Victoria’s premier, Daniel Andrews, is renowned for speaking his mind.
But when asked this week whether the state budget will include funding for more police officers, he was uncharacteristically reserved.
“We’ll have more to say at the appropriate time but no one should be in any doubt, there are more police in Victoria today than there has ever been,” he told reporters on Tuesday.
“The last update I had is that we, in fact, have more police – by head count – than any other state, even states that are considerably bigger than us. That doesn’t happen by accident. It’s happened because we have invested very, very heavily and we aim to continue as we have started.”
He was careful not to dismiss the staff allocation modelling (SAM), brought in by the government in 2016 to predict how many additional police the state would need each year.
It reportedly shows 1,500 frontline officers must be added to the force over the next four years to keep up with demand. Government sources, however, say the modelling has been skewed by the enforcement of Covid-19 restrictions earlier in the pandemic.
“The staffing allocation model, as good as it is, was not written with a global pandemic in mind,” Andrews said.
“I’m not here to speak to the staffing allocation model. People can speculate about what the model says and doesn’t say. I don’t propose working through those issues at a press conference.”
About an hour later, the Police Association head, Wayne Gatt, held a press conference of his own.
“Last I checked, it was the premier’s signature and the police minister’s signature committing to SAM,” he said. “SAM has said we need 1,500 additional police, the force should get 1,500 additional police.
“We’re on the cusp of a new term of government and I think the community have a right to know ahead of making a decision in November, whether or not both sides of government quite frankly intend to maintain their commitment to keep recruiting levels where they should be.”
The Police Association boasts a membership of 98% of all sworn officers – compared with the union movement’s average of 14% in the wider workforce – giving it significant leverage with the government of the day.
Some credit the association’s “cutting police numbers is a crime” campaign with bringing down premier Jeff Kennett’s Coalition government in 1999.
But while Kennett tried to rein in spending, the current Labor government has increased it.
According to the latest annual reports, Victoria police has a budget of $3.8bn and 21,774 personnel, while NSW – a state three-times the geographical size, with 1.4 million more people – has a budget of $3.9bn and 21,879 personnel.
The growth in Victoria’s police force can be attributed to a $2bn announcement by Andrews in December 2016 to recruit more than 3,100 extra officers. It was the single biggest increase in the force in history and came after the state’s crime rate jumped 10% on the previous year.
Then, after the Bourke Street massacre in 2017, Andrews introduced bail laws he described as the country’s “most onerous”. Intended to target violent men, they have instead disproportionately affected Aboriginal Victorians, young people and women. Prison populations have swelled, largely with people who are yet to be sentenced.
Meanwhile, Victoria police has been under scrutiny for using the barrister Nicola Gobbo as an informant, the death of an Aboriginal woman, Tanya Day, in custody, the leaking of photos of the former AFL coach Dani Laidley, and an administrative bungle that led to more than 1,000 officers working without proper authority.
And an inquiry by the Victorian Law Reform Commission found stalking is “often minimised or trivialised” by police, with victims left to manage alone.
“Each time I went to my local station, all they would do was say, ‘He hasn’t broken any laws so we can’t do anything,’” one victim told the VLRC. Another said victims were treated “like they are behaving irrationally”.
It’s clear Andrews is walking a thin blue line – trying to avoid conflict with the police union in an election year but also not immediately heeding its calls. Best he not slip.
