Thursday, 13 August 2026

 Rachel PAYNE (South-Eastern Metropolitan) (10:13): I rise to speak on the Corrections Amendment Bill 2026 on behalf of Legalise Cannabis Victoria. This bill is deeply troubling, not only because of what it says about the way this government responds when the Supreme Court finds that the state has acted unlawfully but really it is a breach of the human rights of Victorians who are incarcerated, a breach of international treaties that we are all signatory to and, most of all, a breach of treaty and our commitment to First Peoples. This bill forces us to confront an uncomfortable question today: what kind of Parliament do we want to be when it comes to human rights? This is not simply a bill about prison yards. It is a bill about what happens when a court tells the government that a person’s rights have been breached and the government’s response is not to fix the breach but to change the law so that the breach can happen again. That should concern every member of this Parliament in this chamber.

The Supreme Court’s decision on George Marrogi’s case was clear. The court found that denying a prisoner just 1 hour of open air each day breached the Corrections Act 1986 and violated the fundamental right to humane treatment protected by Victoria’s charter of human rights. Twenty years ago Victoria made history by becoming the first Australian state to enact a human rights charter. It was a declaration that human dignity does not disappear at the prison gate. We can proudly proclaim that Victoria is a human rights jurisdiction where those rights are respected only when they are easy, cheap and operationally convenient! The government was faced with a choice in this case: whether we uphold that commitment or whether we weaken it when it becomes inconvenient. A prison sentence should never become a licence to deprive a person of their basic human dignity. The right to humane treatment must be something, particularly for those who have the least power to defend themselves; it should be to ensure that Victorians in our prisons are treated lawfully.

Yesterday I attended the rally on this bill and heard the lived experiences of Kelly, Zara, Alicia, Michael and Matt. Their stories brought home the very real and deeply personal consequences that this bill could have for Victorians who are incarcerated. These are not abstract legal arguments. My first amendment to this bill is simple: to ensure that considerations are given to any medical, psychiatric or psychological condition of a prisoner that may be adversely affected by the denial of access to open air. I ask that that amendment be circulated now, please. Yesterday at the rally we heard the stories of both Michael and Matt, who suffer from acquired brain injuries, and how the lack of access to open air was detrimental to their health and to their wellbeing. Why is this proposed amendment unreasonable? Why should a person’s physical or mental health become an afterthought simply because they are in prison? People in custody remain human beings. They remain entitled to dignity, to humane treatment and to a basic quality of life. Access to fresh air and open space is not a luxury. It is a basic part of human wellbeing. For someone living in a highly controlled and confined environment, that access can be particularly important for physical health, mental health, sensory wellbeing and simply the ability to experience something beyond four walls. For prisoners living with existing medical, psychiatric or psychological conditions, the consequences of being denied access to the open air may be even more significant.

Behind every provision in this bill are real people, real lives and real human beings who remain entitled to their rights even while serving a sentence. We should not be weakening those protections for Victorians who are incarcerated. It should be to ensure that Corrections Victoria complies with the rights and protections that Parliament itself has legislated. Instead, the government has chosen to ignore it. Rather than changing the practices, this bill seeks to change the law itself. It seeks to remove the legal requirement to provide prisoners with access to fresh air and replace that basic entitlement with something that can be subject to so-called operational considerations. This is not simply about 1 hour outside, it is about the inhumane treatment of Victorians who are incarcerated. A person does not lose their humanity when they enter a prison, and they should not lose their right to humane treatment. They certainly should not lose the right to see the sky and breathe fresh air.

The United Nations standard minimum rules for the treatment of prisoners, known as the Mandela rules, recognise the importance of access to outdoor exercise. The rules provide that every prisoner who is not employed in outdoor work should have at least 1 hour of suitable exercise in the open air every day, weather permitting. If Victoria removes this basic protection, we risk putting ourselves in breach not only of our charter of human rights but also of those internationally recognised standards. There is a reason these protections exist.

There is an even deeper problem here. We know that our prisons disproportionately hold some of the most marginalised and vulnerable people in our communities, and we know that this burden falls most heavily on First Peoples, who continue to experience incarceration at rates that are deeply disproportionate and completely unacceptable. First Peoples continue to die in custody at deeply concerning rates, and every death in custody represents a family, a community and a life that has been lost. This history matters when we consider this bill. This bill is clearly not aligned with the spirit or intent of treaty. This raises serious questions on the government’s commitment to treaty. It undermines the very purpose of treaty and risks causing disproportionate harm to First Peoples in custody. I want to acknowledge that yesterday marked the first time the First Peoples’ Assembly has exercised its power under the Statewide Treaty Act 2025 and made a submission to the Carroll government to immediately withdraw this bill.

This bill also stands in contrast to the findings and recommendations of the Yoorrook Justice Commission. Yoorrook was clear that Victoria cannot meaningfully address the legacy of colonisation, systemic injustice and the over-representation of Aboriginal people in the criminal justice system without confronting the structures and laws that continue to produce those outcomes. Yet this bill moves in the opposite direction. Rather than responding to the evidence and recommendations of Yoorrook, including the need for greater Aboriginal self-determination, stronger protection of cultural rights and fundamental reform of the justice system, this bill risks further entrenching a system in which Aboriginal people are disproportionately impacted by decisions made without adequate regard to their culture, circumstances or rights. I propose an amendment that is quite simple to ensure that the First Peoples’ rights are protected, which is that regard must be had to a prisoner who is an Aboriginal person and any issues that arise due to the person’s Aboriginality. I circulate that amendment now.

