Media Statement: Legal Challenge on Melbourne CBD 6 Month Designated Area

Joint statement with the Centre Against Racial Profiling

8 December 2025

We welcome the Human Rights Law Centre’s (HRLC) filing of a Federal Court challenge against the legality of the six-month “designated area” declared in the Melbourne CBD.

We strongly support this legal intervention. The declaration of the entire CBD as a designated area for a six-month period constitutes an extraordinary overreach of police powers that effectively suspends the civil rights of anyone moving through the city.

Designated areas are intrusive powers that side-step important legal guardrails designed to protect the community’s rights.

Normalising these powers over such a prolonged period will not increase safety; rather, it will serve to intimidate members of the public on the basis of their mere presence in the city this summer.

Civil liberties restricted

Expanded powers granted to police within designated areas severely restrict people’s ability to exercise their right to protest. In particular, the power to direct protesters to remove a face covering or force them to leave a designated area is easily abused by police who need only claim they reasonably believe’ a face covering is being worn to conceal someone’s identity or to protect them from the effects of crowd control substances such as OC spray, which police often deploy indiscriminately at protests.

While police can use these designated area powers to deny anyone their right to protest safely, some groups are disproportionately impacted including:

• people who are not able to remove their face covering due to medical or cultural/religious reasons, which essentially amounts to state-sanctioned discrimination based on disability or culture/religion; and
• people from marginalised and diaspora communities for whom revealing their identity when protesting presents a serious safety risk, especially as invasive surveillance of protesters is commonplace.

Ineffective and Discriminatory

We oppose these powers not only because they are excessive, but because the evidence proves they are ineffective.

• Historical data reveals these powers have a ‘hit rate’ for finding weapons of only 1%.¹
• Searches where police are required to hold a reasonable suspicion are statistically far more effective in locating weapons than dragnet designated area searches.

Furthermore, we are deeply concerned by the disproportionate impact this declaration will have on racialised communities. Victoria Police’s search rates consistently demonstrate that these groups are targeted at higher rates than the general population:

• Aboriginal people are 15 times more likely to be searched than white people.²
• African people are 9 times more likely to be searched than white people.³

This sweeping designated area declaration effectively empowers police to stop and search racialised communities at will during the summer period, severely restricting their freedom of movement and access to public spaces.

We also recognise that this declaration has been made in parallel with Melbourne City Council’s decision to criminalise and punish homeless people in the CBD via the use of private security personnel. Fostering a culture of surveillance and securitisation does not increase safety for anyone – it only increases the risk of state violence against already marginalised communities.

We call on the Victorian Government and Victoria Police to immediately rescind the designated area, and their powers. Public safety is not achieved by suspending human rights or by targeting marginalised communities with punitive policing.

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