Jacinta Allan was getting tough on crime. Then her review of bail laws went missing

Every journalist wants a glimpse behind the curtain, to slip past the velvet rope that separates people who make decisions from those of us who just write about them.

We yearn for that illicit piece of information, the unauthorised leak, the “mate, you didn’t hear that from me,” which helps reveal a little bit more about why something happened or perhaps, never did.

Imagine the disappointment then, when you slip past the rope, pull back the curtain and find yourself standing in an empty space.

Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan is getting tough on crime and tightening bail laws...isn’t she?Credit: AAP

This is what it felt like trying to make sense of Premier Jacinta Allan’s review of bail laws announced this week.

It started on Tuesday morning with a promise by the premier, splashed across the front page the Herald Sun, to toughen the state’s bail laws. It seemed an odd promise to make given the government’s latest changes to bail laws had only been in force since December, but these are strange times for Labor in Victoria.

By midway through the morning, the scope of her proposed review had dramatically expanded and its substance disappeared. The harder you looked, the less there was to see.

Speaking outside parliament on the first sitting day of the year, Allan offered a series of loosely connected observations about working women and children not feeling safe, electronic anklet bracelets for youth offenders, bail and family violence.

She said she’d spent the summer talking to people, people who “work really goddamn hard for what they’ve got”, and discovered many of them don’t feel secure in their homes. She said she’d directed two of her senior ministers, Attorney General Sonya Kilkenny and Police Minister Anthony Carbines, to conduct a review of bail laws and other laws and come up with ideas about what the government should do.

This was news to most of her parliamentary colleagues. The idea of a bail review wasn’t raised when the Labor caucus spent two days at a Healesville retreat last week and it wasn’t on the agenda of Monday’s cabinet meeting.

So what exactly were the terms of this review?

“It is about the laws,” Allan said. “That includes bail. It includes the legislative setting, it includes the justice settings in this state.

“The terms of reference is to review current laws.”

There is a point where a government review becomes so broad, it ceases to be about anything at all. As it turns out, this one never was.

This became clear when Carbines, one of the ministers ostensibly in charge of the review, spoke to reporters on Wednesday. He said it was OK if people wanted to call it a review but, as far as he was concerned, putting forward ideas on how to improve community safety was essentially his day job.

“I know what I need to do,” he said. “I need to keep the community safe. That’s the job. I don’t need terms of reference to do that.”

The message from Carbines is that, while he is happy to propose law changes to take more repeat offenders off the streets, he doesn’t need to sit down with police, lawyers, criminal justice experts, a black texta and a roll of butcher’s paper.

If police detectives weren’t so busy arresting car thieves and burglars, they might investigate the mysterious case of the premier’s disappearing review.

People who work in and understand Victoria’s criminal justice system will be relieved to learn another wholesale rewrite of bail laws isn’t coming their way.

Nick Papas KC, a former chief magistrate and crown prosecutor, says bail is a “soft target” in any law and order debate. He knows that behind every bail decision, particularly when young offenders or Aboriginal offenders are involved, a delicate balance needs to be struck.

He says the best way to turn young people into better criminals is to send them to jail. Victoria’s Bail Act is explicit on this point. Papas also believes that in Victoria, the balance has shifted too far towards the interests of those who keep breaking the law. He says in more cases involving repeat offenders, community protection should be the primary issue. “How, when and where you draw that line is extremely hard for a magistrate,” he adds.

Defence lawyer and Liberty Victoria senior vice-president Sam Norton says the problem with bail reform in Victoria is that it tends to occur at times of political crisis. According to the latest Resolve poll published by this masthead, Labor is deep in one now.

Victoria’s most recent overhaul of the Bail Act was commissioned eight years ago in the aftermath of the Bourke Street rampage. The review by Paul Coghlan KC, a retired Supreme Court judge and director of public prosecutions, recommended changes that removed the general entitlement to bail in more circumstances.

The unintended consequence was overcrowding of jails, long delays for hearings and in some cases, people spending months on remand for crimes unlikely to carry a jail sentence. One of those people was Veronica Nelson, an Aboriginal woman who died in custody after she was remanded for shoplifting.

A damning coronial finding into Nelson’s death prompted a winding back of the Coghlan reforms. The Allan government passed further laws, which came into effect on December 2, reinstating one of Coghlan’s key recommendations. It now says it wants to do more.

There are things the state government could do to improve the justice system beyond locking up more people. Norton points to the deplorable state of legal aid funding, the impact of mandatory jail terms for crimes such as dangerous driving causing death and the dearth of experienced lawyers willing to defend people charged with sex crimes.

These are all issues which, if addressed, would make the justice system more reliable, fair and efficient. They are also issues unlikely to be high on Jacinta Allan’s nascent law and order agenda.

Having come to the belated realisation that community safety is a serious problem, the premier is determined to take a tougher line on crime. You don’t need to slip past the velvet rope to see that.

Chip Le Grand is state political editor.

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