Wednesday, 23 September 2026

 Renee HEATH (Eastern Victoria) (17:16): Today I rise to speak on the Victorian Auditor-General’s Office (VAGO) report that was handed down this morning, Preventing Youth Crime: September 2026. This is an independent assurance report to this Parliament, and it is extremely worrying. It absolutely confirms what we have been very worried about for a long time, and that is that what the Labor government is doing to address youth crime is not working. I have spoken for a long time about the two aspects of this. The first is that the community is less safe, and the second is that we seem to be losing a generation of young people to crime. Unfortunately, this report proves this. In the opening snapshot it says that youth crime in Victoria has had a 40 per cent increase between the years 2022 and 2025 – a 40 per cent increase. It costs $7304 per day to keep a young person in custody. Not only is that the most expensive in the nation, but we are getting worse outcomes than anywhere in the nation. There has been $40 million spent – and in a minute I am going to go to what we are getting for that $40 million – and 2700 participants have received one-on-one support.

I am just going to flick to section 4, which shows that in Victoria there are 26,977 alleged youth offenders, so almost 27,000. But do you know what they did to assess this? They assessed 26 kids – one-thousandth of the total. And, guess what, out of those 26 kids, 11 reoffended. This is absolutely shocking. This is what VAGO said:

What we concluded

We found no evidence to show the program is reducing offending.

So not some evidence, not little evidence – zero evidence that this is reducing youth offending.

Another thing which I think is definitely worth looking at is that now in Victoria there are a total of 236,000 – it is way over that – Victorians who are now victims of crime. That means that 3.3 per cent of Victorians are now victims of crime. There has to be a new start. There has to be a fresh start. A Jess Wilson–led government is going to provide that fresh start. We are going to attack this from both sides. First, we are going to make the community more safe by making sure there are 3000 new sworn police officers. Not only are we going to return the PSOs to the 119 stations, we are going to increase that number by 200, because this is not okay. The first job of any government is to keep its people safe. But not only that, we are going to have programs that pull these kids out of the cycle of offending that they are committing. We are going to do this by investing $100 million into a program, the safer communities plan. We have a plan for this. What $70 million of that is going to do – and in the short time I have I am going to explain a little bit of it – is we are going to have a first-of-its-kind live-in structured program for serious repeat offenders. It is something that has worked in other states, something that has proven outcomes and something that has been shown to reduce offending. This is going to be something that both the courts and the police will have the authority to refer to.

We need to have programs that work because, to be quite frank, to invest $40 million, assess it on 26 kids and see that 11 are reoffending is just absolutely horrific. Two per cent of the alleged offenders are being reached in this program – out of the $40 million. Of that 2 per cent, they assessed 26, and of that 26, 11 reoffended. If that does not show you the mess we are in, I do not know what will. It is time we stopped losing a generation to crime, and it is time we made our communities more safe.