Serious Sex Offenders (Detention and Supervision) and Other Acts Amendment Bill 2015
Ms SANDELL (Melbourne) — I rise to affirm that the Greens will also be supporting the bill. I have only a few short remarks to make. As has been mentioned, the bill tightens the net on serious sex offenders. It aims to close immediate gaps in the justice and corrections system and give Victoria Police and Corrections Victoria the extra powers they need to manage serious sex offenders on supervision orders.
The Greens support the measures in the bill, just as we supported the majority of the recommendations in the Callinan review to reform the parole system. Recently there have been a number of significant failures by the justice and corrections systems in managing serious sex offenders. As we have heard throughout the debate, many of these failures resulted in high-profile cases which had devastating effects on the victims, their families and their friends. They are things we hoped we would never see in this state, but unfortunately they happened.
Due to these failures, reforms in this area are still needed in order to protect community safety, particularly women's safety, and I am pleased to see that this bill will go some way towards addressing these concerns. For these reasons the Greens support the bill, and we will make further detailed comments when it is introduced in the upper house.