The militarisation of Victoria Police under Labor

Since the election of Labor to government in 2014, Victoria’s police force has become more well armed, well resourced and well staffed than at any other time in the state’s history. The provision of $15 million by the Allan government for police to better brutalise Land Forces protesters—while hospitals and schools are being told to cut costs—is just the latest example.

When Labor was elected a decade ago, annual spending on the police was $2.27 billion. By 2021, it exceeded $4 billion, an increase of more than 75 percent. But that is just the baseline: the police receive significant funding on top of that.

Minister for Police Anthony Carbines boasted last year in his budget estimates hearing submission about the government’s “record investment” of more than $4.5 billion since 2016 in addition to the police’s regular annual funding. This included an extra $685 million in 2016 for “technology, equipment and capability uplifts across the force”. Later in 2016, then Premier Daniel Andrews announced a further $2 billion “community safety” package, the biggest investment in the history of the police force. Rolled out over four years, the package included funding for 3,200 new police officers—the largest increase in police numbers in Victoria’s history—as well as for “critical equipment and hardware”.

One piece of this “critical equipment” was semi-automatic rifles. In 2018, the government announced it was equipping at least 800 more police with these deadly weapons, at a cost of $25 million. Prior to 2018, only members of the Special Operations Group and Critical Incident Response Team were trained in the use of long-arm weapons, both already having access to semi-automatic weapons and machine guns. The 2018 announcement expanded the use of such weapons to the Operation Response Unit and officers in four regional areas.

Victorian special operations police now have an arsenal that includes projectile launchers, chemical weapons detonators, pepper-ball guns, rubber-pellet grenades and stinger grenades that release smoke, light and eight-millimetre pellets. The extra weaponry was justified by the police minister, Lisa Neville, in 2018 as necessary to deal with “high risk events, like a terrorism event”. But the weapons have so far been deployed only against protesters.

The police’s air arsenal has also expanded. In 2020, the government spent $63 million acquiring three Leonardo AW139 helicopters—the “envy of many police forces around the world”, according to Air wing Inspector Craig Shepherd—and a Beechcraft Super King Air 350ER, reported by the Age to be the first plane provided to the police in more than two decades. These aircraft have high-tech capacity to track people on the ground and can fly faster and further and can carry more people than older models.

It’s also not just specialist police that have become more heavily armed under Labor. In December 2021, the government announced that every front-line officer would have access to tasers, a weapon previously available only to special operations police. Last year, two women in New South Wales, one aged 95 and the other 47, were killed by police tasers, despite these weapons being touted as a less lethal alternative to conventional weapons.

Measured in officer numbers, Victoria Police is now the largest law enforcement agency in the country. According to its 2022-23 corporate plan, the organisation has around 22,200 police personnel, a number which exceeds that of New South Wales, a state that has 1.4 million more people and three times the area. Victoria has more police per head of population than any other eastern state or the ACT.

This has corresponded with a rise in the rate of incarceration in Victoria. According to the state’s Sentencing Advisory Council, Victoria’s imprisonment rate reached a record 122.9 people per 100,000 people in 2019, the highest level since the 1890s.

Funding for police is prioritised by Labor over essential services like health and education. A Productivity Commission report on government services found that between 2013 and 2019, spending on police grew by 60 percent and prisons by 96 percent, while health and education spending grew by just 45 percent and 30 percent respectively. So while health workers struggle to treat patients and surgery wait times blow out with devastating human consequences, no expense is spared ensuring police are better placed to kill and maim people.

The readiness demonstrated by police to use this greater arsenal of weaponry at the Land Forces protest, as well as at reactionary anti-lockdown protests before that, is to be expected. To justify the cost associated with the maintenance and replenishment of high-tech weaponry, the hardware must be shown to be necessary. This means finding opportunities to use it. In the absence of other threats, this has meant, and will increasingly mean, these military-grade weapons being used against protesters doing nothing other than exercising their democratic rights.