This amendment was simply to reflect what we have under section 3A of the Bail Act 1977, where a Victorian bail decision-maker must explicitly consider issues arising from an applicant’s Aboriginality. This provision was put in place to address the systemic over-representation of First Nations people in custody, the distinct trauma risks of detention and the vital importance of family and cultural ties. At a time when we should be listening to the voices of First Peoples and strengthening protections for some of our most vulnerable people in our prisons, this bill takes us in the opposite direction. We simply cannot allow this to happen.

It is believed that several days of lockdowns preceded Ms Golightly’s death. Whatever the circumstances, we must face one truth: when people are in our custody the state has a heightened responsibility for their safety, their wellbeing and their lives. Tarsha is not alone. Too many people have died in custody. Too many families have been left to grieve while asking questions about what happened to their loved ones and whether more could be done. We cannot allow these deaths to become statistics or footnotes in parliamentary debates. These are human lives. They are mothers, fathers, sons, daughters and loved ones. We owe it to Tarsha, to her family and to every person who has died in custody to do better as members of Parliament. On behalf of Legalise Cannabis Victoria, I strongly oppose this bill.

 Ann-Marie HERMANS (South-Eastern Metropolitan) (10:24): I also rise to speak on the Corrections Amendment Bill 2026 and in doing so recognise and thank Ms Payne for her contribution. It is important to remember that we are talking about people’s lives, but we are talking about a whole society as well. I will start by saying from the onset that I do feel uncomfortable when we are looking at legislation that will take away or violate what have been proposed as basic human rights. However, I also can see the big picture here and the complications that we have in that there are a number of victims and victims’ families who also feel that they have been violated by the compensations that have taken place and that that is a violation of their sense of safety and humanity and the rights and justice that they expected for loved ones that have lost their lives or whose lives have been completely destroyed.

We find ourselves in this situation because of what took place under this Labor government, with one of its former premiers – all still part of the same regime of course – Premier Daniel Andrews and those horrific lockdowns that have left, in some families and some individuals, tremendous scars that will potentially be ongoing for some of them for the rest of their lives. It was an unprecedented sense of lack of freedom for everybody. I do feel for the fact that those who were incarcerated did not have the opportunity to have fresh air, but I also see the incredible importance of having to look at legislation that prevents ongoing prisoners from being able to have their sentences stripped because of an incompetent government and its incompetent ways of providing care to its community and to its community members.

I want to say from the outset that we are in this situation because it started with one person taking this whole situation into court. As we know, over two years Melbourne suffered through the longest COVID-19 lockdowns. As a result, there were thousands of prisoners who received time off their sentences, the equivalent, as I understand it, of a thousand years of jail time. How do you get your head around that? It is an extraordinary amount. I want to give some statistics to the chamber that they have not yet heard or considered. Some of these you will know a little bit of, but I want to give them to you in a long string so that we can actually put things into context. More than 830,000 days – that is 2270 years – has been stripped from Victorian jail terms over a four-year period due to COVID-19. Figures released under the Freedom of Information Act 1982 show that 352,078 days, almost a thousand years, were wiped off sentences in 2020; 191,786 days – that is 525 years – in 2021; 249,564 days – that is 684 years – in 2022. Prisoners can receive up to four emergency management days for every day there is an emergency or disruption in jail.

I want to thank my colleague Dr Heath for her contribution. She was very detailed in this. She has done a lot of research and has also taken the time to meet with victims and victims’ families. A single prisoner received a 450-day reduction – that is 15 months – from their sentence. Prisoners were placed in 14-day protection quarantine upon reception into prison as part of the COVID-19 response, which in many instances resulted in prisoners being held in their cells for 23 to 24 hours a day. There is a lot of research on what that can do to a person, and that is not a comforting thought. They use solitary confinement as an extreme punishment in situations where prisoners need to be taught, allegedly, an additional lesson. To think that you might be held in your cell for 23 to 24 hours a day, that would be extremely difficult. Let us remember that the whole of Melbourne was locked down in their homes. I found it incredibly frustrating that we were only given, as free citizens, 1 hour of exercise time, and then we were not even allowed to walk as a family but had to go in pairs. So in my case, having four children, I had to actually break up my own family for safety and protection to walk out. So everybody had a loss of freedom in this time. It did inconvenience all Victorians, some more than others. There were those who found this time refreshing, getting off the treadmill and staying at home, but there were plenty of others whose lives were completely upheaved. There was no compensation given to us.

There were approximately 885 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Victorian prisons as of mid-2025, according to data from Corrections Victoria. 885 people – I am going to guess that number has gone up, because, as I said, this is about a year ago. This is year-old data. That is a lot of people in prison, and First Nations people make up around 13 per cent of Victoria’s total prison population despite representing about 1 per cent of the overall state population. That is why, I imagine, those involved in the treaty have put in a letter saying that they are completely against this particular bill. When there are so many Aboriginal people incarcerated, you can understand why they feel this very strongly. Of course, there has been a lot of compensation taking place, but this is an over-representation of our population. Definitely there is something going wrong here.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander prisoners increased in Victoria by 26 per cent – that is an increase from 186 prisoners to 915 – between 2024 and 2025, compared to an 11 per cent increase in total prisoners. That is from Australian Bureau of Statistics stats. On top of that, there are other representations that are just off the charts. African, predominantly South Sudanese, youth comprise at least 19 per cent of young people in custody, despite being less than 0.5 per cent of Victoria’s youth population, and that is from the African Australian Advocacy Centre. A total, however, of 10,990 emergency management days were awarded to 3221 prisoners at five prisons – Ravenhall, Hopkins Correctional Centre, Langi Kal Kal, Barwon and Fulham – and Loddon after they were all placed into lockdown on 21 July when a prison officer tested positive for COVID. All lockdowns were lifted on 23 July, with the exception of Ravenhall, which remained in lockdown until 25 July. That was from the PAEC inquiry in 2020. These are interesting statistics, but what does this actually mean in terms of this bill? One of the things is that this whole bill shows –

Katherine Copsey: On a point of order, Acting President, it appears that the member is trying to tie these matters back to the subject of the bill now, but I was just going to raise the point of relevance. This is not about public health orders. This is about actual conditions in Victoria’s prisons.

