Victoria’s criminal justice system rests on three operational pillars: Victoria Police prevent and investigate crime and place cases before the courts; the Magistrates’, County and Supreme Courts determine guilt, bail and sentence according to law; and Corrections Victoria gives effect to those sentences by managing prisoners and remandees and supervising offenders in the community.
The system is only as strong as its weakest pillar. More arrests achieve nothing if prosecutions disappear into an overwhelmed court system. Tougher bail laws do not improve public safety if bail hearings sit in unmanageable lists with insufficient remand capacity. Smart Community Correction Orders are words on paper if Corrections lacks the officers and resources to enforce them. Without a strong police force to investigate and apprehend offenders, none of the above is possible.
Victoria cannot fix its crime crisis with isolated amendments or slogans. We will strengthen each pillar. We are the party of workers and taxpayers who will fix the mess ourselves.
Victoria was once a safe place to live, raise children and grow old. The first responsibility of any government is the safety of its people. Under successive Labor governments, Victorians are feeling anything but safe. People do not feel safe in their own homes. Enough is enough.
We will make Victoria the toughest state on crime in Australia - and we will do it by rebuilding the system that has to carry that promise. Police and frontline workers will be valued again. They need our protection, and they need a system that does not undo their work the moment they hand off. If you work hard and play by the rules, that should count for something. If you want to do the wrong thing, you will be met with the toughest laws in the country.
Backing Victoria Police
Victoria’s thin blue line is becoming catastrophically thin. The force is operating with some 1,500 position vacancies. Every year more officers quit than are successfully recruited. Specialist squads, visible patrol presence and other proactive policing measures are being cut back for lack of resources. Twenty-four-hour public counter services have shut across 43 stations statewide, leaving Victorians reliant on 000 calls with response times sometimes measured in hours rather than minutes. The first duty of government is to prevent crime and preserve order. Successive governments have forgotten that.
Victoria’s police officers do one of the hardest and most important jobs in the state. A force that is stretched thin cannot deliver the protection Victorians expect. If we want the toughest approach to crime, we must first give police the numbers, the backing and the tools they need to do the job properly.
Patrols Not Paperwork
Victoria Police must be refocused on its fundamental mission: preventing crime, catching offenders and keeping the community safe. Too many sworn officers are buried in administrative burdens, reporting requirements and non-operational duties that keep them behind desks instead of on the street.
What we will do:
Police were recruited to police, not to spend their shifts buried in paperwork.
Quality and Retention, Not Raw Numbers
A stronger police force cannot be built simply by announcing ever-larger recruitment targets. Our priority is quality, experience and retention: maintain recruitment standards, and give good officers a reason to build long careers in Victoria Police. Success should be measured not only by how many officers graduate from the academy, but by how many capable and experienced officers remain operational five, ten and twenty years later.
Broader Field Powers
When police see an offender, the law and the system should help them act, not put obstacles in their way. If an officer has lawfully detected an offence and identified the offender, bureaucratic red tape should never be the reason enforcement is delayed. Frontline police need the authority, technology and institutional backing to get the job done.
What we will do:
Protecting Police and Emergency Workers
Assault a police officer, paramedic, nurse or firefighter and you go to prison. A mandatory minimum sentence will apply under the same framework used for other serious violent offences. Seventy-six per cent of Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation Victorian Branch members surveyed in April to May 2023 reported experiencing workrelated violence in the previous six months.
That is unacceptable.
Bail and Faster Justice
The criminal justice system is horrendously backlogged. It now routinely takes up to 18 months for even a simple contested criminal charge to finish in the Magistrates’ Court. Remand costs climb and urgently needed remand spaces are occupied longer. Bail can be secured simply by pointing out that remand times exceed the prison sentence likely on conviction. Victims are left without closure and sometimes withdraw support for prosecution. Witness reliability fades. The innocent cannot move on, and the guilty do not feel consequences until long after the crime.
