Issue 3  March 25th 2025

A 'tough on crime' race to the bottom

The Allan Labor Government has rushed through two pieces of legislation in a single sitting week - The Bail Amendment (Tough Bail) Bill 2025 and the Terrorism (Community Protection) and Control of Weapons Amendment Bill 2024 – actions that threatens to dramatically increase incarceration rates for First Nations people and other racialised communities in Victoria. This legislative push effectively reverses hard-won reforms while expanding police powers to stop and search without cause, all under the familiar stench of election-cycle racism that seems never to truly leave Victoria. Behind these pieces of legislation lies a carefully constructed narrative about "youth crime" and "community safety", a narrative more concerned with political posturing ahead of the upcoming 2026 state Victorian election than with genuine public protection. This piece examines how these changes will disproportionately impact already marginalised communities and serve primarily to consolidate institutional power by sowing racism and division within the population, while stating that it is working in the interest of ‘community safety’ and ‘social cohesion’.

Right-wing actors holding institutional power across Victoria’s police force and the Murdoch media have shaped public discourse about ‘crime’ and the need for expanded police powers by stoking a moral panic that relies on demonising racialised communities. This has included seeding public conversations with claims of 'out of control' youth crime in the western suburbs, implying that certain racialised communities that are demographically significant in this area are inherently prone to violence and crime. Fuelled by these racist overtures, the Victorian Government has once again capitulated to the pro-police narrative, appeasing a voting base that has been primed to fear crime and associate it with certain racialised groups. Make no mistake, these extra police powers, changes to bail laws and youth crime narratives will hit First Nations and other racialised communities hardest.

In this piece, we focus on the disastrous Bail Amendment (Tough Bail) Bill 2025, which was rushed through both houses of Victorian Parliament in the 18th-21st March sitting week, and the Terrorism (Community Protection) and Control of Weapons Amendment Bill 2024, which passed in the same sitting period to expand police search powers. Together, these changes are poised to further target First Nations and racialised communities.

Bail

Any move towards harm-reduction in Victoria’s bail system has only occurred off the back of extended struggle by First Nations advocates. After the death in custody of Gunditjmara, Dja Dja Wurrung, Wiradjuri and Yorta Yorta woman Veronica Nelson at the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre in January 2020, State Coroner Simon McGregor recommended significant changes to Victoria’s bail system to avoid this tragedy being repeated. Included in the Coroner’s findings was a clear statement that “the Bail Act has a discriminatory impact on First Nations people”. Additionally, Coroner McGregor went so far as to state that “had the RCIADIC recommendations been successfully implemented by the Government and its agencies, Veronica’s passing would have been prevented.”

Despite this, the Allan Government, with enthusiastic support from the Opposition, has rushed through changes to the Bail Act under the Bail Amendment (Tough Bail) Bill 2025, a decision met with widespread alarm in the Aboriginal community-controlled and community legal sectors. Recommended changes to the Bail Act included legislative amendment of the Act to repeal the ‘double uplift’ provision and other sections of the Act that imposed harsh penalties on people who failed to answer bail, contravened conduct conditions, or committed an indictable offence while on bail. These changes were welcome, leading to reform of the Bail Act in 2023 that the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service described as “a step in the right direction,” despite falling short of the full suite of changes sought by Aboriginal communities and experts.4

Search powers

Expanded police search powers have also been passed in Parliament in the last week. Victoria Police can now declare entire suburbs as 'designated areas' for up to 6 months at a time and will be empowered to stop and search someone for no other reason than being in that place. While these amendments to the Terrorism (Community Protection) and Control of Weapons Amendment Bill 2024 have been pushed on the basis of preventing ‘knife crime’, designated areas are almost entirely useless as a tool to find knives and weapons.

In a February 2025 report published by Liberty Victoria’s Rights Advocacy Project, analysis of Victoria Police search data obtained by Freedom of Information request, showed that over 1% of searches in designated areas found any “objects or substances”. The report’s authors note that “objects” and “substances” are vague and undefined, and that the data obtained does not differentiate between things like body armour, other 'illegal' substances, and knives. Our own Racial Profiling Data Monitoring Project data also paints a picture of how ineffective these searches are in turning up contraband items. When looking at 'warrantless' searches, Police data indicates that contraband items were found in 17% of searches. This rate is lower than other international comparison points for warrantless searches. When broken down into racial groups (categorised by Victoria Police based on perception of racial identity), almost all racialised groups have a lower hit rate than people that police perceive to be white. Unsurprisingly, our project showed that despite this fact, members of most racialised groups are more likely to be searched and less likely for police to find anything on them than people police perceive to be white.

The combined effect of the two measures outlined above is chilling. Expanded search powers will lead to more arrests, while the Bail Amendment (Tough Bail) Bill will make it harder for those arrested to be released on bail. We predict that this will lead to a surge in the number of Aboriginal and racialised young people held in remand.

Racist narratives

The Allan government’s bail reforms and choice to expand police search powers will further enable the incarceration of adults and children in Victoria under pressure from police and politically motivated constructions of a 'crime crisis'. These alarmingly regressive amendments to bail and ‘community protection’ legislation have been made possible by the creation of a racist narrative about youth offending for over a decade by Victoria Police and prominent political and media figures. The slow build-up of a racist framing of youth offending has been mobilised in the bail and designated areas debates, allowing the Government to look like it is taking serious action on ‘community safety’ by bringing back tougher bail laws, and expand police power, to curb the perceived ‘crisis’.

