Hansard debates

Martin CAMERON (Morwell) (15:55): I rise today to talk on the Terrorism (Community Protection) and Control of Weapons Amendment Bill 2024. My contribution will be around the Control of Weapons Act 1990. I stand here in the chamber today to talk about issues that we have as a community in the township of Morwell. Unfortunately, I need to stand and talk about this. I know we all like talking our communities up, but out on the streets of Morwell at the moment the community is scared. We have criminals that are out of control. We had a stabbing on the street last week. We need to be able to regain control of the Morwell CBD, because at the moment it is a challenge for anybody to walk around there.

I did a street walk late last week and spoke to some of the shop owners in Morwell. At my first place of call I spoke with Deon from Vinnies op shop and asked him about what went on with the stabbing last week and what actually happens on the streets of Morwell. He told me that on a daily basis there are youth offenders and there are people in their 20s, 30s and 40s who come into his shop and just take stuff off the shelf. His staff are volunteers in their 50s, 60s and 70s and feel the wrath of these individuals coming in and causing grief in his shop. Gippsland Cardiology Service is a new place that has opened up for people to go and get heart health checks and sometimes get blood tests. I spoke to Rosemary there. On a daily basis Rosemary sees drug dealers going down to the corner directly out the front of her shop. There is public drunkenness going on. Individuals are starting to drink at 7:30 in the morning. I was chatting with George at Cellarbrations bottle shop. The individual that would be confronted with this stabbing was in his shop. As he left the shop there were two perpetrators on the other side of the street, and they walked across the road with a baseball bat with a knife strapped to the end of it.

We can dance around the issues with these amendments that we want to make, but the bottom line is that I do not think they go far enough. I am here to represent my community. I am here to represent the police officers that put their lives on the line every day to go and break up these incidents that happen on the streets of Morwell. Police are trying to do all they can. We can no longer arrest individuals for being drunk, which is a real issue. We cannot even ask them to move on. We have to wait for them to do a criminal act – maybe assault someone – before the police can step in. The police know this is going to happen, so they ride – pardon the pun – shotgun over the community to make sure they can protect us as well as they can.

One of the biggest issues that seems to be coming in is rooming houses. We have these rooming houses in Morwell, which have exploded. We have ones which are on a register which we know about, but we also have rooming houses which are not on a register. We have people that are making tens of thousands of dollars a week from these rooming houses, and we need to make sure that we are doing everything we can to gain control of our streets. Michael Henderson is a proud Morwell businessman and has lived there all his life. We were having a chat the other day. In the in the township of Morwell, with a population of around 14,000 people, we have 17 rooming houses. Those rooming houses now make up 106 bedrooms where individuals are seeking refuge, and these individuals are not so nice. We are finding out that they are being moved on from inner-city Melbourne and pushed down into my patch of the world and end up in Morwell. It is not good enough.

I would love – and call for here, as I stand – the Premier, the Minister for Police and also the Attorney-General to come and walk with me on the streets of Morwell so they can give assurance to our constituents down there that it is a safe place to live and work. Come and talk to the people that are considering closing down their businesses because they can no longer feel safe on the streets. They are worried about going into winter, and they want to curtail their small businesses so they finish work at 3:30 or 4 o’clock in the afternoon so they do not have to walk out to their car in the dark. It is wrong. It is just wrong that these things are happening.

I think someone called out before that they were going to go and see the SEC. The home of the SEC was meant to provide 59,000 new jobs, and a lot of them were going to go to Morwell. But the unemployment rate at Morwell at the moment is over 15 per cent and rising. We have got unemployment. We have got thugs walking around on the street, and they have all got weapons, every single one of them. If the police pulled them over and searched them, every single one of them would have a weapon on their body, because that is what it is like. It is not a fun place to be at the moment.

We have a minister in the other place who has her MP office 10 metres away from where most of this stuff goes down – where there is public drinking on the streets, public fighting and drug deals going down – and it just seems to go unnoticed and is swept under the carpet. This is how brazen these individuals are, coming down and doing stuff which is illegal in my book and I think in the book of any person that is in here – carrying weapons on the street. You are walking down there and having someone walk across the road with a baseball bat with a knife strapped to the end of it. That is not right in our society, not right at all. Morwell has the highest rate of criminal incidents in Victoria outside of metropolitan Melbourne. Criminal offences committed by 10- to 17-year-olds have increased by a startling 29 per cent in the last year throughout our municipality. It is something that needs to be addressed.

As I said, this particular bill, although we are making changes, does not go far enough. People are scared. Elderly people will not go down the street to do their shopping. I know I am talking about Morwell, but if you think it is not happening in your seats, where you are MPs – that you have not got individuals walking around the streets carrying weapons – you have got your heads in the sand and you are not doing your job to find out what is going on. The public drunkenness that we have – it falls to local government officers to go out and move people on. What a joke that is, putting the blame on them. There is no way that I would be sending people out onto the street to interact with these people if they were not carrying a weapon and part of Victoria Police. The police, as I said, are doing the best job they can with the laws that they can act on. I have had to stop my electorate officers walking from my office to go and get the mail from Australia Post because it is not safe enough for them to walk on the streets during daylight hours. These individuals that we have down there need to be stopped. I absolutely call to the Premier: please, come down. Minister Carbines, you are the police minister: give the police in my area the powers, because at the moment we are losing the battle with the safety on the streets of Morwell. It is time for real leadership now.