“The government appears to be proposing a law that rips the guts out of what was implemented in Queensland,” he added.
Police Association Victoria secretary Wayne Gatt said the government was moving in the “right direction” by recognising that consequences count for serious crimes.
He warned, however, that the government must not compromise the effectiveness of the reforms to validate “minority views” that the changes are too strong.
“Compromising the intent and effectiveness of this suite of community safety measures to validate these minority views would undermine any value they serve to the Victorian community,” he said.
Gatt said the association had not yet seen the bill in full and that the “devil will be in the detail”.
The United Nations earlier this year accused Queensland’s “Adult Crime, Adult Time” laws of breaching international obligations under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
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During a lengthy press conference on Wednesday morning, Allan repeated her new “adult time for violent crime” slogan 10 times. She began by reading a letter from the victim of a crime whose husband and son were seriously injured by a 16-year-old attempting to steal a car.
When asked whether she was confident that judges would deliver harsher sentences for violent offenders under the proposed laws, Allan and Victorian Attorney-General Sonya Kilkenny cited statistics showing that jail sentences and longer sentences were more likely when matters were dealt with by adult courts.
Allan and Kilkenny repeatedly claimed that the crimes targeted were a “new type of offending” not seen before.
Corrections Minister Enver Erdogan said children sentenced under the new regime would serve their time in youth justice facilities and in some instances “age into” the adult prison system. He said young offenders showing promising signs of rehabilitation could be kept in the youth justice system until the age of 24.
Where the Children’s Court is primarily concerned with rehabilitating offenders, adult courts balance this against the need to deter and punish criminals and protect the community.
The Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service said the announcement was inhumane and breached both the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and Victoria’s Charter of Human Rights.
“Today we are signing Victoria’s first Treaty, at the same time the premier wants to sign kids’ lives away who make a mistake,” the service’s chief executive, Nerita Waight, said.
“Victoria is a cruel and unforgiving state where children cannot make a mistake … it is only a matter of time until we are mourning the loss of a child at the hands of the state.”
The Human Rights Law Centre said the reform would undermine Victoria’s human rights obligations, and exacerbate the over-representation of Aboriginal people in prisons.
The associate legal director of the centre, Monique Hurley, said the government should urgently invest in support services instead.
“In an alarming race to the bottom, the Allan government is copying the Crisafulli government’s harmful youth justice laws in Queensland,” Hurley said.
“The Allan government must scrap these regressive laws which only serve as an attempt at cheap political point-scoring.”
The Victorian Greens’ justice spokesperson, Katherine Copsey, said it was an “astonishing capitulation from Jacinta Allan”.
“Today, Jacinta Allan has shown she is incapable of doing what works and is going to pursue a failed policy that ultimately will not make our community safer,” Copsey said. “It’s absolutely galling.”
The Allan government has been dogged by a wave of violent youth crime, including the stabbing attacks that killed 12-year-old Chol Achiek and 15-year-old Dau Akeung, and heavily criticised by Opposition Leader Brad Battin, who has repeatedly accused Labor of being weak on crime.
This week’s announcement follows the Allan government’s tightening of bail laws to make it easier for children to be remanded and banning the sale and possession of machetes.
Allan last year abandoned an earlier commitment by her predecessor Daniel Andrews to increase the age of criminal responsibility.
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