Will Victoria’s bold new retail crime sentences work?

When the Victorian government announced tougher penalties for assaults and abuse of retail workers this month, it drew a clean line.Someone who threatens or attacks a shop assistant, barista or delivery driver can now face up to five years in prison, with shopfront ram raids recast as aggravated burglary that carries penalties of up to 25 years.It is deemed a necessary response to a crisis. Retail crime incidents in Victoria have increased by more than 20 per cent in the past year, and the state now accounts for around one-third of all reported cases nationally. Research commissioned by the Australian Retailers Association (ARA) and National Retail Association found that 79 per cent of Victorians are worried about rising crime and nearly 90 per cent support stronger penalties for people who threaten or assault workers, but “there is no time to waste”.The mood from the industry is relief tinged with impatience. ARA CEO Chris Rodwell called it “encouraging that Victoria has finally acted on the concerns retailers have been raising for two years”. In other words, the law is catching up to a reality that store teams have lived with for too long.This moment may prompt retail to professionalise risk in the same way other high-exposure industries have already done.Systems that track Other high-risk industries have already learned that violence and harm can’t be solved through punishment alone. They need systems that track, predict and prevent danger long before it reaches the frontline.Aviation is often held up as the gold standard. Airlines capture and analyse vast operational datasets, feed insights into national safety dashboards and use those signals to identify nascent risks before they become major incidents.Mining does something similar as it identifies its most substantial hazards, assigns clear accountability and constantly checks whether the controls in place are actually working. Healthcare, which sees some of the highest rates of worker aggression, has spent years building organisation-wide programs to improve reporting and create safer environments for staff.Retail is not operating at this level. Many incidents still go unreported, responses vary by store, and frontline teams often absorb the emotional and physical toll themselves. According to SafeWork NSW, accurate incident reporting is essential for understanding the scale of violence in any workplace, yet under-reporting remains one of the biggest barriers to fixing the problem. If retailers don’t know what’s happening in their stores, they can’t design better controls to prevent it.The Victorian reforms create sharper consequences for offenders. To professionalise risk, retailers will need to turn that legal construction into an operational system. At a minimum, that suggests that real-time visibility, predictive rather than reactive control and psychological safety as a core metric are crucial.Opportunities and risksThe ARA has highlighted that a small cohort of offenders is responsible for a disproportionate share of incidents, and views targeted bans as a proven way to protect workers from repeat harm.This is where professionalising risk becomes essential. Protection orders require good evidence, reliable incident reporting and coordination between retailers and police. Without robust systems, bans risk being underused or unevenly applied, leaving store managers once again to carry the burden through improvised “do not serve” lists and ad hoc workarounds.Healthcare’s experience shows violence does not diminish solely because the law changes. It reduces when incident reporting improves, when workers trust that reports will lead to action, and when leaders at every level are accountable for the environment staff walk into each day. As SafeWork NSW observed, “incident reporting is a vital process to understand current work-related violence incident rates and the effectiveness of existing risk controls”. However, widespread under-reporting means healthcare organisations “do not currently have means of determining the true extent of the problem”.The political urgency around retail crime has ruptured even further this week. In a joint statement today, the Australian Retailers Association and the National Retail Association welcomed a strengthened bipartisan push in Victoria to accelerate worker protections, including workplace protection orders and tougher penalties for assault. Rodwell said the renewed alignment across Parliament shows the scale of the crisis. “It’s encouraging to see both sides of Victorian politics recognise the scale of the crisis and take action… Retail crime is not a political issue – it’s a community safety issue, and an urgent one.” The ARA and NRA also backed calls to bring forward the passing of workplace protection order legislation, arguing the model already exists and is operating successfully elsewhere. As Rodwell noted, “There is no reason for delay… every day without these protections is another day retail workers are left at risk.”From compliance project to maturity momentRetail does not lack sophistication. Particularly in the last decade, the sector has embraced data science to forecast logistics challenges and optimise media spend and loyalty programs. It has invested in AI to sharpen demand forecasting and personalise marketing. The missing piece is applying that same analytical discipline to risk.In the short term, Victoria’s reforms should prompt a series of practical questions for boards and executive teams regarding the understanding of where worker harm is most acute in a network and why. Another query is whether store designs and labour models are assessed purely on revenue, rather than risk. The ARA has already forecast that enforcement and resourcing will be decisive, warning that “without targeted enforcement and resourcing, the problem will not change on the ground”. If retail chooses to view this as a maturity moment, the sector could shift from perceiving aggression as a depressing cost of doing business to recognising safety as a competitive advantage. A network known for calm, well-protected stores will find it easier to recruit, retain and motivate staff in a tight labour market. It will also be better placed to welcome the next generation of workers and customers who are far less willing to accept harm as part of the job.The law has finally caught up with the reality of working in a Victorian store. The next move belongs to all retailers. Whether this becomes another compliance project or the start of an industrial-grade safety culture will depend on what happens in head offices, not just in Parliament.