Rachel spoke on the Crimes Amendment (Performance Crime) Bill 2025. She acknowledged community fears around an increase in crime, with criminals ‘posting and boasting’ about their offences. However, she expressed that this amendment creates a “slippery slope” that could lead to unintended consequences. Rachel questioned the Minister on the impacts of this bill on drug offences, youth incarceration and homophobic attacks.
Thursday the 14th of August, 2025
Victorian Legislative Council
Rachel Payne (South-Eastern Metropolitan):
I rise to speak on the Crimes Amendment (Performance Crime) Bill 2025 on behalf of Legalise Cannabis Victoria. This bill attempts to address performance crime, otherwise known as ‘post and boast’, a trend where certain crimes, often committed by young people, are filmed and posted on social media. This bill amends the Crimes Act 1958 to create an offence of this kind of behaviour. The offence is broadly defined as ‘where a person publishes or causes to be published material that depicts, describes or otherwise indicates the commission of a relevant offence by the person and that undertakes or causes that publication with the intention of attracting attention to the commission of the offence’. This offence is punishable by up to an additional two years of jail time on top of the penalties for the underlying offence. Offences that will be captured by this law include motor vehicle theft, robbery and armed robbery, burglary and aggravated burglary, home invasion and aggravated home invasion, carjacking and aggravated carjacking, affray, violent disorder and any incitement offence. The government have said that they have chosen these offences to target serious confrontational theft and violent group offences of concern to the community that are increasing in frequency and prevalence, particularly among young offenders.
While we agree that posting and boasting causes further harm to already vulnerable victims of crime, we are not convinced that having a new standalone offence in this way will deal with this issue. The act of posting your crimes online is already something that can be considered at the sentencing stage when deciding how harsh a penalty should be. Jurisdictions that have pushed ahead with these kinds of laws have seen no change in the level of offences. Instead these laws end up pushing young people further and further into the criminal justice system.
As the Legalise Cannabis Party, we are particularly concerned about the risk of future changes to any legislation passed that would seek to expand the list of offences captured by these laws. While currently there are no drug offences included, this bill could represent a slippery slope. What is to stop this government or a future conservative government from deciding that posting and boasting about all offences, including drug offences, is deserving of additional time? While the bill as it stands is focused on crimes commonly boasted about on social media, there have already been calls for this bill to be expanded to cover every single loophole. The appetite is there. I will be putting forward some questions in the committee-of-the-whole stage to seek assurances on a number of matters, including that the laws proposed in this bill cannot, presently or in the future, be used to criminalise cannabis consumers.
Break the cycle
We understand why this bill is before us today. People are scared, and there have been some deeply troubling instances of people posting and boasting about their crimes. In Victoria police have arrested dozens of alleged offenders following a string of horrific homophobic attacks where dating apps like Grindr were used to lure men to meet-ups where they were violently assaulted, filmed and publicly shamed. There is a trend in anti-LGBTIQA+ rhetoric, particularly with young men who are radicalised to hate. These crimes are deeply disturbing, but the solution is not pushing these people further into the criminal justice system and taking away opportunities to break cycles of violence and hatred. The laws proposed in this bill will not stop people from posting their crimes. As they are written, they may not even capture some of these homophobic attacks.
Coupling this with stakeholder concerns and the Victorian government’s backflips on progressing youth justice reform, the changes in this bill cannot be supported. They are at odds with the evidence and will lead young people to become lifelong criminals. We do not want a future where even a puff of a medicinal cannabis vape posted on Instagram could result in threats of jail time. It is for these reasons we will not be supporting this bill.
Committee of the Whole questions
Rachel Payne (South-Eastern Metropolitan):
Minister, what protections are in place to ensure that the list of relevant offences will be limited to those in the bill and not extended in future to capture drug offences?
Jaclyn Symes (Northern Victoria – Treasurer, Minister for Industrial Relations, Minister for Regional Development):
At the outset you would appreciate that the bill contains very specific offences. They have been drawn from the experience of incidents in practice, picking up on concerning behaviour in practice. The bill is designed to respond firmly to that and, hopefully, deter people from particularly not only committing the crime in the first place but publishing it for broader purposes. That is what we are trying to respond to here. There is no intention from the government to expand it beyond the list. I think in some of the conversations and the contributions that we have heard in the Parliament members have suggested we should have broader things, but this is really designed to be targeted. There are a range of laws that pick up other behaviours that are appropriate for other circumstances, I think. There are aggravated circumstances that are available for a lot of sentencing matters. A lot of the offences that may involve some recording still fall into that potential category for people to consider. This is specifically targeted for this conduct, and the government has no intention of expanding the list of offences.
Rachel Payne:
What impact is the bill predicted to have on rates of youth incarceration?
Jaclyn Symes:
In all honesty, what we would hope is that these charges do not ever have to be used. We are responding to behaviour that has happened in the past. We hope that, through enabling police to have further powers in relation to charges, there are very few charges. We also hope that there is a deterrence effect in relation to the conversations that we are having about how this is unacceptable behaviour, it should not happen, and if you engage in it, you can suffer further consequences for your offending behaviour. So hopefully it has the effect of having less young people caught up in the justice system.
Rachel Payne:
This is my final question, and it relates to the string of horrific homophobic attacks that have been reported through dating apps such as Grindr, where they have been used to lure men to meet-ups and there have been violent assaults. These have obviously been filmed and the men publicly shamed. Some people have claimed not all attacks of this kind are covered by the bill as it is currently drafted. When will and won’t these kinds of acts be captured?
Jaclyn Symes:
I share your concern about the horrific examples that have come to light in recent times of bashings that have occurred at meet-ups. It is appalling, and I know that the LGBTIQ+ community in particular have been very interested in the development of this legislation. It is not like most laws; I am not in a position where I can give you examples of what is in and what is out prescriptively. But I want to be very clear that the kinds of hateful, violent incidents that were reported in the media that occurred before this bill came into effect have informed what the government is trying to respond to. Homophobia has absolutely no place in Victoria – not in our streets, not online, not anywhere. Every Victorian has the right to feel safe. We certainly have listened to the LGBTIQ+ community. We stand shoulder to shoulder with them in relation to wanting to address those serious concerns and alleviate fear if we can but indeed enable the law to protect them when appropriate.
Related:
> Bail amendments target the marginalised – Rachel Payne
> Criminal reoffending persists unless root causes addressed – Rachel Payne
> Evidence-based bail laws – Rachel Payne
> Criminalisation of begging punishes Victoria’s most vulnerable – Rachel Payne
External:
> Crimes Amendment (Performance Crime) Bill 2025 | legislation.vic.gov.au