Criminal case initiations in the Magistrates’ Court in 2024–25 exceeded finalisations by more than 11,000. Unless we get on top of this, the system will break down. Melbourne’s population grew from 3.2 million in 1996 to 5.5 million in 2026, a 70 per cent increase, while active Magistrates’ Courts in metropolitan Melbourne shrank from 15 to 10. Physical courtrooms per capita have fallen. Most courts were built decades ago and now serve catchments that have grown exponentially.
The County Court is carrying a backlog of three thousand criminal cases. A serious charge can take well over a year to reach trial. An offender is caught, charged, bailed, and then nothing happens at all. Justice delayed is justice denied.
Bail has also been made unnecessarily complex by repeated legislative tinkering. Public confidence has plummeted. The system needs greater transparency and round-the-clock throughput.
Build Additional Court Infrastructure
There is an urgent need for more courtroom facilities. Three new Magistrates’ Courts to cover Melbourne’s western, northern and south-eastern expansion are essential to cope with existing demand and plan for future growth.
What we will do:
Expand The Judiciary
Raising the number of active magistrates only scratches the surface of what is necessary if we are serious about building more courts and clearing the backlog. Judicial registrars can take procedural and less complicated matters off Magistrates’ lists.
What we will do:
Fund The Opp, Legal Aid And Specialist Courts
The Office of Public Prosecutions operates under severe funding constraints. It struggles to retain experienced prosecutors and is increasingly reliant on junior staff. Serious offending is routinely downgraded to a lesser charge simply to encourage early resolution. Legal Aid faces similar pressure, with limited duty lawyers processing huge volumes. Specialist courts such as the Drug Court and the Assessment and Referral Court (ARC) have demonstrated effectiveness treating the drug and mental health drivers of crime, and need a proportional funding boost.
What we will do:
24/7 BAIL COURT
Courts may close at 4:30pm, but crime happens at all hours. Police may arrest and detain an offender at midnight, then wait hours or days for a magistrate. By the time the matter is heard, the officer with the most knowledge of the offence is often off duty. Many bail applications are dealt with by overworked magistrates, supported by overworked police juggling 30 to 50 matters a day. Despite the enormous social cost of a bad bail decision, bail is not treated with the timeliness and focus it deserves.
What we will do:
Bail Laws That Take Community Safety Seriously
Victoria’s bail laws were last updated in March 2025. Community safety was made the overarching consideration, remand as a last resort for children was abolished, and offences such as home invasion, carjacking, aggravated burglary and armed robbery were placed in tougher categories.
The question is no longer whether to tighten bail. It is what is still missing. We are not proposing to abolish bail. A person who has not been convicted remains innocent until proven otherwise. Bail is not a verdict. It is a prediction about what that person is likely to do between now and trial. Courts should take that prediction seriously and show their reasoning.
What we will do:
These changes keep the presumption of innocence while requiring the system to take community safety and accountability seriously.
Ninety Day Justice
Capacity without a clock still leaves victims waiting. We will put a ninety-day clock on serious violent charges, from charge to trial, and extend court operations into nights and weekends to meet it.
What we will do:
Open Courts and Accountability
Court Watch
Parliament is broadcast. The courts spend more of the public’s money and decide more about the public’s safety, and they operate almost entirely out of sight. Most Victorians have never seen a sentencing. They read a headline about a result they cannot understand and are told they lack the context. If context is the answer, give them the context.
What we will do:
Open courts are not a threat to justice. Secrecy is.
Community Sentencing Review Board
While the Sentencing Advisory Council performs an important research and advisory function, there remains a gap in systematically assessing whether sentencing outcomes align with reasonable community expectations on punishment, deterrence, denunciation and community protection. Legitimate democratic dissatisfaction with sentencing should be channelled into legislative reform through Parliament – not political pressure on individual judges.
What we will do:
Courts independently apply the law in individual cases. Parliament determines the law under which those courts operate. That division of responsibility must be preserved.
