Victoria’s opposition coalition has pledged to abolish emergency management days, which allow prisoners to receive sentence reductions for good behaviour during unforeseen events such as industrial disputes and lockdowns.
The measures, which are unique in Australia, would be scrapped if the coalition defeats the Labor government at the state election in November.
Freedom of Information documents provided to the coalition show that nearly 2,300 years were removed from prisoners’ sentences over a four-year period under the scheme.
The reductions applied to offenders including killers, rapists and paedophiles during the Covid-19 pandemic. Prisoners were automatically granted four days off their sentences for every day of lockdown experienced by Victorians.
Brad Battin, the opposition’s police and corrections spokesman, said the policy did not reflect public expectations.
“Labor’s freebie sentence reductions do not meet community expectations and are out of step with other states,” he said.
Among those to receive a reduction was convicted murderer Shane Robertson, who was sentenced over the 2018 killing of his partner, Katie Haley. Fourteen months were removed from his sentence through Covid-era emergency management days.
Haley’s father and sister, Boyd and Bianca Unwin, have campaigned for the law to be repealed.
Automatic emergency management days linked to Covid ended in February 2023. Prisoners must now apply for the credits.
A Victorian Government spokesperson dismissed the coalition’s pledge as a “straw-man policy” and accused the opposition of being “stuck relitigating COVID”.
“If (Opposition Leader) Jess Wilson really cared about community safety, she’d explain how her 31,000 frontline job cuts won’t gut our police, prisons, and courts,” the spokesperson said.
In 2021, the then-federal Coalition government changed the law to prevent Commonwealth prisoners in Victorian jails from accumulating emergency management day credits and retrospectively removed existing reductions.
