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I'm Ruby Jones and you're listening to 7am. Last year, after months of pressure over youth crime and claims the system had become too soft, Victoria passed what it proudly called the toughest bail laws in the country. At the time, legal and human rights experts warned the laws would put more children in custody and disproportionately affect first nations people. Now the Allan government is doubling down in this week's state budget. It said bail refusals were at record highs and promised more money for corrections, faster youth crime hearings and a rewrite of sentencing laws. But the deeper question hasn't changed. Should bail be a right or a tool for crime prevention? Today we're returning to Daniel James conversation with legal academic Professor Marilyn McMahon on how media pressure and politics are reshaping bail and what that means for justice.
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Justice.
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It's Sunday, May 10, and this episode was originally published in March of 2025.
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Marilyn, the Victorian government recently passed what it says are the toughest bail laws in the country. So can you tell me about these laws?
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Yes, the Premier certainly called them the toughest bail laws ever and said that the reforms will provide a jolt to the system.
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D
Hi, everyone. I just thought I'd jump on here with some breaking news tonight from the Victorian Parliament. We've just passed the tough new bail
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laws, the toughest in the country. What was introduced as part of those reforms was you had the principle of remand being a last resort for youth offenders was abandoned. People charged with some crimes, including armed robbery, carjacking, home invasion and aggravated burglary, will now find it harder to get bail. And the government has reintroduced the crimes of committing an indictable offence while on bail and breaching a bail condition. Now, I think what we saw was that the legislation was rushed through Parliament.
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D
Tougher bail laws passed Victoria's Parliament in a marathon sitting that extended into the early hours of the morning.
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They come into effect in a state where we've already got tough bail laws, perhaps the toughest in the country already. It's part of that long term trend where we've seen bail being turned into a pivotal point for crime prevention. Traditionally, bail really operated as a mechanism to ensure people attended court for the hearing of their case. But bail bail decision making has become much more about the risk that a person who's applying for bail will commit an offence if released on bail into the community. That really means that bail has been politicised and it's now a key law and order issue for us. And it's likely, I think, that what we'll see in coming years is that more than half the prison population in Victoria will be people who'll be held on remand. That is, they haven't been convicted, they've been held prior to the hearing of their matter. Now, that's, I think, a very disturbing statistic.
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D
The Premier has said that these laws are about reducing reoffending and making the community safe. But for how many decades have governments had reports and evidence on their desks about ways to do this that don't resort to police and prisons?
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C
And as these laws were being debated in the Victorian Parliament, there were protests outside. So can you talk to me about the opposition to this bill? What are people saying?
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You had strong opposition to the bill coming from a number of quarters, primarily from legal representatives and organisations, human rights organisations, and especially first nations people and organisations. Lawyers and legal organisations emphasised the traditional concerns that bail should only be denied in exceptional circumstances because it breaches the right to liberty and also it breaches the presumption of innocence. Community organisations draw attention to the well known negative consequences of people denied bail. People can lose their job, they'll be separated from their families, it causes mental distress and also exposes people to the dangers and the stresses of a prison environment.
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D
Haven't we been here before? In 2018, 65% of women were locked up for less than a month and released without a sentence. I am one of those women.
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You had very strong opposition coming from the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service and other organisations representing first nations people because they are so disproportionately affected by harsh bail laws. And we've seen this. The terrible case of Veronica Nelson, a First Nation woman who died in custody after being denied bail for committing minor offences, showed just how the escalation of a minor offence with a vulnerable individual could result in such a terrible consequence.
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A Victorian coroner, Simon McGregor, found today Ms. Nelson had been treated in a cruel, inhumane and degrading way by corrections officers and medical staff in the 36 hours she'd been in custody.
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There's research from the New South Wales Law Reform Commission that tells us there'll be a small portion of people who are denied bail who will ultimately be found not guilty of their offences with which they're charged. That means people will have been incarcerated and served time in prison for offences for which they're found not guilty. That's wrong. I think we've also got very strong opposition coming from the Children's Commissioner in Victoria and other organisations representing youth. Basically what they're pointing, pointing to is that we have a breach of our obligations under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which specifies that detention should only be a measure of last resort for youth. What we've got now under these reforms is that young people will be treated like adults. When failed, decision makers have to decide whether to remand them or release them into custody. Very predictably, what we'll now be experiencing is a significant increase in the number of young people who are being detained in prisons. Youth centres in Victoria and these laws,
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as Premier Jacinda Allen said, are the toughest in the country. But other states and territories are all moving in the same direction, are they not?
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They are.
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I think it's unfortunate, but what you see in other jurisdictions is the same trend towards increasing, putting people on remand. Overall, in Australia, there's about 41% of prisoners who are being held on remand. And we've seen it in states not only like Victoria, New South Wales, South Australia. What's been driving it over a period of at least a decade now is concern about community safety. So whereas, say, 20 years ago, you had only a small fraction of the prison population being those people who are being held on remand, today in some states, like the act, for example, half the prison population is comprised of people being held on remand. In South Australia, the Northern Territory, in New South Wales, it's about 45% of the prison population.
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After the break, how media panic has influenced bail laws.
