From Melbourne's courtrooms emerges an uncomfortable truth: the crime wave Australia worries about happens in the spaces between screens and phones. Over a third of all federal crimes sentenced in Victoria's courts involve harassment and abuse through a telecommunications service or the internet, according to analysis by Victoria's independent sentencing body.
The numbers are stark. Victoria recorded over 6,700 charges for carriage service offences over a five-year period to June 30, 2023. These are Commonwealth crimes: repeatedly texting an ex-partner with insults, a bombardment of threatening calls, abusive social media messages. Under section 474.17 of the Criminal Code 1995, a person commits an offence if they use a carriage service in a way that reasonable persons would regard as being menacing, harassing or offensive.
The severity of the problem sits beneath the public's radar. These offences carry serious consequences; the maximum penalty is three years imprisonment. Yet the reality in Victoria's courts tells a different story. Of the 6,798 charges, 38 percent resulted in a fine, and only 490 community correction orders (7.2 percent) were imposed, with 794 prison sentences handed out.
Why so many fines? The answer exposes a structural failing in the legal system. Most carriage service offences were committed in conjunction with other crimes, such as breaching intervention orders or bail, which fall under Victorian jurisdiction. When a person faces both state and federal charges together, courts become trapped by the complexity of sentencing law.
According to the Commonwealth Offences Sentenced in Victoria report, the challenge is mathematical. When a state offence attracts a community correction order or prison time, federal courts often lack meaningful sentencing options remaining for the telecommunications charge. The result: a fine becomes the default.
Stan Winford, director of Victoria's Sentencing Advisory Council, frames the problem plainly. Federal sentencing law is "incredibly complex, especially when there are Victorian and federal crimes in the same case". This creates an unintended consequence: offenders who threaten or harass via phone or internet often walk away with financial penalties despite the gravity of their actions.
Another significant category of digital crime involves possessing, accessing or distributing child abuse material over the internet, with around 170 charges per year recorded. Research shows most are overwhelmingly committed by male offenders.
The tension here is genuine. Law-makers created carriage service offences to address a real problem: harassment and abuse that was invisible before the internet. Digital communication moves at the speed of impulse, and its harms are measurable. People lose sleep, feel unsafe in their homes, flee relationships. Yet the courts now struggle to match punishment to offence when digital crimes tangle with domestic violence, bail breaches, or other state crimes.
The practical outcome leaves many observers uneasy. A fine might feel proportionate to a single harsh text message, but when that message is one of dozens sent by someone ignoring an intervention order, the penalty appears inadequate. The sentencing council's report does not suggest the courts are soft on crime; rather, it reveals how federal law, designed decades ago, creaks under the weight of modern digital harms. Whether statutory reform could resolve this without over-reaching is a question that sits uneasily between competing values: protecting people from abuse, respecting the rule of law, and avoiding bureaucratic overreach into matters of free speech.