I have to say, I step outside this place and I damn well recognise the Victoria and the Melbourne that I see, and I have to say on the weekend the 50,000-odd people that got to the West Gate Tunnel and walked or ran through that brand new second crossing in and around Melbourne city recognised Victoria and Melbourne and were absolutely loving exactly what they saw. The contributions from those opposite are again the doomsday, end-of-days, end-of-world, anti-Victoria and anti-Melbourne kind of nonsense we are used to and quite frankly expect from those on the other side. It is just sad.

But I am in a great mood this afternoon, because I love rising to speak about the justice legislation that we put here in this place. In the last couple of weeks we have been announcing some really, really big initiatives when it comes to justice, cracking down on crime and, most importantly, preventing it from happening in the first place, which is really key to making our communities a whole lot safer, something this side of the house will take advice on from Victoria Police and the Chief Commissioner of Police, the experts here in this state on what we need to do to crack down on crime and prevent it from happening in the first place.

This is a critically important piece of legislation because it is going to go ahead and deliver on our government’s commitment to ensuring that public protests are safe for everyone, safe from hate and safe from extremism. I think I pretty much speak on behalf of my community in Melbourne’s west: we quite often have had a gutful of these kinds of protests and these kinds of thugs and people turning up – neo-Nazis turning up to these kinds of protests, carrying on in our city. I have to say, this is going to be really important when I tell people in my community we are cracking down on that. We are giving the police the powers they need to ensure that, yes, people have a right to protest but they can do it safely and responsibly.

[interjection]

You can remind me of whatever you want, member for Brighton. I am right on the side of my community.

What my community will be pleased to hear is that in the last 12 months – and the member for Brighton will like this one – Victoria Police have made 77,000 arrests. That is an extraordinary number of arrests out there on the beat, let alone all of the other activities that police in our local community do on a daily basis.

As I said earlier in the week, ‘tis the season to be jolly and wish our emergency services workers, our transport workers and, most importantly, the police workers here across our great state of Victoria, that will be working tirelessly over the Christmas and New Year season, a very Merry Christmas. I hope they have a very happy new year and people are well behaved on our streets, because it is a thankless, tireless job to be a police officer. It is an honourable job, and the people of Victoria thank you very much for the work that you do in keeping us safe.

Our government has always been committed to working closely with Victoria Police. Our record investment – and those on the other side absolutely hate this when we mention it, because it is a huge amount of money – of $4.5 billion is making sure that Victoria Police are equipped with the resources and the power that they need every single day to keep us safe. We have more than 3600 more police officers on the beat compared to when were first elected 11 years ago. I tell folks – and I even told my mother, actually, on the drive into here this week – that Victoria does indeed have the largest police force in the country. She did not know that. She said that is something that I should be spruiking a whole lot more on social media, that folks in my community would really like to hear that.

This is of course in addition to the fact that we have been hard at work this year getting dangerous knives off our streets and participating in our nation-leading machete ban. This was huge in my community. More than 12,000 knives and machetes have been surrendered in just the last fortnight alone. I think that is a success story, that people are handing them in and surrendering them and they have been taken off our streets. Now, those on the other side of the chamber carried on that it would not work. Well, the statistics and the facts, the data, do not lie: it is working. In the last two months, police have taken – this stat is huge – more than 11,000 dangerous weapons off our streets. I think that is really important, because it means they are out of our neighbourhoods and out of our communities. It is all about making our communities safer.

But we know there is more to do, and that is why we are again working closely with Victoria Police to work out the best way to tackle a lot of the high-profile youth crime that we have seen absolutely tear up our local communities. That is why we have announced adult time for violent crimes committed by serious youth offenders, ensuring that the consequences for these kinds of serious criminal behaviour reflect the standard, quite frankly, that our community expects and that they can make a difference. It is why we have committed to legislating life imprisonment for those terrible, terrible people – I mean, I talk to people on our streets and I call them child abusers – who recruit children; they recruit young children into committing heinous acts. Doing this, as I said, is utterly reprehensible. If you are luring kids into a life of crime, quite frankly, I think you deserve to go to jail, and that is exactly what we are going to do. We will work with police on implementing these changes; there is a lot of work ahead of us to do. Today what we are working with them on in this bill before us, before the house this afternoon, makes good on our commitment to tweaking our law so that protests can be free from harmful extremism.

Let us be clear from the get-go – and I think the people of Victoria, particularly here in Melbourne, do understand this and do support this – that people have the right to protest. They have the right to protest safely and free from fear, harassment and intimidation, and that applies to everyone, including those people we disagree with. But there are of course ways to disagree better, and I think there are ways to disagree respectfully. And some of these protests over the past couple of years have really I think flown against the spirit of our democratic traditions. Many, many times – being married into a union family – I have been there protesting in the streets of Melbourne, of Sydney, of Brisbane, across our great nation, and it has been wonderful to be able to do so. But what we are seeing is a change in some of the behaviour of some of the people that turn up to these protests.

Quite disturbingly – and this is what really does my head in, because my kids absolutely love coming into the city and doing a bit of a shop, having a bit of yum cha; they have got their favourite yum cha place, which we are thinking about visiting on Sunday – what we are seeing are these brazen neo-Nazis taking to our streets here to spread fear, hate and intimidation at rallies. We even had a shocking rally in Sunshine West of neo-Nazis. They do live in my local community too. The fact that they come here into the city to attend protests and to incite hatred and violence is completely inappropriate. You do not have the right to target people who freely practise their faith. I think what we can do is we can get the balance right. That is what this bill is all about, and that is what we are trying to do here in this place.

Over the last couple of months our government has worked closely with Victoria Police, and we have worked really closely with faith groups, to ensure that we get these powers right. We want to work efficiently with our anti-vilification laws that have now come into effect. The result will be that people can continue to exercise their democratic rights and assemble peacefully and protest. This is a great bill, and I commend it to the house.