TRANSCRIPT:
I rise today to speak on the Justice Legislation Amendment Bill 2023, a bill that we do not oppose. This omnibus bill is rather uncontroversial, making several fixes to the wording and clarity of various pieces of justice legislation. This is a bill that we have seen in other forms previously, with the Justice Legislation Amendment Bill 2022 passing through both chambers last year. Much like this bill, last year’s version was introduced to make a number of minor but necessary amendments to existing justice legislation and to help clarify the law and support procedural improvements. A similar bill was also passed through both chambers the year prior to that, with several temporary COVID-19 measures for our justice system implemented through these changes. While these bills may appear to be merely a formality, they introduce necessary changes and ensure that legislation relating to our justice system is kept relevant and appropriate – well, at least for another year. I will run through some of the changes this year’s bill will address and what kind of impact these changes will have. From looking through the bill, there are 11 key areas where changes are made, with nearly all areas of our justice system covered, including courts, criminals, coroners, police, lawyers, firefighters, juries and tribunals.
One of the amendments will be to clarify and confirm temporary changes to the Open Courts Act 2013 and the Court Security Act 1980. These amendments apply directly to court proceedings and include supporting remote public access, proposing alternatives to physical court hearings and making changes to the enforcement powers of court officers. These were initially introduced as temporary fixes during the pandemic and were due to expire on 26 October this year. Under these new provisions, court officers will be empowered to enforce not only relevant pandemic orders but also measures necessary to safeguard the health and safety of court users. At the same time court officers exercising their power to seize prohibited items will need to demonstrate reasonable grounds that an item is prohibited before taking this action. The accessibility of court proceedings also features heavily in these amendments, with changes upholding the legality of holding these proceedings online should it be necessary. There are also updates to account for some modern realities we face with the justice system, particularly when it comes to digitisation of records and management.
The Spent Convictions Act 2021 is updated to facilitate information sharing and increase accessibility within the scheme. This also intends to provide safeguards to ensure that identified data is not made publicly available, although clause 23 does state it will not be an offence to publish de-identified data. The Children, Youth and Families Act 2005 is also amended, with a focus on supporting the introduction of electronic case management in the family division of the Children’s Court. These reforms will allow certain documents to be filed electronically, a necessary update to the system, considering the digital world we now live in.
The Coroners Act 2008 is another section of our justice legislation that is amended, with recommendations for coronial inquest findings being implemented as well as recommendations from the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. Additionally, through amendments to the Crimes Act 1958, the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service is now contacted when a person taken into custody identifies as Aboriginal. This must be done within 1 hour of the person being taken into custody or, if not practicable to do so, as soon as it is.
The Victoria Police Act 2013 will be amended too, correcting what seems to have been the inadvertent removal of regulation-making powers to prescribe fees for services provided by police officers, PSOs and Victoria Police employees. The legal profession also is included in these amendments, with language changes to remove current impediments to prosecution, including hefty delays. For juries, the Jury Directions Act 2015 is amended to clarify that certain jury directions are available in all sexual offence trials, regardless of whether the prosecution is required to prove a lack of consent. This remedies errors made in 2022, when new jury directions were worded in a way that unnecessarily references a lack of consent. A new section in this legislation provides that, if an absence of consent is not an element of the offence, the direction still applies in the same way as some other sexual offences.
I want to quickly touch on some of the changes that will be made through this legislation to tribunals such as VCAT. These amendments are in response to recent court decisions that seem to shrink the jurisdiction of VCAT and to provide certainty about the jurisdiction and rights of parties in impacted cases. The reforms to VCAT will expand the class of VCAT members who can make orders to transfer federal jurisdiction matters to a court for determination as well as provide courts with the power to extend the limitation period for federal jurisdiction matters referred to them by VCAT. They will also preserve the rights and liabilities of parties involved in previous VCAT decisions which are no longer valid due to the matters having an indirect connection to federal law. Recent court decisions held that VCAT has no power to hear matters that involve the exercise of federal jurisdiction, including matters where there is only indirect connection to federal law. This has potentially invalidated a number of VCAT decisions and required a referral of matters initiated in VCAT to a court that can exercise federal jurisdiction.
Lastly, there are some crucial changes made to amend presumptive rights compensation for firefighters. This is done by adding an additional three cancers to schedules in both fire services legislation and the Forests Act 1958. The additional three cancers impact female firefighters and include cervical, ovarian and uterine cancers. Firefighters are the backbone of many regional towns, with CFA volunteers being such an essential part of our communities. So often they show a selfless determination in the face of danger, and it is time that they were supported accordingly by this government. While it might initially be difficult for some to grasp the necessity of these changes, they are covering several bases of our justice system that require updates and clarity.
Our justice system has suffered in recent years, with outrageous backlogs in our courts and tribunals and difficulties with increasing crime in regional areas. Recent data from the Crime Statistics Agency have shown a rise of both criminal incidents and the number of offences recorded in my region during the past year. In the Mitchell shire, which includes many towns in the Euroa electorate, there has been a 10 per cent rise in criminal incidents and a 13.5 per cent rise in offences recorded. These are primarily offences relating to breaches of family violence orders, theft, assault and drug offences. Benalla has had similar jumps, with criminal incidents well above the state average and 921 criminal incidents recorded in the last calendar year – for a town with a population of 14,000. Even reading the newspapers recently there has been an alarming amount of violent crime, with shootings, stabbings and break-ins.
I will not oppose any legislation that encourages a more effective and efficient justice system, but while an effective justice system is important, so is the need to invest in our police’s resources and preventative support services. Just this week we have been hearing chatter about the one-person police stations across Victoria that are under threat. Sadly, like much of the government’s policy we see introduced, this will be of particular detriment to regional towns, including those in my electorate. Violet Town, Stanhope and Pyalong are all home to one-person stations in my electorate, and each one of these towns is set to be negatively impacted by this change. These small country towns are often too far away from any major centres for a response within a reasonable time, and the loss of a single-officer station equates to further pressure on incident response times. We need more cops, not less. Police in small towns are more than just the local officer. They are an integral part of the community and have to balance the fine line of enforcing the law and being mates with locals. This is another example of small country towns being sacrificed in the name of bureaucracy and decisions being made in Melbourne. The Andrews Labor government needs to fix its issues with police recruitment and retention and keep its hands off our single-officer police stations in rural areas.