When reform kills: The implications of bail reform for First Nations women in Victoria, Australia

In March 2025 Victoria’s Allan Labor government introduced sweeping reforms to the Bail Act 1977 (Vic), which pose a disproportionate risk to both the lives and liberties of First Nations women. This article adapts Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectional lens to consider the effect of the bail reform on First Nations women through the intersecting points of disadvantage of race, gender, and colonialism. This analysis concludes that considerations of First Nations women as a vulnerable population were absent from the reforms, and so have reduced this population to biological beings with no legal worth. This may ultimately prove to be lethal.