Wednesday, 3 December 2025

 David LIMBRICK (South-Eastern Metropolitan) (17:52): I move:

That the petition be taken into consideration.

What happens when Victorians fight back against thugs that invade their homes? This is a question that many Victorians do not really know the answer to. Firstly, I would like to congratulate Carly, the petitioner who put forward this petition, who managed to garner 20,554 signatures from Victorian citizens. Carly did not do this because of some ideological concern or policy belief; Carly did this because she herself is a victim of a home invasion. I believe Carly is in the gallery right now.

Many Victorians have been in the unfortunate situation where their home has been invaded by violent people to rob them or do them harm, and some of these Victorians have fought back. There is a man who I have met in my electorate. His name is Aaron. His home was invaded. He lives with his wife and teenage daughter. His home was invaded in the middle of the night, and his wife called the police. Aaron, being a resourceful man, had a baseball bat near his bed, and he went and chased this thug out of his house. We do not know if the man that was robbing him was armed or not. I went to visit Aaron. He lives in a beautiful place in Clyde, a beautiful area. All the neighbours know each other – people from all around the world, very peaceful – yet their suburb, the place they live in and call home, has been constantly attacked by people invading homes. I asked Aaron, ‘What would have happened if you’d hit this guy in the head with your baseball bat?’ He said, ‘I don’t know,’ and I said, ‘I don’t know either.’ In fact, most Victorians do not know.

Under Victorian law, you are entitled to defend your home, but it must be what they term a ‘proportionate’ response, and what is considered proportionate is left up to the police and the courts. It is quite unrealistic, I believe. Put yourself in the mind of someone who has had their home invaded, who is concerned about their family and what might happen to them. They do not know if someone is armed. People are not considering what is proportionate force; they are considering what might happen to their family and thinking, ‘I’m going to do whatever it takes to defend my family against these thugs until the police arrive.’ There are many Victorians like this.

What this petition is proposing and what I have proposed in this Parliament before is to look at something called castle law. What this does is it basically sets the default of the law so that it sides on the side of the home owner that is defending themself. As long as they are not doing anything egregious and they are genuinely defending their home, then they know that the law has their back. Even under the current system it is not clear to Victorians; the government has not told people what they can and cannot do in these situations. People are concerned that if they fight back, they might very well end up getting in trouble with the law. In fact it happened not too long ago in Queensland. A man defended himself against a violent home invader. That man, who was attacking him in his home, ended up having a heart attack and passing away. The home owner was charged with murder and stood trial, and the only reason that he was acquitted was because they got an expert witness that was a medical expert who said that the heart attack that the man suffered was not due to the attack from the home owner, it was due to the assailant’s methamphetamine addiction, which damaged his heart, and that is why he passed away. The man was acquitted. Nevertheless he was dragged through the courts for an extended period of time. He lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees, which has put his family in a terrible financial situation, not to mention the mental stress that this poor man had to go through. I do not want Victorians going through that.

I think that Victorians should know that the Parliament has their back, that the law has their back, when they fight back against violent thugs, and I think that is what this Parliament should do. The government claim that they are being tough on crime. You cannot claim that you are being tough on crime when you turn your back on those who want to fight back against thugs.

 Jacinta ERMACORA (Western Victoria) (17:57): Thanks for the opportunity to speak on this issue. I would like to start by thanking and acknowledging all of the petitioners, and in particular Carly, who you mentioned, Mr Limbrick. That must have been an awful experience, and it is indeed an awful experience for anybody who is a victim of crime. I would also like to acknowledge Mr Limbrick’s continuing advocacy in relation to victims of crime. You have been truly influential in shaping some of our legislation in relation to victims in this term of government, and I thank you for that.

We have recently had a very similar debate on this topic in this chamber, so some of the material that I will cover this evening is likely to be no surprise. I would like to start by saying that any victim of crime is one too many, and that is why we have continued to crack down on offenders with a range of new laws that back the work of Victoria Police. I want to urge Victorians to always call the police in an emergency or when there is danger or a threat to safety, whether it is in their home or whether it is elsewhere. Police have the training, the equipment, powers and support to respond to crimes, threats and other emergencies. Attempting to respond to a perceived threat or unlawful behaviour is risky and can result in unintended harm to you or others. And let us face it, no material possessions in your home are worth your life. Treating self-defence in the home differently to self-defence outside the home has the obvious potential to encourage people to equip themselves for such defence, and it is unfortunate that that use of weapons too frequently ends up with the person trying to defend themselves being injured themselves and escalating the behaviour and response of those who engage in unlawful activity. Kat Berney, the director of National Women’s Safety Alliance, in relation to calls for capsicum spray legalisation, which I have responded to before, said:

What are we suggesting will happen when a potential victim is armed with pepper spray? What happens when the violence escalates and the perpetrator is also armed with the same weapon?