The ACTING PRESIDENT (Gaelle Broad): I ask Mrs Hermans to return to the topic of the bill.

Ann-Marie HERMANS: I was about to tie all of these stats in. In terms of this bill, as I have said, it comes back to this situation where this government has voted for treaty, as did the crossbench and the Greens, who just interrupted what I had to say. They voted for treaty, and they said they were going to listen to the Aboriginal community. But that has also shown itself to be a bit of a token gesture here, because now the government is saying, ‘We’re just going to ram this through,’ and these are the communities in particular that will be largely impacted, but they are not everybody.

The reality is that we live in a society where crime and consequences have to be considered. People who are not doing the wrong thing should not be penalised by people who are doing the wrong thing. In other words we have to be considering the victims as well as the fact that, yes, the people who are put into prison are people, but the people who have been wronged in community are also people. What we are seeing is that this compensation that is taking place has allowed many people in society to feel that they or their families have become victims once again because of shortened sentences. When you reduce sentences because of systemic failures in a government, because of the way that it operates or what it lacks in operation, then it becomes unjust for everybody within the community. Reducing the sentences of these prisoners because of this little provision in there that allows prisoners to have additional time taken off their sentences as a result of COVID lockdowns does not feel just for the everyday person in public. We were all locked down.

I read out the different representations in prison because it is relevant. There are communities that are hurting and that feel they are victimised in prison. The statistics are massive: the Aboriginal community represents about 1 per cent of the population and yet at least 13 per cent of prisoners are Aboriginal people. I am just trying to reconcile how this government could put together a treaty and then not listen to their so-called treaty that is going to be the first point of call and then put this together. I guess what I am trying to wrestle with here is that nothing seems to make sense. We had to get to this point where we have had a lack of justice for violent criminals. Sure they were locked up, but what about the people whose families suffered as a result of these violent criminals? Reducing their sentences because the government did not give them fresh air does not pass the pub test for people in the community.

There has to be a balance in how we go forward with things. It is extremely difficult. We will not be opposing this bill, but we can see that it has its flaws and that there are issues in terms of the humanitarian practices that take place in prisons. Clearly our prison systems are failing not only our communities but those who are incarcerated. I cannot imagine what it would be like to never have fresh air and not be able to see the sky, and I hope that I never have to. I will say that the closest thing I came to it was under this government with the COVID-19 lockdowns. That was the most horrendous experience, to not have the freedom to go out on a walk with my family where we could walk together.

It turned out in retrospect that all of these fears that were placed on us were not even legitimate. I think that is what makes people so angry. To think that we now have violent criminals having their time reduced because of a bunch of furphies that this government decided to act on is extremely difficult for the public to reconcile. I am going to wrap up at this point, but there is so much more that could be said. Clearly our prison system is failing us. This is a situation that is quite diabolical. Having sentences reduced to such an extreme level is just not helpful for the public to gain trust in this government, but at the same time taking away human rights does not sit well with me as an individual.

 Katherine COPSEY (Southern Metropolitan) (10:38): I rise to speak on the Corrections Amendment Bill 2026 on behalf of the Greens and to say unequivocally that we will be opposing this bill. This is a horrendous bill. This is a shameful bill that this government is bringing before the Parliament today. I would like to say I am surprised, but at this point I am not. This government has shown consistent disregard for human rights when it comes to its justice policy. This is just the latest failure from the Andrews–Allan–Carroll Labor government, who have decided that they do not care about evidence-based justice responses. As a community we are all paying the price for that failure of courage, political will and sense. This bill raises a very simple but appalling question: can a government pursue a mass incarceration agenda, drive more people into prison and on to remand and then respond to the pressure it has created itself by taking away basic human rights? The Greens say no.

Section 47 of the Corrections Act 1986 currently provides that a person in prison who is not ordinarily engaged in outdoor work has the right to spend at least 1 hour each day in the open air, weather permitting. This is known as the Mandela principles. It is a fundamental tenet of humane incarceration of people accepted globally. This bill attempts to make that right conditional. Rights are not conditional. Rights exist. This bill attempts to strip that right away from people incarcerated in Victorian jails depending on whether it is ‘reasonably practicable having regard to operational considerations’. Those considerations are very broad. They include management, good order and security of a prison and the safety and welfare of prisoners. But it is not an exhaustive list, either. The government’s own explanatory memorandum to this bill makes clear that this power is intended to operate not just in short-term emergencies but ‘on an ongoing basis or for extended periods of time’. So to be very clear about what this Labor government is putting before the Parliament today, we are being asked to weaken the right of people in prison to get a measly 1 hour a day in the open air. Being able to see the sky and to breathe fresh air is not a luxury or some special privilege. It is one of the most basic, minimum conditions of humane treatment.

