, to come and meet the real victims, those out in those areas in Clyde North, in Berwick and in Berwick South.

Mary-Anne Thomas interjected.

Brad BATTIN: I note that the Minister for Health at the table says she does it all the time. Well, I can tell you the Premier has never, not once, ever come out to the Berwick electorate and met with victims of crime and spoken to the people who are the ones that now feel unsafe in their homes, those that have had aggravated burglaries with knives, baseball bats and machetes whilst their kids were home, those that have rung 000 and found that there are no police at the Clyde North police station. The community out there is angry, and they just want answers. What they want is a Premier that takes accountability. So my adjournment today is for the Premier to come out, take accountability and meet with my community to assure them that we can do more to fix the crime crisis that this government created, in the Casey electorate.