Wednesday, 3 June 2026

 Renee HEATH (Eastern Victoria) (18:39): (2549) The adjournment I raise tonight is for the Attorney-General. Two weeks ago, it was revealed that Victorian prisoners had received the equivalent of over 2270 years off their prison sentences due to the Labor government’s COVID emergency declaration. It was further revealed that these COVID discounts were being applied to sentences as recently as last December, and that they still may be. The Allan Labor government’s attitude to this issue has been nothing short of disgraceful. It took almost 18 months for me to get this data out of the Allan government, including the information being held within the former minister’s office for more than a year. Victims and their families are distraught at the government’s continued dismissive attitude towards them and the ongoing pattern of putting criminals first. However, following the release of this data, the government reached new heights when it comes to arrogance. Firstly, the Minister for Victims refused to answer any questions about the issue despite his portfolio, despite being responsible for the victims charter, which lists its objectives as:

to recognise the impact of crime on the victims of that crime, including the impact on members of the victims’ families …

And:

to recognise that a victim of crime has an inherent interest in the response by the criminal justice system to that crime …

If that was not bad enough, the Premier then set out to gaslight victims and their families by saying that these emergency management days were not automatically considered during COVID. The Premier was wrong. As if the corrections commissioner’s previous statements that these sentence reductions were being automatically considered was not enough, even the recent FOI, which took us forever to obtain, says ‘automatic consideration is no longer in place’.

My question to the Attorney-General is: given the ridiculously large number of COVID sentence reductions, will you finally end emergency management days for violent and high-risk offenders? Also, isn’t it about time that the Allan Labor government put victims before perpetrators? If they will not, we will.