The historical context here also is quite extraordinary. I have mentioned that this bill falls foul of established international practice in relation to guaranteeing minimum standards for human rights. It also takes us back in Victorian history. The National Trust’s history of Old Melbourne Gaol describes the brutal conditions of 19th-century model prison systems. People could be locked alone in tiny cells for up to 23 hours a day, and they wore silence masks when they left their cells. But even prisoners in solitary confinement in Victorian-era prisons were allowed 1 hour of exercise each day in the fresh air. Nearly two centuries later this Labor government is asking Parliament to remove that right. We should be moving away from the cruelty of Victorian-era imprisonment, not finding fresh legal mechanisms to reproduce it in 2026.

Prisons do have genuine operational needs. They need to manage genuine emergencies, security incidents and immediate risks to safety. Of course the state needs to do that, and it needs to do that in a humane and legal fashion. If it takes the extraordinary measure of depriving people of their liberty and sentencing them to carceral sentences, the responsibility that goes with that is to design a corrections system that can function without breaching people’s rights on the regular – on the daily. That is what is happening under Victoria’s Labor government as we speak.

This bill expressly contemplates denying open-air access for extended and ongoing periods because of this Labor government’s failures in the corrections system and because of ongoing operational constraints that they know about and that they have allowed to fester. The broader context here also really matters. This government has spent the past two years weakening and messing up Victoria’s bail laws, undoing progressive reforms that it embarked on in the first period of the Parliament and making it more difficult for people to remain in the community with access to support systems, to family networks and to education and work opportunities while they are awaiting trial. Subsequently they have increased, with their own policies, pressure on our prisons, pressure on our police stations and cells and pressure on the remand system. And we know that these policy choices that this Labor government has made will disproportionately affect and are disproportionately affecting First Nations people, women, children, people with disability, people who are experiencing poverty and people with mental illness.

The answer to this overcrowded, under-resourced, inadequately functional prison system cannot be to lower the standard of human rights. You cannot make political choices that put more people behind bars and then tell those people that the state can no longer guarantee the most basic conditions of humane detention. A person does not lose their rights because they are in prison. They do not lose their dignity because they are on remand. And I have been really disturbed by some of the statements in the chamber today, which indicate just a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of incarceration. Comparing it to public health orders trivialises the gravity of what the state does in sentencing people. We should also remember that many people who are being held, particularly on remand, are held by the state before they have been sentenced. They are detained and held and experience deprivations on occasion in justified circumstances because of external factors that mean they can be held before sentencing. But there are people in the system who are not yet convicted, and there has been real glossing over and conflation of those two situations by some of the contributions that I have heard in this debate today. People are innocent until they are convicted of crimes.

The Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service has been really unequivocal about what the operational considerations referred to in this bill mean in practice. They are an experienced stakeholder and they are trying to support people who are being sucked into and criminalised by Victoria’s justice policies day in, day out. VALS told my office that for more than 18 months Corrections Victoria has used operational considerations as an excuse to impose rolling lockdowns which are actually to do with staffing shortages. VALS has clients that have reported extended confinement in cells and disrupted access to beneficial support programs; visits with external people, including medical and legal appointments; cultural support; and social and emotional wellbeing and mental health services. VALS has reported that this current practice by the corrections department under this Labor government has led to an alarming increase in self-harm incidents and suicide attempts during these lockdowns, and we have seen deaths in custody continue under this government – deaths in custody that this government was warned were an ongoing risk and a direct risk and consequence of their policy choices.

What does the government do to try and correct this situation? Well, it does not try and improve the system and the treatment of people within it. Now the government actually wants to put those same words, ‘operational considerations’, into legislation as a legitimate basis for limiting people’s access to open air – to fresh air – for 1 hour a day. VALS warns us:

The right to open air, often only granted for 1 hour a day, can be lifesaving. It is unconscionable to strip that away.

This warning needs to be taken extremely seriously. Fresh air and sunlight are not luxuries. They are necessary things for humans to function well, and if we are serious about the rehabilitative intent of our sentencing practices, they are fundamental. You cannot expect people to thrive and to recover and to move towards positive life outcomes if you are torturing them in jail. You cannot expect people to thrive in that circumstance. VALS is warning us that you cannot expect people to survive in that circumstance, and that is what this Labor government is putting before the chamber with this bill.

The bill is precipitated by the Supreme Court’s decision in Marrogi. The court found that certain enclosed rear courtyards attached to cells in high-security and management units at the Metropolitan Remand Centre and Barwon Prison did not satisfy the statutory requirement that prisoners have access to the open air. The proper response to a court finding like this would be to admit the fault, to recognise the inhumane conditions that your government has created in detention and to act to rectify those. But that is not what this Labor government does. They are not here to take responsibility for the situation they have created. Shamefully, they have turned around and are trying to strip away people’s human rights and change the law in a manner that will probably affect large numbers if not every incarcerated person in the state. And worse, the bill retrospectively tries to protect the state from monetary liability for its past failures to meet the open-air entitlement. That will apply even when legal proceedings have already commenced, provided they have not been finally determined when this provision, should it pass the Parliament, comes into operation. This government is telling people: ‘The law gives you this right, our charter guarantees you this right’ – the Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities that the Victorian government is so proud of, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this week, I might add – ‘We’re going to take that right away from you. We’re going to change the rules. You went to court to enforce it while it was legally enforceable, but we’ve changed the rules on you and the consequences retrospectively so you can’t receive justice and you can’t receive damages.’