Tougher Sentencing
Sentencing Act Reforms: Intensive Correction Orders and the Presumption of Escalation
Victoria’s sentencing system must give courts stronger consequences for serious and repeat offending. Too often courts face an unsatisfactory choice between another community-based order and sending an offender straight to prison. Repeat offenders cycle through fines, good behaviour bonds and soft community orders without escalating consequences.
What we will do:
When an offender repeatedly rejects opportunities to change, the justice system must respond decisively and escalate the consequences – to jail if necessary.
Reform the Sentencing Act for Serious Violent Crime
Right now, the law lists five reasons a court can sentence someone: to punish them, to deter others, to rehabilitate them, to show society disapproves of the crime, and to protect the community. The problem is a judge only has to pick one of those reasons. Many choose rehabilitation. Once they do, the law then says they must give the lightest sentence that still helps with rehabilitation. Community safety can be left out completely.
We will change this for serious violent crimes.
What we will do:
When the crime is serious and violent, the sentence should properly protect the community and reflect the full seriousness of what happened, not just focus on rehabilitation.
Serious Child Offenders
Right now, a child who commits a serious violent offence is sentenced under the Youth Justice Act 2024. That Act focuses on rehabilitation, and for most young people that is the right approach. It is the wrong approach for a 17-year-old who puts someone in intensive care.
We will change that. A child charged with a serious violent offence will be sentenced under the Sentencing Act 1991 as an adult.
This is not just a handful of kids at the margins. Children are responsible for the majority of robberies, carjackings and home invasions in Victoria. If they are tried in the Children’s Court, only 34 per cent are jailed for aggravated home invasion. In the County Court, 97 per cent are jailed.
Labor raised the age of criminal responsibility to 12 years old. That did not stop 10- and 11-year-olds offending. It stopped counting them. A child of that age who breaks into a house today produces no charge, no record, and leaves no trace in the statistics. Every parent in the state knows that a 10-year-old knows the difference between right and wrong. We will return the age of criminal responsibility to 10 years old to ensure that corrective action is taken to prevent them ending up in a life of crime.
This approach better matches community expectations and puts public safety first.
Serious Repeat Offenders
Everyone in the system knows which offenders will be back. They finish their sentence, walk out with no supervision at all, and the countdown begins.
Currently the Serious Offenders Act 2018 allows a court to keep murderers and sex offenders under supervision, or in detention, even after the sentence has ended, for up to fifteen years. It works.
What we will do:
Ganging Up on Gangs
Most of the serious violence in Victoria is committed by a few hundred people. They run in gangs. Police know who they are. The trouble is that police cannot bring the rest of the state with them. They can serve a warrant, but they cannot make Fines Victoria chase a debt, ask the parole board to knock on a door, or have VicRoads cancel a licence. Every agency can help crush these gangs, but they currently cannot move together. We will make them move together, the way Victoria already does for family violence.
Every gang on the list gets one warning, delivered in person, in front of police command, the prosecutors, and the families of the people they have put in hospital. They are told exactly what happens next. They are offered a way out through the streamlined H.E.L.P. services.
Then, if any one of them commits a violent offence, every agency moves on all of them. The whole gang. Warrants served. Fines called in. Licences gone. Bail checked nightly.
No one goes to prison for another’s crime, but if one gang member offends, they make the whole gang suffer. That is what turns a gang on itself. The one who cannot stay out of trouble becomes the most expensive friend the rest of them have.
Glasgow did exactly this, and violent offending fell by 46.5 per cent. Labor has copied the mentoring program that ran alongside it, but left this part out. We will do the part that has been proven to work.
