Victoria's New Offence of Grossly Offensive Public Conduct

In August 2022, the Victorian Parliament created the new indictable offence of "grossly offensive public conduct" in s 195K of the Crimes Act 1958 (Vic). This was in direct response to the notorious conduct of Richard Pusey in the immediate aftermath of a fatal accident on Melbourne's Eastern Freeway in 2020, which resulted in a charge of "outraging public decency". The present article examines the background to and the elements of the new offence, before comparing it with existing offensiveness offences in Victoria and with the England and Wales Law Commission's 2015 proposal for a statutory version of outraging public decency. The article argues that the new offence does not respond to a demonstrated gap in the law and is a clear example of penal populism. The article concludes with a policy argument for why offensive conduct offences should in principle only ever be summary offences.