Parliament should always, as a principle, be very cautious about retrospective legislation, but especially, I would argue, where it is designed to protect the state from the consequences of its own failures. The caution, I would add, should be even greater where the people who are affected are prisoners. Often people in this situation may not be sympathetic targets of public empathy and sympathy, but they are in a profoundly unequal relationship with the state. They are in one of the most unequal relationships with the state that a citizen of Victoria can find themselves. The government is seeking to hit people while they are down and take away the most fundamental, meagre rights that they should be entitled to.

The bill also contains a second retrospective measure buried in there, which was added in the Assembly, validating actions that were taken by Department of Justice and Community Safety advanced practitioners between April 2024 and May 2026, when some actions were taken without the required delegations being in place. This is less serious than the substantive content of the bill, but it is another administrative failure by the state that is being sought to be repaired retrospectively through the legislation.

The government’s own statement of compatibility on this bill says that this bill is in part incompatible with human rights. It identifies the protections that are violated as the protection against cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment and the right to humane treatment when deprived of liberty among rights that are being limited. Normally you would think that that would make the government stop and ask if it is got the balance right. But instead, this bill expressly excludes the relevant provisions of the charter, and then it goes further than an ordinary charter override in fact; the explanatory memorandum confirms that the usual five-year expiry on this override does not apply. So the government is, with this bill, seeking to grant this exemption to operate indefinitely, and that is extraordinary. I think it is particularly important in that context that Ms Payne’s amendment relating to a statutory review be accepted today. The Greens will be supporting the amendments brought forward by Legalise Cannabis, and I think that this facet of the bill makes that an extremely important amendment.

The charter in Victoria exists precisely because governments under pressure do have to limit people’s rights through legislation. The charter sets out what those rights should be and the calculus that we should apply when seeking to limit those rights. Governments under pressure can make choices of administrative convenience – and political convenience, I would add – over the rights of marginalised people. Rights matter most when respecting them is difficult or politically inconvenient, actually. There are few groups it is politically easier to disregard, particularly in this state’s media environment – I acknowledge that – than people in prison.

There is another egregious aspect of this bill that I want to turn to now, and that is what this bill does to the state’s newly proclaimed relationship with treaty, the First Peoples’ Assembly of Gellung Warl. The government’s own statement of treaty compatibility acknowledges that Aboriginal people may be disproportionately affected by this bill, particularly Aboriginal people held in separation in custody, and it accepts that restricting open-air access may compound the unacceptable disadvantage experienced by Aboriginal people. It concludes that aspects of this bill are incompatible with treaty objectives of addressing the ongoing injustices of colonisation and ensuring the equal enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms by First Peoples. Remarkably, that treaty statement also admits that Gellung Warl was not given the opportunity to advise on the open-air provisions before this legislation was introduced. The government says there was simply not time. It is bad enough that that work was not done before this bill was brought to this place. Gellung Warl has now spoken. For the first time, the First Peoples’ Assembly has exercised its powers under the Statewide Treaty Act 2025 to make a formal submission to the government on this legislation, and its message cannot be clearer. It says ‘withdraw the bill’. Gellung Warl says the bill is ‘inconsistent with the spirit and intent of Statewide Treaty’ and it will disproportionately affect First Nations peoples. Co-chair Djaran Murray-Jackson said:

This Bill is not in the spirit of Treaty nor is it compatible with the Statewide Treaty Act.

The assembly has also pointed directly to the Yoorrook Justice Commission’s recommendations that Victoria implement the United Nations minimum standards on solitary confinement and properly fund and operate prisons so that prolonged lockdowns for administrative or management reasons are ended. This bill just takes us in the opposite direction of that. It tries to paper over and excuse the failures of the state rather than fix them. Gellung Warl says that this bill would move in precisely the opposite direction. It entrenches those practices under the language of ‘operational considerations’.

This is a real test of what these new treaty powers mean in practice. This is a test of the government’s words versus its actions. Under section 83 of the Statewide Treaty Act the Minister for Corrections must respond to Gellung Warl’s submission within 60 days, and I would argue that that is a perfectly reasonable thing. It is something that the state should have factored into the timeframe for bringing this bill to Parliament, and it is something that is still within the state’s power to action. Pause this bill, take the time to engage with Gellung Warl and give them the response that they are entitled to. But instead of pausing the debate, considering this first formal intervention and responding in good faith, the government has pressed ahead today with the bill. The statement was delivered in the last 48 hours, but the government pressed ahead, started debate on this bill last night and is pressing ahead today, in the same week that it is pulling its own signature legislation for work from home. It is completely within the government’s power to pause this bill. In fact they are doing that with another thing that they said that they were committed to, but they have had industry pressure and they have had business group pressure on the Equal Opportunity Amendment (Work from Home) Bill 2026, so they are choosing to pause that.

Georgie Purcell interjected.

Katherine COPSEY: Thank you, Ms Purcell. You can work from home, but you cannot breathe air. You can respond to business group pressure, but you will not respond to Gellung Warl asking you to withdraw this bill. It says everything about the continuing priorities of this Labor government. At an absolute minimum we would have expected the government to delay debate while it considered Gellung Warl’s call. Treaty cannot be something that this government celebrates ceremonially and then disregards when First Peoples turn around and use the powers that it gave them in good faith. VALS CEO Nerita Waight has said that this state desperately needs to confront systemic overpolicing, racial discrimination, Aboriginal deaths in custody and the shamefully high incarceration of Aboriginal people. VALS says that the government must authentically engage with Gellung Warl through treaty, and the Greens wholeheartedly support this call. We will not be supporting this bill should the government press ahead with it, and I echo and endorse the comments of Gellung Warl that the government should withdraw it. This bill should not proceed.

