Wednesday, 10 September 2025

Community safety

Anasina GRAY-BARBERIO (Northern Metropolitan) (18:43): (1950) I have three adjournment responses that are now overdue. I have emailed the relevant ministers, and I am now requesting an explanation in the house. The questions are numbers 1626 to the Treasurer for the Premier, 1794 to the Treasurer for the Premier and 1626 to the Treasurer for the Premier.

My adjournment matter this evening is for the Premier, and the action I seek is an explanation of why this government continues to deny multicultural communities targeted grants, programs or funds under the Victorian community crime prevention programs. In Victoria there is no clear picture of hate crime. Victoria Police do not publish statistics on crimes against multicultural or ethnic communities, which means these incidents are effectively invisible in official reporting. The Labor government have announced they are keeping Victoria free of hate, yet when we look at their prevention response the picture is not so reassuring. At the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee in 2024 the then Minister for Crime Prevention admitted that crime prevention funding had been shifted into broader budget categories, making it impossible to see what is really being spent to ensure community safety. In 2025 the Labor government pointed to a whole-of-government approach to crime prevention, youth justice, prisons and countering violent extremism, but these are reactive responses that come after the harm has already happened. They are not the same as prevention that keeps communities safe in the first place. There is no sustainable investment to keep multicultural communities safe from the daily violence they face, from racist assaults and hate crimes to discrimination and overpolicing. Current programs fail to respond to the fear multicultural communities feel. Just yesterday one of our Greens candidates was racially abused while out minding his own business. He was told, ‘Indians do not belong here. This is our space.’ And then right after that, he was kicked in the face, an unprovoked and shocking attack that points to the real danger and risks that so many in our communities are facing right now.

There is no visible dedicated stream that funds multicultural community organisations to do prevention, recovery and resilience work at scale, and critically, there is no routine, transparent publication of hate crime data by Victoria Police that would tell us the true scope of the problem in our state. Without clear data and a clear program, we are asking communities to endure harm and then navigate completely fragmented services after the fact. Prevention means tackling root causes – racism, exclusion, poverty, disconnection – before they become violence. It means backing and trusting our grassroots groups, who know how to best serve their communities. It also means supporting the recovery and resilience work that these communities know how to deliver.