By ERIKA ALLEN
FORMER Member for Morwell, Russell Northe lost an application for leave recently to appeal against his 21-month prison sentence.
Northe was sentenced last October for falsifying documents and setting up fake expenses while serving in public office.
Lawyers on behalf of Northe attended Victoria’s Court of Appeal to argue the sentence of imprisonment was “excessive”. However, the appeal was refused.
In Victoria’s Court of Appeal’s, Northe’s lawyers applied for an appeal to leave, arguing the sentence of imprisonment posed a risk to Northe’s “deteriorating” mental health.
When Judge McInerney announced the sentence in October 2023, the Express reported the verdict was met with “shock”, and that “most (people were) expecting Mr Northe to be handed a community corrections order”.
That a community corrections order should have been issued is precisely what barrister Paul Smallwood argued at the appeal hearing on Wednesday, June 19.
Mr Smallwood argued the sentence was “manifestly excessive” in circumstances where prosecutors had agreed a relatively short sentence followed by a community-based order was in range.
Justice Phillip Priest and Justice Stephen McLeish however emphasised that a community correction order was “insufficiently punitive”.
“The offending profoundly breached the trust which the community places in Members of Parliament, and the trust of the electors of the district of Morwell in particular.”
It was also argued Judge McInerney had failed to give sufficient weight to Northe’s mental health problems and risk of deterioration in custody.
It is documented that Judge McInerney noted imprisonment would “weigh heavily” on Northe given his mental health history. The court heard Northe was diagnosed with a depressive disorder with anxiety in 2021 and was admitted to hospital a year later.
“The judge accepted that the consequences of a sentence of imprisonment were ‘of powerful mitigation’ and that the hardship the applicant would experience in prison in respect of his mental health was also a very weighty factor in mitigation,” Justice Priest and Justice McLeish said.
“But ultimately, the judge said that the only appropriate sentence was one of imprisonment.
“We accept that the mental health condition of the applicant… was a very powerful mitigating factor in the sentencing exercise,” they said.
Hence, Justice Priest and Justice McLeish concluded that the sentence was “far from being manifestly excessive”.
“The sentence reflects the very careful attention given by the judge to a particularly challenging sentencing task. Leave to appeal must be refused on this ground accordingly.”
Northe served as the Member for Morwell from 2006 until retiring before the 2022 state election.
He served with the Nationals from 2006 until taking indefinite leave in 2017 to deal with depression.
Northe quit the Nationals that same year, before returning as an Independent, and winning the 2018 state election.