If the government is concerned about pressure on the prison system, there are actually answers available, and it is the failure of the government to seriously engage with these policy solutions that is reprehensible. They should be reversing their punitive bail agenda. They should implement Poccum’s law. The Greens have steadfastly sought to amend the regressive bail laws that this government has brought. There should be a single unacceptable risk test for bail. We should get rid of the bail offences that are funnelling people into the system where they will now be routinely dehumanised and tortured for low-level offences – offences that may not even result in a carceral sentence. We need to invest in housing and in health care. We need to properly back our community legal centres. We need to invest in drug and alcohol support, we need to invest in mental health support and we need to properly back First Nations-led justice responses. Each year I have put in budget submissions begging for the government to invest in the proven work that VALS is doing. These services work. They are there; they are ready to scale up. But the government chooses to funnel money, billions of dollars, into prisons and into policing, rather than doing what works, and then they cannot even manage the systems that they create.

We need to properly staff prisons. If you are going to pursue this agenda, then you need to recognise the consequences that come with that: the burdens on the courts, police and our corrections system. The Greens would say you need to expand genuine alternatives to custody that give people access to better pathways rather than institutionalising and further criminalising people. We need desperately to reduce the huge number of people being warehoused on remand in this state. We are going backwards on this. We are going backwards under a Labor government. The government should not create greater pressure within the corrections system and then try to legislate away the rights that become inconvenient for them to deliver as a result.

The state has an obligation to run prisons safely. It also has an obligation to run them humanely. I would say it is something that the state should be proud to do. This bill is a marker of whether or not we are actually a civilised society. Under Labor, the answer is no. One hour in the open air – it is an extraordinarily low bar, and they cannot get over it. This Parliament should not let them get away with it. We should not let them lower the bar further. The Greens oppose this bill, and I have put some amendments to colleagues that we will seek to add to this bill today. I ask that they be circulated now, and I will briefly speak to them.

These amendments relate to another ongoing travesty under the Andrews–Allan–Carroll Labor government, which is the practice of decanting. My amendments take the opportunity to address this other serious human rights problem which is persisting in Victoria’s corrections system. That is the prolonged detention of people in police cells, in police jails. Earlier this year the Greens introduced the Corrections Amendment (Stop the Legal Loophole – Better Rights in Police Custody) Bill 2026. That bill sought to stop the practice known as decanting and to strengthen basic protections for people who are being held routinely in police cells as a result of the overcrowding and under-resourcing of Victoria’s justice system under Labor.

These amendments are narrower than what was introduced in that bill. They take two important elements of it. The first is that these establish in legislation an upper limit of 14 days for a person to be detained in a police jail, except in circumstances of extraordinary emergency. It is my understanding that individual jails may have a lower maximum time that is gazetted. This amendment is not intended to make all of them automatically 14; it sets an upper limit of 14 days maximum in police jails. The Greens would like to see that lowered, actually. We do not think that police cells are designed to hold people for prolonged periods, and we do not think that 14 days is a good time for someone to spend in one of these facilities. But we want to legislate an upper limit because we find that, in practice, even that generous timeframe is being exceeded in Victoria regularly.

The second part of these amendments makes it clear that transferring a person from one police jail to another will not reset the 14-day time period. Time already spent in police jails counts towards the overall 14-day limit. Together with police and other stakeholders, we would like to actually see in practice a lower limit. We have advocated for seven days previously as the upper limit. We are putting 14 days before the Parliament. We think that in most circumstances, that is probably one that is already sought to be met and tried to be met by various actors in the justice system, and it should not go longer than that. This is, again, a low bar.

Police cells are designed for short-term detention; they are not prisons, they are not correctional facilities, and they do not have the facilities, staffing or services necessary to hold people safely for weeks at a time. It matters because people are currently being moved between police stations, sometimes over enormous distances. Let us be crystal clear: moving someone from one inadequate police cell to another does not solve the problem, it just resets an administrative clock.

People held in police jails can spend 23 hours a day in a cell and maybe after today that will be 24. They have poorer access to health care, lawyers and visits from family, and they do not have programs and supports that are available in regular correctional facilities. People have been transported hundreds of kilometres from their families, communities and legal support teams. Some people have even served entire terms in police cells. Duty solicitors tell my team that they are regularly losing people in the police cells system. Neither the person’s family nor solicitors know where the person is being held at a particular time. Therefore they cannot drop off essential medicines and basic things like a change of clothes or change of underwear for someone being detained by the state. They cannot have necessary legal appointments, and they tell us it is only a matter of time before these conditions lead to a death.

For Aboriginal people in particular, this is extraordinarily dangerous. VALS represented a Gunaikurnai man earlier this year who had spent 26 days in police custody in these inadequate conditions. He had been moved between police stations, at one point around 200 kilometres away from his family and community. VALS reported that during this period he experienced serious medical problems requiring five ambulance attendances and four hospitalisations, and access to his family and medication was restricted. Decanting is being used to extend detention beyond existing gazetted 14-day limits, and VALS has called for this practice to end.

Victoria Police has itself acknowledged that police cells are inappropriate for prolonged detention and previously sought agreement with Corrections Victoria to reduce the transfer period from 14 days to seven. Police should be doing police work. They should not be required to operate an overflow default prison system because this government changed the bail laws without ensuring that the corrections system could cope with the entirely predictable increase in people on remand. I asked the government about what modelling they had done when we were doing the bail bills. They should have seen this coming.

