By KATRINA BRANDON
LET’S flip the switch.
Those were the words Shadow Minister for Police and Corrections and Crime Prevention David Southwick shared at a community safety forum in Morwell last Thursday (November 6).
More than 100 people attended the event hosted by Member for Morwell Martin Cameron at Morwell RSL Sub-Branch, including Latrobe City Deputy Mayor Sharon Gibson and two other local councillors.
The families of late Morwell Indigenous leader Kaiden Morgan-Johnston and elderly gentleman Harry Wright were present.
Wanting to hear what the community had to say, Mr Cameron and Mr Southwick held the event to listen to communities affected by relentless crime sweeping the Latrobe Valley.
“We all know the issues that we are experiencing at the moment,” Mr Cameron said.
“Not only here in the Latrobe Valley, but right around the state, with a crime crisis, with youth crime, with individuals impacting family laws.
“We’ve got a lot of work to do and a process to get through to change a few things here in the state of Victoria, so families don’t pay the ultimate price by losing a loved father (such as Harry Wright) or a loved son (such as Kaiden). That’s the bottom line for me.
“When this stuff starts to happen, we need to have a change.”
Handing over to Member for the Eastern Victoria Region Melina Bath, she acknowledged local leaders doing all they could in difficult circumstances trying to make a difference.
Mr Southwick then jumped straight into the issue at hand.
“We must not stop until we fix the mess that we’re in, both here in Morwell and across the state,” he declared.
“It is victims that are forgotten, and we know, no matter what, when things like this happen in your life, it remains with you forever. It is about time that governments acknowledge that, support that and give you every bit of assistance, because it doesn’t stop when the crime happens, it continues all the way through, and you need every bit of support.
“Tonight, I wanted to talk to you about some of the ideas that we have to flip the switch, because what we’re seeing at the moment is broken. For any community to have to deal with what you are dealing with should absolutely never happen. The one job of government is to keep their community safe.”
Mr Southwick noted the importance of feeling safe in a community, and highlighted that, currently, people aren’t feeling secure in their own homes or at work as crime rates rise.
Wanting to “break the cycle”, he told the crowd he wanted to hear specific issues people are facing, as well as thoughts on how to fix the system.
“Victoria is stronger when people feel safe, safe at work in the community and at home, with appropriate protection and community-led support programs,” he said.
“But I want grassroots change. Volunteers are on the ground, seeing the work that is invested in changing kids’ lives and turning them around. That’s where we want to be, in the early intervention stuff, and when kids make the problems despite all the help, there have to be consequences.”
Laying out the statistics, Mr Southwick said there is a serious assault nearly every half-hour across the state. Every hour there is a residential burglary, a vehicle theft every 15 minutes, retail theft every five minutes and youth offence every 20 minutes.
Across the Valley, he said, there were a total of 12,535 offences in 2024 and 14,011 so far in 2025. Out of this year’s numbers, there was 213 serious assaults, 2305 retail offences and 803 youth offences.
Since 2015, youth offending among the ages of 10 to 17 has increased by 40 per cent. In the past year, there has been a 14 per cent rise in crimes committed by young people.
Mr Southwick highlighted that these statistics only reflect crimes that have been reported, whereas many more haven’t. Looking within the community, he said that many stores have stopped reporting crimes because police don’t have the resources or are moving too slowly.
“One of the big issues with that huge increase is largely driven by what the motivation is,” he said.
“In terms of young people, they are being really motivated in a negative way. Social media has a lot to answer for in terms of what kids have been stimulated by. If you look at some crimes, people need money, so they steal something to sell it.
“(Online) they can boast about it. They can take a car, steal it, drive it fast, then they can video themselves in the car and share it with all their friends.”
Currently, the average daily cost per young person in detention centres is $7775, with the average daily cost per young person in community-based supervision costing $517.
Mr Southwick also said the current residential care system that children need is broken.
“They’ve been shuffled from service to service,” he said.
“I’m not saying all of these kids are the ones that are a problem, but there is a big portion that are being caught up in the wrong groups.”
Looking at options, Mr Southwick compared residential care situations to services such as Mirabel, which work right across the state, where grandparents and carers bring up children, providing the care they need and setting boundaries. He said these models of care are better than incarceration because they give children mentors to look up to.
He also noted that Victoria is 2000 police short. Alongside the shortage, police officers are currently dealing with hours of paperwork.
Using Operation Vision, a van that had been set up outside Traralgon Centre Plaza for a week, Mr Southwick noted that, all of a sudden, those same people who create unsafe situations had been reduced.
While looking at ways to protect the community, Mr Southwick said that Castle Law, a law allowing people to defend their home, wouldn’t be viable, as it would mean the government is saying they can’t protect you. Neither can the police, potentially leaving the issue unresolved.
Mr Southwick said instead, there needs to be a clear definition stating that if someone has entered your home, they have broken the law, and to ensure that, per se, if they injure themselves, they cannot sue the homeowner.
He then went on to reiterate that this is where boundaries are lost, as offenders know they are committing crimes and can enter somebodies car and home with a machete without harsh consequences.
The infamous machete bins, introduced by the state government, were also discussed.
Mr Southwick said people who were turning machetes in weren’t generally the ones who needed to.
In a meeting with Victoria Police, he said that an older lady had entered a police station with a bag with what she thought was a machete. She was unsure, yet police disposed of it anyway.
Going in a different direction, Mr Southwick mentioned a case on the Gold Coast involving Jak Beasley, who was murdered coming out of a nightclub. To try to ensure something like this wouldn’t happen again, his parents sought justice and helped create Jack’s Law.
Jack’s Law gives police the ability to go up to someone and search for weapons and seize them if found.
“That’s proactive searching powers Queensland adopted Jack’s Law right across the state, New South Wales has adopted it now,” Mr Southwick said.
“Victoria won’t even meet with the Beasley family to talk about things that are working in other states to adopt it here, that’s a disregard our Premier has.”
Mr Southwick’s last point of the night was about the police being understaffed and underfunded.
“Family and domestic violence is on the rise, and our plan is ‘break bail, face jail’, simple, and what it says is that there will be absolutely tight boundaries around this,” he said.
“At the moment, there are too many parameters. Some of the protests are happening in the city each and every week. The Morwell police are actually shipping officers down to Melbourne to babysit those protesters who show up every single week. So when they do that, they lose shifts, and they can’t respond to crime here. So that’s costing us 25,000 police hours to cover our shifts, affecting right across the state because we’re not managing these things properly.”
Leading into questions, Kaiden’s brother, William Morgan Junior, asked Mr Southwick where the “justice workers” were, as the young offenders continue to be bailed out.
Mr Southwick said he would look into prevention programs and youth services to ensure there was “the right” role models around and available to youth communities.
For those of age who continue to commit crimes around public transport, Mr Southwick noted that he would ensure PSOs are available at stations and on trains to prevent such situations.
Looking at all options, he said he has been focusing on “what works,” either in different states or overseas, to help force the issue in Victoria in a bid to make communities safer.
Mr Cameron noted that more needs to be done and that the Opposition is pushing for more.
“I’m sick of a Premier standing up in front of her cameras and with a little smile on her face telling us we are safe,” he said.
“We’ve got some wonderful people who run some incredible programs for disadvantaged kids to turn it around, but we’ve got to change how it’s being done. At the moment, we need to keep the pressure on the government. I don’t want another person murdered on the streets of the Latrobe Valley or anywhere through regional Victoria.”
