The secrecy you can buy

On Tuesday 11 August 2026, Victorian Premier Ben Carroll and Attorney-General Sonya Kilkenny made a pledge. If Labor wins the state election on 28 November, they will amend the Open Courts Act 2013 so that convicted rapists cannot keep suppression orders. Carroll has held the job for a fortnight: he became Premier on 28 July, after Jacinta Allan resigned.

The state's leading open-justice scholar measured it at close to zero. Professor Jason Bosland of Melbourne Law School told ACM mastheads that suppression orders already lift on conviction in '99 per cent of cases', an assertion he offered, and that 'there will actually, in substance, be no change'. Justin Quill, a media lawyer at Thomson Geer, put it conditionally: until the detail arrived, he said, it was impossible to judge whether the announcement was 'a good one or just motherhood statements'.

This masthead is not here to score the politics. We are here for the machinery. If Bosland is right, the pledge lands on the one point that already resolves itself, while the secrecy that matters is manufactured earlier and deeper: in interim orders granted on mental-health evidence that the well resourced can assemble, in pseudonym and concealment orders that sit outside the Open Courts Act altogether, and in a counting system so broken that nobody can say how many orders exist. Here is the mechanism to watch, because it is the whole story.

01A pledge aimed at the moment that already resolves itself

Track the Attorney-General's positions across five months, because the sequence explains how this reform was made. In early March 2026, days after the Melbourne Press Club and Monash University published their State of Play report, Kilkenny called its data 'at best questionable' and would not commit to a review, per the South Coast Register. By late June she had committed to a review, as Bosland recorded in The Conversation on 7 July. On 11 August she stood beside a new Premier and pledged legislation. None of this implies anything improper: positions move as evidence and politics move. Note where the movement ended. The commitment that emerged targets orders held by convicted rapists, the point at which, on Bosland's estimate, orders almost always dissolve anyway.

Bosland held a roundtable at Melbourne University on 10 August, the day before the announcement; Kilkenny did not attend, per the ACM report. His verdict on the system the pledge leaves in place is compact.

Jason Bosland, Melbourne Law School: 'one system of justice for some'

02Interim secrecy behaves like a product

The State of Play report of 3 March 2026 is the document that started the five-month sequence. Its most consequential finding is about who obtains suppression, and how.

Read that carefully. It is not a claim that any application was false, nor a claim about any judge; judges rule on the evidence before them. The finding is about capacity. A psychiatric report, experienced counsel, an urgent application: these are things resources assemble. The report also documented the floor beneath the practice: the requirement to give media three days' notice of a suppression application is 'routinely breached', interim orders stand for months, one for nearly six years per Bosland, and Victoria Police no longer routinely provide the names of accused people.

The court rejects the picture. Chief Justice Richard Niall, as Chair of Courts Council, responded in a statement dated 2 March 2026 that the report gave 'a misleading and selective picture', pointing to more than 3,800 published written reasons and 255 accredited journalists, per the court's own published statement. His response belongs in the record: openness in the aggregate and secrecy in the particular case are different measurements, and both can be true at once.

03The order finishes its work before the verdict

Consider the case the pledge could have been written for; it resolved without the pledge. Tom Silvagni was charged in June 2024. His identity was suppressed for 545 days on psychiatric and suicide-risk evidence. On 5 December 2025 he was convicted of two rapes. On Thursday 11 December, Judge Andrew Palmer lifted the suppression, observing that his identity was 'a matter of common knowledge within Melbourne'. On 17 December, Judge Gregory Lyon sentenced him to 6 years and 2 months, with a non-parole period of 3 years and 3 months. An appeal was filed in January 2026 and remains pending. The order lifted on conviction, exactly as Bosland says orders almost always do. But for 545 days the public could not be told a name a judge would later describe as common knowledge.

