Tuesday, 9 December 2025

 Rachel PAYNE (South-Eastern Metropolitan) (22:18): (2232) My adjournment matter is for the Attorney-General, and the action I seek is that they investigate banning good character references in child sexual abuse cases. The ACT became the first Australian jurisdiction to introduce a bill to ban good character references for sentencing perpetrators of child sexual abuse. This announcement follows the work of the Your Reference Ain’t Relevant campaign, co-founded by survivors of child sexual abuse Harrison James and Jarad Grice. This announcement also follows the 2024 Queensland District Court case of convicted sex offender Ashley Griffith, where good character references were taken into account. Ashley Griffith had pleaded guilty to 307 child abuse offences. In introducing the bill, the ACT’s Attorney-General Tara Cheyne rightly described current laws as perverse. In effect current laws allowing good character references in cases of sexual offences against children reward the manipulative strategies perpetrators use. That is because predators do not just groom the people that they are trying to abuse, they groom their friends, their families and the community. Their good character helps them to facilitate child sexual abuse, yet it can currently act as a mitigating factor during sentencing. While judges can exercise discretion with regard to good character references, concerns remain that the current approach fails to consider the unique circumstances of child sexual abuse. Removing these kinds of references would deny predators the opportunity to be rewarded for these exploitative techniques. I understand the issue of good character references was discussed earlier this year at the Standing Council of Attorneys-General, and that there was interest in reforming the laws, particularly from Queensland and New South Wales. Since this time, Queensland has limited the use of good character references during the sentencing of sex offenders to where it is relevant to the offender, to the offender’s prospects of rehabilitation or likelihood of reoffending. In New South Wales, the sentencing council handed its final report on the use of good character to mitigate sentences to the Attorney-General earlier this year. It is not yet clear whether Victoria is interested in joining New South Wales and Queensland to change the law when it comes to the use of character references, but this government has repeatedly demonstrated the courage to act to protect victim-survivors of child abuse, most recently by introducing a bill to expand the laws of vicarious liability for child abuse. So I ask: will the Attorney-General investigate banning good character references in child sexual abuse cases?