‘Battle for Independence’: Outgoing Ombudsman Speaks on Relationship With Labor Government

“Real reform was, and is still, needed in the wider justice sector,” according to outgoing Victorian Ombudsman Deborah Glass, who presented her final report to Parliament on March 25 after 10 years overseeing the integrity of the state’s public sector. She was particularly critical of the government’s tough-on-crime approach to the justice system, after it last week reneged on its pledge to institute a presumption of bail for children. However, reform, she said, “requires a government not driven by headlines that all too often have triggered a knee-jerk tightening of bail, parole and sentencing laws. “The kind of tightening that swept up troubled, non-violent people like Veronica Nelson who should never have been in a prison cell when she died, tragically, in January 2020.”...