In 2023, Victoria Police held a presentation for the Department of Justice focused on ‘youth crime’ and the growing concern about ‘young offenders’ in the state. Among the audience was the South Sudanese Youth Justice Expert Working Group, which complained about the inappropriate content of the presentation and its racist overtones. Reporting at the time by the ABC documented these concerns, noting:

"One person commented they were "disturbed" by "the casual way the violent imagery was discussed" and another said the commentary was "upsetting … flippant, and racist in several points."

Another part of the ABC’s piece on the issue included the revelation that:

"Department emails said the second presentation "focused almost exclusively on offending by African background Australian young people and adults", without "any explanation or evidence as to why".

The reporting on this presentation tells us how Victoria Police see ‘youth crime’. For them, it is a racialised issue in need of police intervention. Their internal framing is of a ‘crisis’ that has racialised villains in need of tough punishment, meaning police need more powers to clamp down on the ‘crime wave’.

Since the 2023 presentation, the police have slowly pushed more and more stories about youth offenders, offenders out on bail and the growing dangers of knife crime, culminating in a statement published on the 20th of March outlining “totally unacceptable” rates of crime in Victoria. Only a month ago did Police say they were 'frustrated' by the 'revolving door' of bail. In its March 20th statement, Victoria Police refer to “repeat child offending,” “hardened young offenders,” “a hardcore group of young offenders,” and “the state’s worst young offenders... youth gang members, child car thieves and underage burglars,” painting a picture of out-of-control youth crime in the state. The statement also applauds changes to the Bail Act, and states that:

“Advice and recommendations were provided to Government by Victoria Police ahead of this announcement, including the critical need for community safety to outweigh the rights of the individual committing repeat serious and violent crime when it comes to bail decisions.”

The racism in Victoria’s law-and-order conversation couldn't be more potent. Police deploy coded language that guides audiences’ interpretation of who must be committing these crimes. ‘Youth-offenders’ is frequently used as code for 'Black and brown kids', ‘Western suburbs’ means racialised communities, and 'hardcore repeat offender' has come to mean ‘African gangs’, which itself is supposed to evoke a sense of foreign and unruly threat to white audiences. These tropes are all laid bare in the Murdoch newspapers’ decision to strategically place photos of African or Middle Eastern young people in handcuffs, or show footage of offender in 'all black' during a break in.

From the same reporting on the 2023 presentation by Victoria Police, another audience member was quoted on their concerns about the choice to use racialised depictions of ‘offenders’:

One attendee recalled a slide in the second presentation that featured pictures of two young men of African background handcuffed on the ground. "The presenter went on to say that one of these men had been found to not be involved in the incident at all," they said. "I question why the image of this person's face was kept in the presentation."

While Victoria Police employ coded language when speaking about crime and community safety, the prevalence of both structural and individual racism within the force is obvious. So obvious in fact that in a particularly brazen incident, a member of Victoria Police used the Nazi salute twice while teaching in the Police academy. That officer was suspended with pay and was not charged. The suggestion that Victoria Police has a Nazi problem is not a recent one. In December 2023, Victoria Police were criticised about their apathy towards a Nazi march down the main streets of Ballarat. Earlier that year Victoria Police also came under fire for failure to act when a group of fascists took over the steps of Parliament House, performing the Nazi salute and chanting obscenities. These murky overlaps between Victoria Police and white nationalists must be understood and located within a context of systemic racism in Australia more broadly when looking at differences in approaches to policing of racialised communities.

The Murdoch media has also played a crucial role in stoking the flames of racial division by publishing sensationalised reporting on almost every negative incident involving young people in the state, frequently accompanied by graphic images, and foregrounding the ‘crime wave’ narrative at all costs. The Herald Sun started an ongoing news section on March 5th called “Suburbs Under Siege”, which almost exclusively features images of masked youth ‘committing crimes’, or racialised young people in handcuffs. In the week before the bail announcements, the Herald Sun ran 21 stories on bail and launched a petition for tougher bail conditions. Meanwhile, radio personalities Fifi, Fev and Nick, hosts of the eponymous breakfast show on Melbourne’s 101.9FM, launched their own petition calling for tougher bail laws.

Conclusion

It is impossible not to notice the racist dog-whistling underpinning Victoria’s youth crime and bail conversation. Even before the time of Dutton’s ‘African gangs’ hysteria, police and right-wing media have used youth crime to mean Black and brown kids. The tried and tested tactic mobilised by Victoria Police and echoed across all other State and Territory jurisdictions is to create a climate in which expanded police powers – including the ability to stop and search individuals without reasonable grounds – seem like a necessary solution. The young people who will feel these racist laws in effect will be Aboriginal children and children from racialised communities in the west and south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne. These children, who are already vastly disproportionately represented in custody, will be funnelled into our prisons and remand centres at an even higher rate. Make no mistake, these are the young people who will feel these laws, theirs are the communities that will be impacted by more children being locked up. Not Fifi’s or Fev’s or Nick’s.

The Allan Labor government is immensely proud of the regressive measures it has taken to expand the dragnet of the criminal legal system in Victoria and is promising more of the same in future. A second ‘Tough Bail Bill’ is set to be introduced mid-year, which will “create the proposed tough new bail test for serious, repeat offenders,” and will also impose tougher bail test conditions for the new offence of “committing an indictable offence while on bail.”15 The Government’s assures in its press release about the passing of the Tough Bail bill that safeguards will be put in place to ensure that the tightening of these conditions is ‘proportionate’. This gesture rings hollow when we take into consideration the scale of structural power held by police and the courts as compared to criminalised people, especially those who are already racially marginalised.

Photo by Charandev Singh