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From home invasions to stabbings, police pursuits and carjackings, child criminals breaching bail every
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three hours, it's just out of control.
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Rodolfo Arena's Jeep was allegedly stolen by teens who were already out on multiple counts of bail.
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C
Marilyn, you mentioned that these tougher bail laws we're seeing in Australia have been influenced by media and political narratives around crime and a growing concern with community safety. So tell me about the pressures and narratives that have influenced the introduction of these bail laws.
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Well, I think in Victoria, we've seen there's been a recent increase in the crime rate and that has generated considerable concern. And we've seen also that police have agitated in relation to young offenders and they've asked for harsher bail laws to deal with them. And we've also seen the Premier introducing the notion of a review of bail laws just prior to the Werribee by election.
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Daily, we get calls and messages from Melburnians who are sick of not feeling safe in their own homes. Instead of action, we get empty words from our leaders. Enough is enough.
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And then you had a massive media campaign conducted by two radio personalities.
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Join our campaign to petition the Victorian Parliament. It's time for action. Bring about bail reform for repeat offenders. That puts the community first.
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Yes.
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And holds offenders accountable. So there it is.
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Then the Herald sun joined in and you've got, you know, Channel 9 news, which is also promoting fear of crime being committed by people who are on bail under pressure.
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The Premier is talking tough. The laws need to be changed and they will, but not quickly enough for mother of two Adele Andrews, left terrified after machete wielding thieves broke in while her family slept early Tuesday morning. Something's very, very wrong and I don't know what it's going to take.
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That's a powerful conjunction of circumstances that favours the introduction of punitive bail laws.
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C
And this is not the first time that media attention has driven a tightening of bail laws in Australia, is it?
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No. You saw exactly the same thing. From about 2012 to 2015, you had a couple very high profile offences being committed in Victoria. Adrian Bailey, who killed Jill Marr, Sean Price, who killed Massa Yukotic. And then you had James Gargazoulis, who was responsible for the Bourke street killings. Those high profile crimes generated again, enormous media concern. And that media concern drove the Coghlan inquiry, which in 2017, 2018, generated very harsh bail laws in Victoria. So, again, what you see is high profile but unrepresentative crimes driving law reform.
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C
So there's been a lot of reporting on youth crime in Victoria, in particular repeat youth offenders driving a rise in crime. So what do these stats actually tell us at the moment?
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Well, there's obviously been modelling done by the Victorian Government, but they haven't released it, so we don't really know what's driving them. We do know that the police have told us that they are concerned about a small group of recidivist youth offenders and that is driving their concern for harsher bail laws. What we've seen is an increase in youth crime, not only in Victoria, but elsewhere, and I think that's been a potent driver of the bail reforms. In particular, the abandonment of that principle that you only use imprisonment or remand as a last resort when you're dealing with young offenders in Bailey.
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C
So there's a question here about the balance between ensuring community safety, which is a laudable goal, and protecting individual rights. So where do you think the balance sits?
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Well, I think we've lost any sense of balance in the current debate. If we take a step back and get away from the headlines and the very emotionally driven media portrayals that we've seen in recent weeks, we have to remember, as a community, we have an interest in protecting people's rights. Much of the discussion in recent weeks has presumed that people on bail are guilty of their offences. I think that's deeply troubling. So I think we need to take a step back and realise that once again we are balancing different interests here. There's not only those members of the community who've been traumatised by violent crime and they certainly need our attention. I think the second thing we need to remember is that much offending is related to mental health issues, drug and alcohol problems, family violence and social disadvantage. Tackling those issues will really contribute to community safety as well, because they underlie a lot of the offending that we're seeing. But locking up people in prison is a short term solution. We know that people who've gone to prison aren't deterred. And there's research from the United States that suggests if you put a person in jail even for a short period of time, we're talking maybe three or four days, you increase the likelihood that further down the track that person will have more contact with the criminal justice system. So I think we have a really unfortunate paradox now that is people who are demanding that we put more people in prison to protect the community may actually be giving us a short term solution, but a long term problem. We've got what I would regard as a return to draconian type bail laws that will lock up lots of people who probably shouldn't be in jail. We're capturing a broad category of people. What we really need to do is make sure that we only remand those people who are a serious risk to the community if released on bail. I think that, you know, the very broad approach that's been adopted by the government is one that lacks consultation, that lacks adequate reflection and therefore has all the hallmarks of a regressive bail policy.
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C
Marilyn, thank you so much for your time.
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Thanks, Daniel.
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I'm Ruby Jones, thanks for listening. 7am will be back tomorrow with an episode on the first week of the Royal Commission into antisemitism and social cohesion
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and started calling me all sorts of racial slurs. Among them dirty Jew, started doing the Nazi salutes and started doing a gun finger at my forehead imitating like he wanted to kill me.
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The Royal Commission has heard first hand accounts of hatred and harm experienced by Jewish Australians. But it also needs to answer a difficult question. What counts as anti Semitism and where is the line between political speech, criticism of Israel and hatred directed at Jewish.
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There's got to be some guardrails to protect people from harm. The question is, what is harm? But often we're talking about, you know, things that exist in the gray area, and that's where this gets really difficult.
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That'll be in your feed tomorrow. See you then.