Our amendments are modest. They do not pretend that it will solve this broader crisis or guarantee all of the rights that people should have in custody, but they do put a real limit into the law and they close this loophole that is allowing the limit to be circumvented by moving a person from station to station. We think that these amendments simply bring into practice what the rules should be. These amendments, I note, require an instruction motion, and I would ask all members of the chamber, when we come to consider this in committee, that they support the instruction motion, regardless of their position on the amendments. I will have more to say in committee, and I will leave my comments there.

 Georgie PURCELL (Northern Victoria) (11:08): I rise to also briefly contribute to this bill, and like my colleagues on the crossbench in the chamber, I will be opposing it. I wanted to pick up on some of the comments that Ms Copsey and Ms Payne have made in relation to just how shocking it is to see this bill here before us in Parliament after the extraordinary and historic measure that was made yesterday where we saw the co-chairs of Gellung Warl do what they were authorised to do and write to the government and say when legislation coming through this place will disproportionately impact First Nations people in our state. We always said in the treaty debate – in fact it was said in here constantly at the time – that we can do this now, but what we do next matters the most after we pass our historic treaty – the first in the country – and it seems that is not a whole lot. We all had hope that this would really be the pathway forward to not only healing but reconciliation and acknowledging the hurt and pain of colonisation which can never be undone. We cannot change the past, but we certainly can change the future, and that is what we all agreed here in that moment in the chamber where there were cheers and tears and joy. I know from the many communities I spoke to just how much that meant. To see the first action of this authority doing what it was designed to do and for this to not even be pulled off the notice paper for a conversation, to sit down with the co-chairs for consideration – this bill has instead been prioritised.

I naively thought that perhaps when the Premier changed, things would be different, that we would see decisions that were being made genuinely reconsidered. I mean, we have just watched the dreadful amendments to the Outdoor Recreation Victoria Bill 2026 go through the lower house – we were hopeful that that would be reconsidered. We were hopeful that this would at least be put forward for a conversation with the people that it impacts the most, people who will be harmed because of this, people who will have their rights taken away – and not only that but people will have their rights taken away and many of them will not even receive a conviction on the other side of it.

It has been an absolute race to the bottom when it comes to corrections legislation in this place throughout the entire term. Every single time I have stood here speaking on a corrections bill I have thought, ‘Well, it can’t possibly get worse than this.’ I have spoken many times with Rob Hulls, who obviously was in here a long time ago and who has publicly supported some of my animal protection work. I know one of his proudest moments all those years ago was our charter of human rights that we have in Victoria. We do not have a federal charter of human rights. We have one here in Victoria, and we have that for a reason: to ensure that every piece of legislation that comes through this place is compatible with it and that we will not be depriving people of their liberties no matter who they are or where they come from or what circumstance they are in. To know that this bill is not just incompatible with human rights, but not compatible with our treaty act, a new criteria that we have, and a decision is still being made to put it through this place is absolutely galling and makes me really lose a lot of faith that anything could possibly change in terms of where I feel this government is going.

When decisions are made by courts like the Supreme Court, the expectation would be to accommodate those decisions and to acknowledge that perhaps a framework was not working, not to change the legislation to allow that thing to occur under certain circumstances or to not allow people who have already gone through this to seek justice and compensation and acknowledgement of the suffering that they have been through. I know, working with many advocates with lived experience and in the victim-survivor space, that such a fundamental part of ending retraumatisation and moving towards healing is having acknowledgement that something bad happened to them and they did have a right taken away and there was a breach of their safety.

I know that there will be many people watching this debate, whether they be First Nations people or community legal centres or advocates for liberty and human rights, that will be pretty appalled that we are standing here on Thursday morning after Wednesday’s measure knowing that this is going to have really concerning impacts on the eve of an election. I do not have faith that if there is a change in government and that comes forward, if we no longer have a Labor government in this state, there is going to even be an ability to address that. I think it is an incredibly irresponsible decision. We have a number of weeks left in here. This bill is already in the upper house. I just do not see any justification or reason not to take a breath and take a moment and think about the impacts of what this will do.

I have spoken about the impacts this will have on First Nations people and Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders in our state because we know the huge rates of incarceration among those communities, often because of other forms of harm, because of systemic racism, because of a lack of understanding of culture and communities, all of the many things that we spoke about in the treaty debate here, but this will impact other people in prison. I say ‘people in prison’, and I said this yesterday at the rally, because they are people first and foremost. A lot of people have been saying ‘prisoners’. That is intentional language. That takes away the human aspect. This is a small change in language that removes that othering and that demonisation. That is intentional, to make people believe that this bill is justified.

We know that this will impact women. We know that it will impact women who have experienced family violence, who have perhaps been misidentified. We know that this will impact trans and gender-diverse people. We know this will impact people with a disability. The amount of people who are in our prison system who have an acquired brain injury is incredibly high. We know that they could be not only in solitary confinement but deprived of the sun and the sky and access to open air. The impacts of that deprivation are long running and lifelong and ironically will very likely result in them reconnecting with the justice system again.

