Ms THEOPHANOUS (Northcote): I will begin my contribution by referencing a day that many speakers have referenced already, but one which I think bears recounting. On Tuesday, 5 December 2017, Tanya Day was asleep on a train from Bendigo to Melbourne when she was taken off by V/Line officials and handed to police. They put her in a cell to sober up. It took roughly 5 hours in that cell to set off a chain of events that would ultimately lead to Tanya Day’s death 17 days later in hospital from brain injuries. In those 5 hours, in those four walls, Tanya Day’s family lost their mum, their grandmother, their sister, their aunty. The immeasurable grief of that loss has reverberated through our state, vibrating an invisible thread through our history, a thread that runs back through every family, every community that has felt dispossession, discrimination and violence. We have a long way to go before we truly come to terms with that past and so much more to do to overcome the systemic and cultural barriers that continue to impact Aboriginal Victorians. Part of that will be reflecting on our own understandings of race and privilege, part of it will be listening to and amplifying the voices of Aboriginal people and part of it will be accepting where we got it wrong and working to change things but all of it—all of it—will require perseverance, empathy and the courage shown by the Day family.
The reforms contained in this bill are long overdue and they do not reflect the totality of the changes that are necessary. But change is incremental, excruciatingly so for those waiting for the weight of injustice to be lifted, and that weight is no small thing. That weight is born of generations of wrongdoing. That is a weight that presses down, that suffocates. That weight, that sinking weight, is perhaps the same one described by Tanya Day’s own children in their final submission to the coroner. They wrote in their mother’s voice. They wrote:
Then they took me to the divvy van. I had the most terrible sinking feeling.
…
I felt that same old feeling, that feeling Aboriginal people feel all the time, but white people can’t believe in because they don’t feel it. They couldn’t see me at all. All they could see was a drunk Aboriginal woman.
These are powerful words, words that make the invisible thread vibrate loud. We need to hear them. Our current laws, which mean people can be arrested and held in a police cell purely for being drunk in public, have had a profound and disproportionate impact on our Aboriginal communities. Aboriginal people make up 0.8 per cent of the Victorian population, yet 6.5 per cent of all public drunkenness offences between 2015 and 2019 were recorded against Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people, because the truth is that these laws are not enforced on people who have had one too many cocktails at the Melbourne Cup or those who are celebrating Labour Day with an esky and their mates in the park. No. All the data tells us that this offence is used against certain cohorts of people, in particular Aboriginal people, culturally and linguistically diverse people, people experiencing homelessness, people with a substance use issue and people experiencing mental illness and distress. These people need support, not punishment.
Late last year I rose in this Parliament to underscore the importance of this reform to my community, a community with a strong and proud Aboriginal presence and many Aboriginal-controlled organisations, peak bodies, services and advocates. I asked then for us to imagine how that series of events on 5 December could have unfolded differently if a health-based response was put front and centre. And that is the critical part of the findings of both the coronial inquest and the work of the expert reference group on public drunkenness which this government established: Tanya Day’s death was preventable. She needed care and support, not incarceration.
This bill repeals these outdated laws of the past, laws which are so out of touch that they reference being drunk while in charge of a carriage, a horse, cattle or a steam engine, laws that were written at a time when alcohol abuse was considered a moral failing rather than a health issue. We live in a different era now, with more knowledge of health prevention, social support and trauma-informed and culturally-safe responses. So we know we can do this better.
This bill will amend the Summary Offences Act 1966 to remove the public drunkenness offences in sections 13, 14 and 16 as well as the associated power of arrest in section 15. The reforms will bring Victoria into line with almost every other state and territory in Australia, some of which removed these offences decades ago. It will mean very simply that people can no longer be arrested just for being drunk in public.
Now, of course Victorians rightly want to know what response model will be replacing the law-enforcement model, and Victorians rightly want to know how the community as well as first responders will be kept safe in the event that a person is engaging in risky behaviour. That is why it is important to understand the repeal of these offences is not happening in a vacuum. These changes are being complemented by our broader work to develop an alternative, non-custodial model for responding to people who are intoxicated in public.
In November last year the expert reference group on public drunkenness released its report, which provided detailed recommendations about how to implement a health-based response. We are looking at a new model, one based on the tenet that people should not be held in police cells merely because they are intoxicated in public and that the police’s role in responding to these incidents should be minimised. Most importantly, at the heart of our model will be access to health and social services as the primary response. These services will be culturally responsive, tailored to local communities, based on the best available evidence and will prioritise the cultural, psychological and physical safety of both those receiving services and the service providers.
People will be supported to recover from their immediate episode while being offered pathways to longer term health and social services if they need them. In order to support that work we have allocated $16 million in the state budget to develop a model that is right for Victoria, one that is workable and safe and meets community needs. That includes establishing trial sites in several locations to refine and test the public health model as well as consulting widely to get this right.
Importantly, the changes in this bill do not prevent police from making arrests for other criminal offences. If there is damage to property, for instance, or violence, police will still be able to use their existing powers to maintain community safety. As well as this, liquor licensees and local councils will still have a range of ways to regulate the consumption of alcohol in those settings.
As I said, decriminalisation simply means that police cannot arrest people for the sole offence of being drunk in public if they are not committing any other offence. So let us put the scare campaigns and the thinly veiled excuses for delays aside and just look at the facts, because we all know that the disproportionate application of public drunkenness laws compounds disadvantage and inequality faced by certain cohorts, and we all know that contact with the justice system is correlated with worse outcomes across social and economic indicators. We all know that when it comes to long-term health and wellbeing people need care and compassion and wraparound supports that do not just address the immediate circumstances but offer genuine pathways for recovery.
Those opposite have tried to argue that these amendments are premature, and I just want to address that for a moment. The Aboriginal community has waited decades for these changes to happen. It has been 30 years since the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, which first recommended decriminalisation. Over that time the Aboriginal community and its leaders, families and organisations as well as others have campaigned tirelessly to see this reform, and I acknowledge their determination and strength. I have spoken at length with Esme Bamblett, who is not only the chairperson of the Victorian Aboriginal Executive Council but also CEO of the Aborigines Advancement League in my electorate of Northcote. She and I have spoken about the multitude of ways that our laws and systems perpetuate a cycle of disadvantage and poor outcomes for our Aboriginal communities. Aboriginal people are still disproportionately represented in the justice system, in rates of employment, children in out-of-home care, chronic health conditions and life expectancy. This amendment is not the silver bullet, but it is a key instrument in shifting the paradigm and reducing contact with the justice system for vulnerable cohorts.
In summary, ultimately this is a reform that is long overdue. It is a reform that is too important to delay. I commend the former Attorney-General and member for Altona for her immense work on this and I commend the bill to the house.
