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Victorian bail laws under fire as it fails to reach ‘unambitious’ targets
The Victorian government is under fire for its commitment to the new Closing the Gap Agreement after a progress report found that Australia is not on track to meet the “already unambitious” targets relating to incarceration of Aboriginal people.
Naomi Neilson
Marking the fourth anniversary of Victoria’s bail laws, lawyers with the Human Rights Law Centre (HRLC) have reflected on the “devastating” effect that they have had on Aboriginal people, but particularly women, as the prison population continues to rise. Paired with an agreement last year, the government is being heavily criticised.
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HRLC legal director Meena Singh said Victoria’s bail laws are some of Australia’s “most dangerous”. In Victoria, nearly six in 10 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women are on remand, “having been convicted of nothing”. Many are imprisoned on remand for minor breaches of bail conditions and low-level offences.
“[The bail laws] are needlessly removing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women from their families. These punitive laws are funnelling women into prisons to be warehoused on remand before they have been sentenced for a crime. Time is overdue for the government to fix Victoria’s broken bail laws,” Ms Singh said.
In the first “Annual Data Compilation Report”, mapping progress under the National Agreement on Closing the Gap found that despite Victoria signing on last year with a commitment to meet required targets, it and the rest of Australia are not on track.
In Victoria, 1752.8 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander adults per 100,000 are imprisoned, compared to 124.6 non-Indigenous adults. Additionally, 15.3 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are imprisoned compared to the 1.7 non-Indigenous children. While there was a decrease in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the “long-term trend” of rapid incarcerations is set to resume.
HRLC has submitted that the Andrews government could address these statistics by repealing the reverse-onus provisions in the bail laws, creating a presumption in favour of bail for all offences and repealing the offences of committing an indictable offence while on bail, breaching bail conditions and failure to answer bail.
Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service chief executive George Selvanera said that the government often attributes the “massive explosion of people in custody” as an unintended consequence of bail laws changed in response to the Bourke Street massacre. However, “those consequences are, by now, well-known”.
“A government decision to continue business as usual is a deliberate and cruel choice to traumatise Aboriginal women and other more vulnerable people and their families through unnecessary, costly remand and to neglect its commitments under the Closing the Gap Agreement,” Ms Selvanera said.