Ms Berney also quoted a 20-year-old review into people with pepper spray injuries from the Journal of Clinical Toxicology. The review found that patients with pepper spray related injuries tended to be older children and young adults.

Just before I finish up, the Crimes Act 1958 provides that a person will have acted in self-defence if they believe the conduct is necessary to defend their lives and if it is a reasonable response in the circumstances as they perceive them.

In closing, I just wanted to quote a piece of research. This is from the University of Oxford, and it is a study on crime, public risk and public health and safety:

Stand Your Ground laws, designed to protect individuals who actively defend themselves from crime, have not improved public safety …

That is their conclusion. That is certainly, I acknowledge, in the context of widely available guns in the US. But also, since 2013 in the UK, there is no discernible trend either way in the results of self-defence changes similar to what Mr Limbrick is referring to.

That is my thinking and certainly the thinking of the government at this point. But I thank you for raising the issue and causing me to reflect on it again, and I thank the people in the gallery.

 Moira DEEMING (Western Metropolitan) (18:02): I rise to support this petition, and I commend all of the petitioners for coming together and raising this issue, because as we all know, the criminals are in charge in this state. In Victoria you can be asleep in your bed, your children asleep in theirs, and if you hear a noise and you get up and you find someone in your house, a man in a balaclava moving towards your children’s door, your heart is going to stop. You are not going to be thinking. You are just going to instantly and brutally defend – not property; nobody cares enough to die for property of course. But for our children who are also in our homes – yes, we would die for our children. Yes, we would risk any kind of injury for our children. No, we would not hesitate, and we should not be punished for that. That is a totally healthy human instinct and the only one worthy of any kind of parent.

Police are trained; they are equipped. We just got told: ‘If this happens, we are encouraging you to call the police.’ I just cannot believe that, actually. I will read it out. In Victoria:

Police shortages have led to widespread underreporting and a growing number of unsolved cases. The reality is that many offences go undetected are not investigated simply because our police force lacks the resources to respond.

Public Accounts and Estimates Committee figures showed that we have got a shortfall of 2333 available recruits. That includes approximately 700 officers on workers compensation, 300 senior officers expected to take early retirement packages, 233 staff on extended sick leave and 1100 vacant positions yet to be filled. The acting police commissioner acknowledged it could take up to five years for Victoria Police to return to full operational strength. We cannot just call the police. There are not enough police, and there is an excess of violent crime. Then we get told if we get injured, ‘Well, you escalated it. That’s really incitement, isn’t it? If you’ve got a weapon, then that’s just escalating things.’ No, no, no – there is no good reason for a stranger to be inside a home uninvited. They have already crossed the line. They have already broken the law. They have already demonstrated that they are there for no good reason.

What the petitioners are asking for is extremely reasonable. They are not calling for vigilantism. They are actually just calling for clarity, the kind of clarity that already exists in many other jurisdictions. In Western Australia householders are allowed to use any force they reasonably believe necessary. In South Australia the laws are relaxed in terms of proportionality in home invasion cases. Queensland has a specific defence of dwelling, and it is strengthening it further. And as we have heard, in the United Kingdom the law protects householders unless their actions were grossly disproportionate, recognising that fear, darkness and urgency shape a human response, especially because it is in your home. There is no category where it is reasonable for this random stranger to be in your home. That man in Queensland who we heard about before found the man in his house, as I understand it, near his child’s cot. I would not blame someone for whatever they did if they found a strange man over their baby’s cot – absolutely nothing. I would probably give him an award.

These laws in other jurisdictions have not caused chaos. They have not unleashed violence. What they have done is remove ambiguity, protect the innocent and send a clear message that in your own home, when strangers enter, threatening violence or not, you are not going to be punished for reasonably assuming the worst and defending yourself as a person without any training and without having been negligent in any way for not having that training. These are just families in their homes. In Victoria they are families in their homes with no police on call that you can rely on. There is no good reason for uninvited strangers to be in our homes. There is no good reason to expect frightened parents, lone grandparents, single women and teenagers to behave like trained professionals. There is no good reason for the law to hesitate when any of those people do their best to survive and to protect their children. In the hallway in that moment the only thing that matters is protecting the family.

