In the wake of a teenager's death and years of parental advocacy, Victoria has joined a growing list of Australian states granting police the power to stop and search anyone, anywhere, for knives — a decision that arrived not through evidence, but through political gravity. Premier Ben Carroll, newly in office, reversed his own government's prior position to match an opposition pledge, offering little more than the fact of his newness as explanation. The move raises an enduring question that democracies rarely answer cleanly: when grief and fear speak loudly enough, does evidence still have a
Victoria adopts Jack's Law despite expert warnings on knife-search effectiveness
Jack Beasley, 17, was fatally stabbed in Surfers Paradise in 2019, prompting the law named after him; Queensland data shows 22.6% of scanned people with known ethnicity were Indigenous despite comprising 4.6% of population.
Politics & Governance