Published on Thursday, 23 October 2025

Address to Melbourne City Council meeting, 21 October 2025

IMCL managing lawyer Shifrah Blustein delivered this speech to the City of Melbourne's Future Melbourne Committee meeting on Tuesday, 21 October 2025 in response to a council proposal to increase spending on private security guards in the CBD.

I am speaking on behalf of Inner Melbourne Community Legal, the community legal centre for the CBD and surrounds.

We stand with the submissions of other community legal centres - for Melbourne to be the best and fairest city, we must continue our history of freedom and equality and recognise the Victorian Charter of Human Rights not just as a statement of rights, but as a call to our shared responsibility.

Our full recommendations are in our submission – the key points I make today are:

•  The City of Melbourne must immediately suspend engagement of security guards or the use of Council employees acting as security guard-like authorised enforcement officers; and
•  Reinstate funding of critical community services and grant programs to deliver services in health and wellbeing priority areas.

The Council proposes to spend $2 million on what is little more than a PR exercise of a so-called ‘visible safety presence’, employing security guard-like officers who will not create a safer Melbourne. Instead they criminalise poverty, making the issues the City of Melbourne is concerned about worse in long-term.

At the same time, Council is trying to sell a different message to those concerned about the human rights impacts of the program: that enforcement officers will actually be doing outreach work similar to social workers. The council is not listening to the people most impacted, whose experience of this program has been nothing but menacing and threatening - the opposite of a social worker. You can’t have it both ways. If Council accepts that criminalising poverty is counterproductive – say it and fund real social workers and services!

Council’s last annual report states that 48% of residents experience food insecurity and 25% experience housing stress. Family violence is the leading driver of homelessness. It is therefore highly problematic that Council has not renewed funding to programs supporting people experiencing family violence to instead fund pseudo-police to criminalise the predictable outcomes of family violence when early intervention and support is not provided.

Until recently, Inner Melbourne Community Legal delivered a maternal child health justice program in partnership with council social workers which supported vulnerable new mums to ensure they remained safe during family violence, including to ensure their access to safe housing. This was delivered with the modest amount of $80,000pa. Inexplicably, that funding was not renewed and the program it was funded under was cancelled.

For Council to achieve its vision of belonging and inclusivity, it must commit funding to address the root causes of poverty, homelessness and other marginalisation and inequality, so that we can work together towards ensuring everyone can live safely and with dignity.