This bill before the house is actually really important, because it acts upon an important commitment made by our government in the Community Safety Statement 2018–19 to go ahead and review Victoria’s asset confiscation and unexplained wealth laws. In many ways this bill is the result of extensive work undertaken by a department of incredible individuals who have really thought about this bill and what needs to go in it to ensure that it is going to work and do what it is intended to do. I would like to thank the department staff that have been involved in getting the bill to this stage.

Previous achievements in this space include the Major Crime and Community Safety Legislation Amendment Act 2022, and we know this strengthened law enforcement’s ability to identify and seize digital assets. This bill is actually the next step that will build upon that act. It is not the first bill to come before this Parliament this year relating to crime, as I have said. In the last sitting week in March the Council passed the Firearms and Control of Weapons (Machetes) Amendment Bill 2024, which I did indeed speak here in this place on. That clarified that machetes are a controlled weapon, something I know that folks in my electorate feel incredibly strongly about. They have talked to me to no end about it, and it is something that I also share serious concerns about, which is why it was such a great thing to see that bill passed and enacted into law.

It is also a great opportunity for me to say that the Sunshine local police are holding a community safety forum. I think it is this week or next week. I know that I am actually going to be in attendance, as I know that many residents will be. I do encourage residents who want to have a full and frank conversation around community safety – it is not just around crime but community safety – in our local Brimbank area to go ahead and attend that. I will indeed put up another social media post encouraging locals to go ahead and hear from local police the facts of what is going on in our local community and what police are doing to go ahead and make our community that bit safer. But the good thing is that here in this place our job is to introduce and pass bills, just like that firearms and machetes amendment bill that we have put in. That is our job here in this place. Indeed in that last sitting week in March it was a good thing to do to go ahead and pass that bill. We do know that the firearm prohibition orders have been very successful since they were first introduced in 2018, and the changes we have gone ahead and made will ensure that they are more effective while still balancing individuals’ rights to be served appropriately.

But today this bill, as members here in this place have talked about, is about unexplained wealth – wealth that people probably should not have. It should be obvious to most people that one of the main motivations of crime is money and accumulation of wealth. Throughout the years, theft has been the number one recorded offence in Victoria, with the number of recorded theft offences last year totalling just over 290,000. If it is not money that has been stolen, chances are that it is a valuable piece of personal property that has been stolen to be sold or pawned for cash. At an organised crime level, what we know is that money can come about through illegal sales and indeed the black market.

We know that more often than not unexplained wealth can play a really important role in facilitating and fuelling criminal activity. Because organised crime has an economy of its own, which this wealth gives life to and perpetuates, confiscation powers are really important powers and laws that we can introduce. That is what we are dealing with here today. They come in handy because it means we can disrupt the unexplained wealth that is used to fuel criminal enterprise. What we do know is that whilst our existing laws in this space work well enough, they need to be improved to better target sources of unexplained wealth. This bill changes this by introducing a new unexplained wealth order.

Under the current arrangements the Director of Public Prosecutions is actually empowered to apply for forfeiture of property of a person who is reasonably suspected of criminal activity or if they are reasonably suspected of owning property that they did not lawfully acquire. When this order is made, the person who owns the property is required to prove that they acquired it legally. If they cannot, it is forfeited to the state. The order introduced in this bill functions exactly the same, but it does not require a connection to criminal activity for an application to be made, and that is an important differentiation. This comes with further requirements for an application for this order to be made, in that the unexplained wealth must exceed $200,000. In this instance the person is still required to prove that their wealth was acquired legally, and if they are unable to do so the court can go ahead and impose a debt requiring them to pay the state the value of any wealth the court is satisfied was not lawfully acquired. The existing laws and orders dealing with unexplained wealth have a threshold of $50,000, and this will indeed be retained.

The other part of the new order that is really important to understand is that this applies to a much broader definition of ‘wealth’. Currently the existing pathways are limited to property that a person currently owns or has an interest in, so what this bill will do is expand the definition of ‘wealth’ under the act for the purposes of this new power only to include and capture all interests in property that can be owned by a person. Importantly, the broader definition is going to capture things like gifts, services provided and advantages or benefits received by an individual person, because what we know is that when it comes to organised crime, individuals and groups in this space will trade in more than conventional currency such as money and such as property, and this definition is going to help us better target those markets much, much more effectively.

Whilst this new order might seem to some a little bit extreme, it does come accompanied by some important balances. Balance is really important when introducing a new law or new power. The bill will allow the court to refuse to make or reduce the value of an unexplained wealth order if it believes that doing so would be completely unjust. We do not want to see disproportionate outcomes or unreasonable decisions made that end up creating significant unfairness on individuals. In addition to this the bill is also going to allow for a person who is subject to an unexplained wealth order to be able to seek a reduction on any total debt payable on the grounds of undue hardship or forfeiture, which they can do within 60 days of such an order being made by the court.

This bill is a really important one. It helps us take another really big step forward to cracking down on organised crime and making our state safer. I do, in wrapping up my contribution this evening, want to give a big shout-out to the men and women in this state that keep us safe, and they are Victoria Police. They work tirelessly 24/7, round the clock day in, day out, regardless of public holidays and other things to keep our communities safe. In the conversations that I have had on many, many occasions down at the three big cop shops in Melbourne’s west – Sunshine, Wyndham North and indeed Werribee police stations – the police officers are just so dedicated to ensuring that our community not only feel safe but are indeed safe and safer. I do want to give them a big shout-out and thank them for everything that they do. I think this is a bill that is going to go and make Victoria Police’s job a whole lot easier in cracking down on unexplained wealth and criminal activity in our community, and I commend the bill to the house.