A second case, a different man, shows the machinery running past the verdict itself. Ralph Carr, a talent and entertainment manager, spent roughly three years under a suppression order made in 2023 on mental-health grounds. In late July 2026 he was unanimously convicted in the County Court, before Judge Frank Gucciardo, of two rapes and a sexual assault committed in March 2023. Conviction did not end the secrecy. Per Women's Agenda's reporting in early August 2026, the 2023 order was extended after the verdict by a fresh interim order, granted on suicide-risk evidence; media organisations led by the ABC opposed it, and a further hearing was listed for early August. The extension was then abandoned and the order lifted, per subsequent reporting across 3-7 August 2026: the ABC named him on 5 August, Guardian Australia on 7 August. Three years of silence, then a post-conviction extension, gave way only when the application was no longer pursued. Carr's lawyers went on to argue, and lose, a stay application resting partly on mental-health evidence and partly on a challenge to the jury's verdict, and on 25 August 2026 Judge Gucciardo sentenced him to six years with a four-year non-parole period. Carr's lawyers have flagged an intention to appeal; as of this update, no appeal has been confirmed as filed or decided. The pledge is about conviction. The machinery, here again, was interim.

04Nobody can count the orders, and some sit outside the count

How big is this system? Nobody knows, and the commonly cited numbers prove it. The Australia's Right to Know white paper of 2024 counted, for 2023, 521 suppression orders in Victoria out of about 1,113 nationally, with 308 recorded in South Australia and 133 in New South Wales. To keep this honest: the count is a byproduct of media notifications, not a census, and Bosland himself warns the cross-state comparison is debunked. We will not rank the states on it, and neither should you. The usable fact inside those numbers is their provenance: Australia's closest thing to a national count of court-ordered secrecy is a side effect of notices sent to newsrooms.

It gets thinner. Pseudonym and concealment orders sit outside the Open Courts Act entirely and go uncounted, as Bosland set out in The Conversation on 7 July 2026. Whatever an amendment ends up doing, the measurement void guarantees nobody will be able to demonstrate what changed.

Reviews are no escape from the void; on the record, they are where it is managed. The NSW Law Reform Commission's Report 149 on open justice was tabled on 12 July 2022 with 156 recommendations. Four years on, no government response has been published or is locatable on the Department of Communities and Justice or NSWLRC pages. Victoria's review, committed to in June 2026, now has a benchmark for how long a review's output can wait.

05Naming is a resource, and it is rationed

Now set those cases beside the ones where the state itself does the naming. Joshua Brown, a childcare worker, was named by Victoria Police in a public media release on 1 July 2025, facing 156 charges. His alleged victims are statutorily unidentifiable. On 28 May 2026 it was reported he had indicated he will admit the offending. Nothing here implies the naming was wrong; police releases serve real purposes. The point is who holds the switch.

Hannah Thomas, a former Greens candidate in New South Wales, was charged under a riot power that was conceded, in about mid-July 2025, to have been wrongly laid. All charges were withdrawn on 9 September 2025, per O'Brien Solicitors, and in June 2026 the State of NSW's civil defence admitted battery and false imprisonment. Her name travelled worldwide at charge. Her vindication did not.

Assemble the full machine. At one end, the state publishes a name at charge, and the name outruns the case. At the other, per the State of Play report's account, applications built on evidence that resources can assemble secure interim silence at the exact phase when a name matters most, silence that can hold for months or years. In between sits an Act that does not govern every order, a count that is a byproduct of newsroom notifications, and a reform pledge aimed at the one moment when, by Bosland's estimate, secrecy already gives way.

The rort is not a person. It is not the new Premier, not the Attorney-General whose position moved with evidence and politics, not the judges who rule on the material before them, not the counsel who put it there. The rort is the mechanism: secrecy allocated by the capacity to apply for it, deployed at the phase where it does its real work, measured by nobody, and reformed at its weakest point.

So watch two things between now and 28 November. Watch the interim order, because that is where the product is sold. And watch for a count, because until someone can say how many orders exist, nobody will be able to say whether anything changed. A state that cannot count its secrets cannot claim to have surrendered them.

If it's a rort, we cover it.