Every time we have this debate there is a conversation around how instead of doing all of these things that result in more people locked up, costing taxpayers more money, which ironically, obviously, is what they are trying to avoid in having to pay compensation, a whole lot more money could be saved if we just did the things that stop people having interactions with the justice system – education and the evidence-based change that is not particularly politically sexy. The government is fearful of doing it because they know what they are going to get from the other side. But the ultimate outcome is that people are paying the price with their lives. It felt as if we had reached a point in our state where that was acknowledged. Over the past four years we have just continued to wind back rights and wonder why crime is increasing and jailing is increasing. It is because we have not done all of the many things that we know we need to do to ensure that the people who are vulnerable, who are most likely to end up in these situations, are supported and have wraparounds – whether that be things that are as simple as community support, education, housing or family violence services. At the same time as we have seen funding absolutely pumped into our prisons, we have seen funding into those things pulled back – and they wonder why there is a problem here before us. When that problem comes to an absolute boiling point, as it has now, the solution is to just make their lives worse, which, as I have said, is only going to exacerbate the very situation that we are in right now.

Many people have already spoken about the reasoning for this decision, and I am not going to go through the detail of it again. But we know that the idea of so-called operational requirements is just a front for not having to address the reality right now in our prison systems for so many people. We have seen the ongoing impacts at Dame Phyllis Frost Centre, where a young woman recently died during the time that this legislation was between the two houses of Parliament. We know that the scapegoating wording is just being used in order to not make any changes to accommodate this Supreme Court ruling.

I have had a bit of a funny week in here this week. A lot of us, I think, felt somewhat optimistic over the past few weeks that a change in Premier, even though it was at the last minute, might have been a change in direction on some of the many things that all of us on the crossbench have been talking about for some time, but it has not. There is the ability to just go back to the drawing board and think about how we deal with these issues. I do not think any of us here deny that certainly there is a mentality that Victorians are feeling unsafe and that crime needs to be addressed, but we actually need to look at the reasons for that and what we can do to ensure that people do not find themselves in these situations of desperation, feeling like they have no other choice, which results in them having contact over and over again with police and the justice system and prison. Whether that be for a short period of time or an extended period of time, certainly at the very least we can ensure that their human rights will not be stripped away from them in that process. I have spoken briefly about who this affects, but the statistics also show that over 60 per cent of the youth justice population is currently unsentenced, and 40 per cent of the adult population. That means right now these people could be without access to open air under this legislation and ultimately not be found guilty of any crime at the end of that. That is certainly not to say anyone should be deprived of their human rights, but I have heard from a range of people that this is about the bad guys so why do I care about them, when the statistics show that often these will be innocent people who will suffer the effects of this legislation.

Among Victoria’s existing prison population, 33 per cent of women and 42 per cent of men have an acquired brain injury. That means they need more support, not less. That means that they need services wrapped around them, and deprivation is only going to make the impacts of that acquired brain injury worse. Aboriginal Victorians are over 10 times more likely to be imprisoned than non-Aboriginal Victorians, and we know the reasons for that. It is racism, it is a lack of understanding in our communities and it is problems within the police. Knowing that this bill is going forward and we still do not have any independent oversight of our police in this state and the impacts that this could have as a result of that, there is no accountability for anything that could come as an adverse impact of this legislation. We already know there are going to be adverse impacts. I mean, people are not going to have access to open air, but there is so much worse that could come as a result of it.

The operational considerations – Victoria’s corrections system is obviously a complex task, but it is not so complex that the government cannot guarantee the most basic of human rights. This is a problem of the government’s own making, and it is a problem that we have continuously warned about through many debates in this place until the early hours of the morning. The operational considerations referred to in the bill have undoubtedly worsened due to this tough-on-crime approach. No-one is denying that. It has seen incarceration skyrocket and our prisons overflowing, and the use of these operational considerations as a limitation is so concerning given the recent impacts of these considerations. I touched on Dame Phyllis Frost earlier. Staffing shortages have led to the use of rolling lockdowns in that prison and other prisons in Victoria. Often we do not know about these things because as a result of those lockdowns there is limited ability to share the impacts of what is happening in there with the outside world. Last week an 18-year-old woman, as I said, died in custody. I think many people are unaware of that because we see people in these systems as others, and that results in legislation like this. That woman had a family and people who loved her and people who cared for her, and she has become yet another statistic of someone who has died in custody in our state, and there is a link between those lockdowns and that death.

The concern that I have is future legislation will come, just like this bill, as a result of the government’s failure to properly run the corrections system and the impacts on the corrections system as a result of their policy. Who knows what the future holds? This is hopefully the last corrections bill that we will see here in this term, but we really do all need to consider the consequences of what is before us today and how it came before us and whether or not it is the right thing to do, particularly given that the people who were advised to tell us when something we were doing was wrong are telling us it is wrong and we are still not listening.

I know there will be amendments from my colleagues in the Greens, from Ms Copsey, and from Ms Payne. I will be supporting those amendments, and I am hopeful at the very least that they can be considered. A lot of us are often trying to make bad bills less bad or to put some accountability and transparency over them, and certainly when the crossbench does that work we are hopeful that the government and the opposition will at least consider it if the pathway they are going to take is ultimately supporting the piece of legislation.

I want to send my deepest thoughts and apologies to the people who I know are devastated about this bill and people in our First Nations communities across the state who stood in this place and celebrated not that long ago, only to see this before it now. Treaty cannot just be symbolic. It needs to actually do what it was designed to do. As someone who was very proud to support that piece of legislation, it is pretty devastating to be here today only a few months later. I will have more to say in the committee stage of the bill. But as I said, this is a bad piece of legislation, and we are about to move to committee on another bill, and there is still time for the Premier to reconsider this decision and to listen to the advice of the people who know it best.

 Lee TARLAMIS (South-Eastern Metropolitan) (11:26): I move:

That debate on this bill be adjourned until later this day.

Motion agreed to and debate adjourned until later this day.