Reputation vs Accountability: An Australian State's Controversial Sentencing Shake-Up
Sentencing the 'Good Bloke': Should Character Count in Court?
Victoria, Australia’s second most populous state with around 6.7 million people, sits in the country’s south-east and is home to Melbourne, its legal and cultural capital. Often proud of its coffee culture and restaurant scene, it’s now becoming a focus of discussion around Australia’s legal academic community.
The state has always been a leader in progressive law reform, it was the first Australian state to decriminalise abortion, and its family violence legislation has been widely studied internationally. Its court system operates across three tiers: the Magistrates’ Court, the County Court, and the Supreme Court, with sentencing decisions subject to appeal and guided by statutory frameworks and common law principles developed over centuries.
It is within this context that a significant and contested sentencing reform is now unfolding.
In February 2026, the Jacinta Allan’s Labor Government announced legislation to remove “good character” as a mitigating factor at sentencing across all criminal offences in Victoria- including rape, sexual assault, family violence, and serious assault. Attorney-General Sonya Kilkenny says she will bring the bill to Parliament by mid-2026. If passed, judges will no longer be able to reduce a sentence because an offender has been described as a respected community member or person of prior good standing. Victoria follows New South Wale, Australia’s most populous state, which introduced equivalent legislation in February 2026, in what appears to be the beginning of a national shift.
The reform has been welcomed by survivor advocates and criticised by prominent legal bodies. Both sides have a case worth hearing.
What Are Good Character References?
When a person is convicted of a crime and brought before a judge for sentencing, courts have long been permitted to consider not just the offence itself but the broader context of the offender’s life. One mechanism for doing this is the good character reference, a written statement, typically from a friend, employer, family member, or community figure, attesting to the defendant’s positive qualities and standing in society. Under the longstanding framework confirmed by the High Court of Australia in Ryan v R (2001), courts were required to consider good character evidence and exercise discretion about what weight to give it.
In practice, this has meant that convicted offenders, including those found guilty of serious sexual violence, have been able to place before the court letters describing them as devoted parents, generous neighbours, or respected professionals. The legal purpose was to contextualise an offender’s culpability and assess their rehabilitation prospects. The contested question is whether that purpose has, in too many cases, been distorted into something else entirely.
The Case for Reform
The push to abolish good character references draws on several distinct but related arguments.
The most immediate is the experience of victim-survivors in the courtroom. Hearing a perpetrator described as a “devoted father” or someone with “impeccable character”, after a jury has just found that person guilty of rape or assault, can be profoundly retraumatising. Attorney-General Kilkenny has stated that this practice “diminishes the experience” of victims. The reform’s most vocal champions, survivor advocates Harrison James and Jarad Grice, co-founders of the Your Reference Ain’t Relevant campaign — have argued that a survivor’s lived trauma should not be outweighed by an offender’s social reputation.
Then there is the equity problem. Assembling credible character references — from employers, community leaders, or respected professionals, is considerably easier for those with social capital. The NSW Sentencing Council’s own review found that good character evidence may “operate inconsistently,” since access to credible character witnesses is not equally available to all defendants. Wealthier and better-connected offenders can marshal impressive testimonials; those from disadvantaged backgrounds often cannot. If the result is that social standing systematically influences sentence length, the system is producing unequal outcomes for equivalent crimes.
A third argument targets the internal logic of the evidence itself. The NSW Sentencing Council identified “good character” as vague, potentially unjustified, and not necessarily predictive of rehabilitation. There are also troubling cases — particularly in institutional settings, where an offender’s good reputation was the very mechanism that enabled the crime, making it perverse to then allow that same reputation to reduce the sentence. Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse identified exactly this pattern, which led to partial restrictions already being in place for child sexual offences.
The Case Against
The opposition to this reform is not merely procedural, it goes to fundamental questions about how sentencing is supposed to work.
The NSW Bar Association has been one of the most prominent critics, arguing that “sentencing is a complex process” and that if a crime is “an aberration for a person who has otherwise made positive contributions to the community, this ought to remain as a mitigating factor.” The association’s concern is that blanket removal of character evidence makes sentencing more rigid and less capable of responding to individual circumstances.
Criminal Defence Lawyers Australia principal Jimmy Singh has raised a further concern: that the system already has mechanisms to address disadvantage in sentencing, and that removing good character evidence does not actually resolve the equity problem, it eliminates a tool available to all defendants, not only the privileged. As Singh has argued, experienced sentencing judges are “adequately capable of maintaining discretion in giving adequate weight, if any, to good character evidence” after accounting for the full circumstances of the offending.
Brett Collins, founder of Justice Action and himself a former prisoner turned long-time advocate for incarcerated people, has made perhaps the most human argument against the reform: that character references allow courts to see the person behind the offence, “not just as someone who is an offender, but someone who has more history behind them, and who should be seen as a real person.” The question, in his view, is not whether a crime should be excused, but whether a sentence should reflect the complexity of a human life.
Good character as a sentencing consideration also has deep historical roots, dating to 17th and 18th century English courts, where its purpose was to distinguish the first-time, otherwise law-abiding offender from the hardened recidivist. Critics of the reform argue that purpose remains valid, even if the practice around it has sometimes been abused.
A Nuance Often Lost in the Debate
One important point that tends to get obscured in public discussion: the reform does not strip courts of all ability to consider an offender’s personal background. Under the Victorian proposal, judges will still be able to weigh factors such as prospects for rehabilitation, remorse, and the likelihood of reoffending. Supporters’ letters can still be submitted to court, they simply cannot be used to establish “good character” as a standalone mitigating label. As legal analysts have noted, that same evidence will instead be directed into other established mitigating categories, where it can be given appropriate weight.
This nuance matters because it shifts the debate. The question is less “should courts know who a person is?” and more “should prior social standing be its own discrete lever for reducing a sentence?”
Unintended Consequences
Even some supporters of the reform’s goals have urged caution about its scope. Domestic Violence NSW has expressed concern that removing good character evidence as a mitigating factor across all offences could inadvertently disadvantage victim-survivors who themselves become entangled in the criminal justice system. In domestic violence contexts, perpetrators frequently use legal processes as tools of control, and without careful design, a reform intended to protect victims could end up affecting them too. The organisation has called for parallel reforms and targeted judicial training to prevent this.
The Law Council of Australia, the peak national body for the legal profession, has also flagged that patchwork reform across states risks producing inconsistent outcomes, with similar crimes attracting different sentences depending purely on jurisdiction. Without national harmonisation, the reform may improve fairness within Victoria while compounding unevenness across Australia as a whole.
Where Does This Leave Us?
Victoria’s reform reflects a genuine and important shift in how the justice system is being asked to weigh reputation against harm. The arguments for change, reducing trauma for survivors, addressing structural inequality, and closing the loophole of offenders exploiting their own good standing, are serious and well-founded. So are the concerns about judicial discretion, individualised justice, and unintended consequences for vulnerable defendants.
What seems clear is that this is not simply a question of being “tough on crime.” It is a harder question about the purpose of punishment itself, whether sentencing is fundamentally about the act, the actor, or some combination of the two. Victoria is about to legislate an answer. Whether it is the right one will be debated in courtrooms and law faculties for years to come.