Opinion: Law and order a distant second in our police state

If only the State Government spent the same energy keeping us safe in our beds at night as it does blaming the Prime Minister and threatening lockdowns, writes Mike O’Connor. VOTE IN OUR POLL

As Toutai Kefu and his family wrestled with axe and machete-wielding assailants in their home at Brisbane’s Coorparoo last week, they must have been ­comforted by the thought that ­Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk was keeping Queensland safe.

We have troops on the NSW ­border and hundreds of police deployed to check the status of every person entering the state, while out in the suburbs, people triple-lock their doors and peer through the shutters at the darkened street outside. Private CCTV cameras have become a feature of life in the suburbs, as the security that the locked door once provided is shattered by the assailant’s axe.

You might well ask who is running the state when it seems that the total focus of the Government is to craft and polish the pandemic message of the day and then deliver it in its most menacing form. Has the Government become so obsessed by the credit it believes can be gained by its tough rhetoric that it is neglecting to provide that most ­elementary of government services – the protection of its citizens from ­violent assault and the rigorous ­enforcement of the law?

If you were to ask any Queensland parent what they considered to be the most important function of ­government, I have no doubt that they would place law and order at the top of their list.

Toutai Kefu (left) and family return home after their ordeal. Picture: Tara Croser

The default reaction of government when faced with irrefutable ­evidence that the once safe haven of the home is being threatened is to ­attribute it to a few “bad apples”.

It’s a handy reference, apples in my experience being a benign fruit that have never, as far as is known, ­attacked anyone. There is nothing benign, however, about what is ­happening out in the suburbs.

In 2018, youth crime in Melbourne became so prevalent that then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull voiced his concern at the escalating level of gang violence. Victoria Police deputy commissioner Andrew Crisp was of a different mind, saying that he did “not accept for a minute that we do have gangs.”

A few days later, this statement was revealed to be as false as it was self-serving when Victoria Police ­acting chief commissioner Shane ­Patton admitted that there were ­indeed street gangs in Melbourne. “These young thugs, these young criminals, they’re not an organised crime group like a Middle Eastern ­organised crime group or an outlaw motorcycle gang. But they’re ­behaving like street gangs, so let’s call them that – that’s what they are.”

The gangs in Melbourne were made up of people of African descent, but the ethnicity is hardly the point when you are on the wrong end of an axe, or as is alleged to be the case in the Coorparoo case, a machete.

Like their Victorian counterparts, senior police here echo the Government as you might expect, given they now appear joined at the hip to politicians on nightly television to add authority to the latest pandemic pronouncement. There are no gangs, just bad apples.

To say that there is no gang problem is an exercise in semantics. What ­constitutes a gang? As far as residents are concerned, it’s any group of individuals known to each other who gather with the purpose of breaking the law.

They don’t have to wear uniforms and have colourful names. As deputy commissioner Crisp said: “They’re behaving like street gangs, so let’s call them that – that’s what they are.” A few days ago Deputy Premier Steven Miles expended considerable energy blaming Scott Morrison for blaming the state premiers for blaming the Government for blaming someone or something for doing or not doing whatever it was. It was a Sunday and he was obviously rostered for blaming duties that day. He did a grand job shovelling blame in every direction except his own, while out in the suburbs people are wondering if instead of buying a caboodle or a labrador, they should buy a guard dog.

If the amount of political energy that is expended every week blaming the Federal Government and threatening lockdowns for a single infection was spent on keeping families safe in their beds at night, it would be a good thing.

The State Labor Government lives by opinion polls. It spends millions of dollars on media advice, but it can have this tip gratis: Governments stand or fall on the issue of law and order and telling people that you’re keeping them safe from Covid, while someone is ­smashing down their front door is a recipe for electoral defeat.