 Ann-Marie HERMANS (South-Eastern Metropolitan) (18:07): I thank Mr Limbrick for sponsoring this e-petition, which reached the high bar of 20,554 signatures. We know that the petitioners are requesting the Legislative Council to call on this government to amend the legislation to provide more clarity and protection for self-defence in the home, in line with the United Kingdom’s approach. The United Kingdom has special provisions for self-defence in a person’s home, where people only contravene the law if their actions are considered grossly disproportionate. This recognises that people have more at stake in defending their home than they would in public, but Australian law does not recognise this distinction.

Victorians are frightened in their own homes, and the headlines make it impossible to ignore why. A 60-year-old man in Gladstone Park was stabbed repeatedly, attacked with a hammer and shot. His wife, 57 years old, was threatened at gunpoint. In Kew East a husband was stabbed 11 times. In Mount Waverley, in a crime so barbaric it shocked the entire nation, a pregnant woman and her partner were decapitated in their own home. These events represent a rapidly escalating pattern of violent home invasions in this state. The Crime Statistics Agency reported 30,545 residential burglaries in the year to June 2025, a 13.9 per cent rise compared to the prior year. Aggravated burglaries have surged by 22 per cent, reaching 7856 incidents. Victorians are living with this reality every day, and they are demanding change. That is why this petition smashed the threshold of 10,000 signatures required for debate. That is why it received 20,554 signatures. Victorians have sent us all a very clear message: review our self-defence laws and tackle the crime crisis.

Right now our laws are simply not keeping up with the danger that our families face. The petition today is about the extent to which a person can defend themselves in their own home. It was Sir Edward Coke who put it plainly centuries ago, stating, ‘A man’s house is his castle,’ a principle rooted in English common law. Your home should be a safe place. We all remember the old Australian movie from 1997, the comedy called The Castle, about restoring and keeping your family home. But this would not be a comic film if we had to make it about the burglaries and the thefts that take place in people’s homes, where people are so scared that families and parents are resorting to self-defence, as they have done in my region. A mother made sure that each of her children had a baseball bat under their bed or under their pillow because they knew that the home invaders were coming back. They had taken their car keys, and the police said they would return. It took a week, but they did return, and by the time they returned, the fear had escalated so much and the father’s instinct to protect his family had escalated so much that it was a miracle that they ran off, given the rage that the man had to protect his home and his family.

In Victoria today the principle is compromised by ambiguity. Our self-defence provisions in part IC of the Crimes Act 1958 are meant to protect people acting in fear for their lives. Self-defence was first codified in 2005 under Labor Attorney-General Rob Hulls. His activist reforms replaced longstanding common law and reshaped our justice system, but it was not always for the better. The Labor Party ushered in judicial activism, softer sentencing, greater complexity and a shift from impartiality towards social justice. In 2014 further well-intentioned amendments were made primarily to combat family violence, especially after defensive homicide was being misused by violent men. Section 322K of the Crimes Act says a person is not guilty if:

the person believes that the conduct is necessary in self-defence; and

the conduct is a reasonable response in the circumstances as the person perceives them.

But herein lies the problem – ‘reasonable’. That single word is arguably vague and subjective, and I mentioned that when we were talking about some of the bills that have come before the house to do with children – ‘reasonable’. In a violent home invasion it is impossible to measure in a split second what ‘reasonable’ might be, and people should not be expected to become legal scholars in the dark of the night as an armed criminal forces their way into their home. Other countries use clearer standards, and we need to do so as well in Victoria. It is simply not okay.

 David LIMBRICK (South-Eastern Metropolitan) (18:13): I thank everyone that has contributed to this debate today. I will just respond to a couple of things. Ms Ermacora said that possessions in your house are not worth dying for, and certainly that is true. My television is not worth dying for. My PlayStation is not worth dying for. My microwave is not worth dying for. But do you know what is worth dying for? My family. I think that every parent in Victoria feels the same way, and they want to know when their family is under threat from violent criminals and they fight back that the government and the law have their back and that this Parliament has their back.

I think it is absolutely essential that we have clarity on this. The government has not provided clarity to people on what happens in these situations. Unfortunately it is becoming all too common that people have their homes invaded. The people that I mentioned before, Carly, the petitioner, and also Aaron – as is common for people who have had their homes invaded – no longer feel safe in their homes. They leave. In fact both of these people are leaving their homes. It is such a sad and traumatic thing that we even have people leaving our state because their home was invaded. I urge the government to act on this. I know that the government sees aggravated burglary as a serious crime; they have laws that we will be debating this week on this very topic and how serious it is. If they really feel it is that serious – and it is serious – then they should be talking about what people can do to defend themselves against these violent thugs that invade their houses.

Motion agreed to.