Expand Remand Capacity and Corrections Victoria Resourcing
A tougher criminal justice system cannot work if Corrections Victoria lacks the resources, staff and infrastructure to enforce court decisions. Around 40 per cent of Victoria’s adult prisoners were on remand in June 2025. Audits of Community Correctional Services have identified excessive caseloads, shortages of experienced staff, delays in responding to breaches, inadequate access to treatment programs and fragmented offender-management technology. Caseloads have exceeded 60 offenders per officer in some locations, impeding prompt action against non-compliance. Community Correction Orders are only as real as the supervision behind them.
What we will do:
Prevention and Responsibility
Self-Defence in the Home and Pepper Spray Trial
Victorians are entitled to defend themselves and their families. Law-abiding citizens need greater confidence that the law will protect them when they are confronted by serious violence in their own homes. Alongside that, Victorians, particularly women, are entitled to a practical form of non-lethal self-defence outside the home.
What we will do:
When an innocent person is threatened with violence, the law should protect their right to defend themselves while maintaining firm safeguards against abuse.
Parental Responsibility
Where a child under 16 is offending, the state currently has almost nothing to say to the parents. The taxpayer pays for the damage, and the household that produced the behaviour carries none of it. Queensland legislated the answer: a parent of a child under 16 is liable unless they can show they did not know about the conduct, or took all reasonable steps to prevent it. We will do the same.
What we will do:
It is a fair test. Plenty of parents are doing everything right and getting nowhere, and they will have the defence. This is about ending the pretence that a 12-year-old is out at three in the morning with nobody responsible for them.
Sport as Crime Prevention
Sport is one of the best and cheapest ways to keep young people on the right track. A young person who is at training a few nights a week is a young person with structure, teammates, and something to look forward to. Most parents already know this. The problem is that in a cost-of-living crisis, organised sport is often the first thing families have to drop.
What we will do:
H.E.L.P.
Victorians already pay for a wide range of government-funded services: mental health support, drug and alcohol treatment, employment programs, TAFE and training, mentoring, housing assistance, and more. The problem is not that the services do not exist. The problem is that they are scattered across multiple departments and agencies, buried behind different websites, referral forms and waiting lists.
A young person in crisis at two in the morning, or a parent trying to find help for their teenager, should not have to navigate nine different systems. Right now, that is exactly what they face.
We will expand the remit of Service Victoria so it becomes the single digital front door for government-funded services: one website and one app, one login, and one simple intake that identifies what a person needs, connects them to the right service, books it where possible, and follows up.
This will start with a clear focus on young people through the H.E.L.P. pathway – Health, Employment, Learning and Purpose – so support is available before someone ends up in the justice system. It will then expand across other government-funded human services so that Victorians no longer have to hunt through fragmented systems to get the help they already fund.
What we will do:
No new bureaucracy. No new buildings. Just a practical system that makes the services Victorians already pay for reachable when people need them. That is how we support good behaviour and intervene early: we make the help easy to find.
Clean Up Victoria
Melbourne looks like an abandoned city. Graffiti on the shopfronts, on the fences, on the trains, on the war memorials. It is disgusting, and Victorians are embarrassed by it. This was the most liveable city in the world, and it now looks like a place people have given up on.
Damage left unrepaired tells everyone walking past that nobody is in charge here. Broken windows theory says that minor damage like this is exactly what invites major crime. No more.
Victoria already has the law. Under the Graffiti Prevention Act 2007, marking graffiti carries up to two years in prison and a fine over $43,000, and a court can order the offender to pay for the removal. It is barely enforced. We will make sure that it is.
What we will do:
People do not let a place they are proud of end up like this. Make Victorians proud of this city again and they will look after it themselves. We will clean up Victoria.
Deport Violent Criminals
If you come to Victoria from overseas and commit a violent crime, you should not get to stay.
The Commonwealth already has the power under the Migration Act to cancel visas and deport people sentenced to 12 months or more. That law has been there for years. What has been missing is the political will on the Victorian side to make sure every case is actually sent through.
What we will do:
Victorians have a right to expect that those who come here and commit serious violence do not get to remain in the community once they have been convicted.
