Australian murderer sues for right to eat Vegemite in maximum-security prison
A convicted murderer is challenging an Australian state’s ban on prisoners eating Vegemite, asserting that withholding the “polarizing yeast-based spread” breaches his human right to “enjoy his culture as an Australian.”
Andre McKechnie, 54, has taken his fight for the “salty, sticky, brown byproduct of brewing beer” to the Supreme Court of Victoria. He is suing Victoria’s Department of Justice and Community Safety and Corrections Victoria, the agency responsible for managing the prisons.
The case, scheduled for trial next year, sees McKechnie seeking a court declaration that the defendants denied him his right under the Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities Act to “enjoy his culture as an Australian.”
He also wants a declaration that the defendants breached the Corrections Act by “failing to provide food adequate to maintain” McKechnie’s “well-being.”
He wants the court to order the decision to ban Vegemite to be “remade in accordance with the law.”
McKechnie is currently held at maximum-security Port Phillip Prison. He was 23 years old when he stabbed to death wealthy Gold Coast property developer Otto Kuhne in Queensland state in 1994.
He was sentenced to life for murder and transferred a decade later from the Queensland to the Victorian prison system.
He wrote last year that he spent eight years free on parole in Victoria before he “decided that I had had enough.” He returned to prison and has spent the past decade in custody.
Vegemite has been banned from Victorian prisons since 2006, with Corrections Victoria saying it “interferes with narcotic detection dogs.”
Inmates used to smear packages of illicit drugs with Vegemite in the hope that the odor would distract the dogs from the contraband.
Vegemite also contains yeast, which is banned from Victorian prisons because of its “potential to be used in the production of alcohol,” the contraband list says.
Manufactured in Australia since 1923 as an alternative to Britain’s Marmite, Vegemite was long marketed as a source of vitamin B for growing children.
The spread is beloved by a majority of Australians, but typically considered an acquired taste at best by those who weren’t raised on it.
The last U.S. president to visit Australia, Barack Obama, once said: “It’s horrible.”
