Tuesday, 2 June 2026

 Katherine COPSEY (Southern Metropolitan) (15:38): I rise today to condemn the Allan Labor government’s ongoing failure to implement the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture, OPCAT, in Victoria. Australia ratified the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture in 2017, and its purpose is simple: independent, preventative inspection of places where people are deprived of liberty, including prisons, youth justice centres, police cells, secure mental health facilities and other closed environments. Victoria is still undermining OPCAT in practice by refusing year after year to establish the independent preventative inspection system that it promised to implement. That failure is even more egregious now, because Labor’s regressive bail laws are driving more people into prisons on remand before conviction and often before they have had any real chance to defend themselves and the government is warehousing more people in already pressured prisons while refusing to implement the oversight system designed to prevent abuse behind locked doors. The government needs to answer basic questions: will it implement OPCAT in Victoria before the end of 2026, what funding has been allocated to do this and will the minister instruct the department to prepare legislation and a consultation framework? Victoria cannot keep expanding and overloading the prison and corrections system while refusing the human rights safeguards that should come with that. The question is simple: what is the government trying to hide by refusing to implement OPCAT?