In March 2025, VALS alongside 92 representatives of Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisations, community services, family violence and legal sectors stood together to launch their open letter ‘Bail Saves Lives: Poccum’s Law is the Way Forward’.
As a collective voice, we strongly condemn the suite of knee-jerk bail law changes introduced by the Allan Labor Government in March. We know they will lead to greater criminalisation of Aboriginal communities and other marginalised communities. Granting bail saves lives. Any bail reform must align with, and not detract from Poccum’s Law.
In anticipation of the second tranche of bail law amendments scheduled for mid-year, VALS has prepared a Statement of Advice, containing 20 legislative and programmatic recommendations. Our recommendations are essential to minimising the inevitable harmful impacts of these regressive bail changes on Aboriginal people and communities.
In Victoria, the Aboriginal imprisonment rate has almost doubled in the last ten years, and about half of the prison population is on remand.
34 years ago, the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody handed down its report, which included recommendations to increase access to bail and only use prison “as a sanction of last resort”. Since then, the recommendations have been repeated in many reports, reviews, inquiries and forums, yet Victoria has failed to implement these recommendations and instead has gone backwards.
Victoria’s prisons are now filled with people on remand, those who have not been found guilty of any offence, some of who are unlikely to serve a prison sentence even if convicted.
Our children continue to be remanded for petty offending as they are subjected to the same bail test as an adult. By ignoring expert advice, the Victorian Government is tearing Aboriginal families apart and further traumatising Aboriginal communities. Aboriginal women are the fastest growing demographic in Victoria’s prisons. Many of them are victim-survivors of family violence. They need support, not a prison cell. Many of them are primary carers. Locking them up in prison before their day in court destroys families and communities.
