Vikki Campion: Kids laughing as juvenile crime soars in regional areas
In regional NSW, the rate of juveniles breaking into homes and businesses soars – and the kids laugh it off while people live in fear of fearless gangs, writes Vikki Campion.
Opinion
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Massive bruises bloom across Phebe Furneaux’s breasts, jaw, back and arms. She’s deep asleep, then screaming, her door broken open, her assailants raining blows on her.
They want her keys. She had her Honda Civic in September 2024. She has a new car now. They beat her and tell her to stop screaming.
For the second time, the northern NSW mum will never learn the names or sentence of the underage offenders, if they are punished, or more likely, laugh it off and get off under “doli”.
Her attackers are aged 16 and under. One, she guesses, may have been as young as 12. They will be anonymous in perpetuity.
Across NSW, juvenile offenders of the crime of “break and enter dwelling” in the three years to September 2024 increased by 14 per cent per year, according to the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research (BOCSAR).
Take a regional local government area, such as Moree, Dubbo, Coonamble or Walgett, and compare it to the rest of the state, and the rate of juveniles breaking into homes and businesses doubles, triples, soars.
In places like Kempsey, the rate of juvenile break and enter dwellings is 2336.1 per 100,000, about 13 times the NSW rate of 175 per 100,000.
In Tamworth, where Phebe lives, it’s three times the state average.
For every offence, there’s a victim whose rights don’t seem to matter in a children’s court system that leans on “doli incapax”. Kids laugh it off to the cops, to the community justice teams: “Ha ha ha I will get doli” – the presumption that kids don’t know that breaking into a woman’s house while she sleeps, violently assaulting her for her car keys, who previously stole her car and hooned it through a regional town, underage and unlicensed, is wrong. They know she will never learn their names.
Don’t fall for the old trope of “Where are their parents?”
We have designed a society where parents are undermined at every step, and discipline is reduced to removing pocket money and video games.
The question should be: “Where are the billions of dollars in taxpayers’ money being put into agencies to divert juvenile crime and help their parents?”
I can’t follow Phebe’s attackers through the courts; they are closed, and we’d be relying on community sources, so here is another example.
Annual reports show the NSW Children’s Court dealt with more than 31,880 criminal cases in 2023, yet only a select few have been published, even with a pseudonym.
Under the pseudonym of “Greg”, an 11-year-old, at Dubbo District Court, faced 72 offences varying from aggravated break and enters, robbery armed with an offensive weapon, including a knife, police pursuits involving speeds of up to 130km/h driving through red-light intersections and at 120km/h on the incorrect side of the road in a stolen car.
The only issue in dispute was doli incapax; and on those grounds, his case was dismissed.
Greg’s mother told the court she struggled to control his behaviour, and that of his older brother who was in juvie, that he didn’t respond if she took away his pocket money or video games.
“He swears at me and calls me a slut and a whore. I chastise him. He just laughs at me.”
When he was suspended for 20 days, she told the court “he liked it, her doesn’t care he’s suspended” and “he would get more school at juvie than when he is out”.
“I told him … you’re going to be in and out of jail the whole of your life … he looked at me and smiled.
“I picked him up from the … Juvenile Justice Centre and he said as we were leaving … to one of the workers: ‘Don’t let them take my room from me, I’ll be back soon, save my bed for me’.
He does not care about being up there, it’s just like a holiday camp for him, and his brother is up there at the moment so it doesn’t bother him.”
This is a desperate mother and a boy who gets a kick out of being “gangsta”. There is no reference in the court to any of his victim’s welfare. The magistrate decides not to listen to his mother, saying her evidence of “Greg knowing the difference between what’s seriously wrong and naughty is opinion”. He gets doli and the plethora of cases are dismissed.
Word is “Greg” has racked up more than 80 offences now.
Cops cannot arrest their way out of this when the courts are so soft they won’t even listen to offenders’ mothers, and juvie is a sought-after destination.
The big money is in justice diversion. The Minns Government in NSW budgeted $86.9m in youth justice initiatives, including $66.9m for early intervention and diversion; $4.9m to get at-risk young people re-engage with education, training and employment; $26.2m for “strengthening” early intervention and prevention programs for young people.
Then there are billions more from the federal government.
Right now, the Attorney-General has $28.4m open for grants of up to $1 million for awareness campaigns and programs to prevent criminal and anti-social behaviours, “healthy decision-making”, youth justice conferencing, and “transition from detention” support.
Bucketloads are going out, but where is the value when politicians are too scared to scrutinise it?
You’ll find more information on greenhouse gas emissions of public servants than tangible outcomes of $1.6bn being pumped out of the National Indigenous Australians Agency (NIAA) each year into agencies to address all the factors behind crime: mental health, homelessness, violence, substance abuse, well being, or the $800m in legal aid from the Attorney-General’s department.
For all these billions of dollars leaving Treasury, where are the agencies who are being paid to help kids like “Greg” and his mum, and when do the Phebes of the world get protection?
How about no one gets one extra cent until they work during the hot times and prevent crime instead of sitting behind a computer from Monday to Friday from 8am to 4pm when the kids are asleep?
In some NSW regional towns, there are between 80 and 120 agencies doing the same job, using the same kids to report back to lobby for more funding, who are not required to show what their outcomes are, and who don’t have to provide a cost-benefit analysis. Rip up the funding model and start again.
Phebe’s Tamworth petition for severe consequences for repeat offenders attracted more than 900 signatures on Change.org while her bruises were still blue.
The slogan “Adult Crime, Adult Time” won the Queensland LNP an election, as did the criminal conviction “Post and Boast” laws in the NT. Without punishment swiftly following the crime, you have people living in fear because of fearless juvenile gangs.
SEEDS OF IGNORANCE IN ATTACKS ON FARMERS’ SOLAR FEARS
Climate-200-funded MP Zali Steggall painted her ignorance of regional issues in bold when she derided farmers in their fight against intermittent power precincts this week.
She lauded China for “leading the charge in installing more solar panels in 2023 than the rest of the world combined” on social media, drawing ire from community group Central West Orana REZist Inc.
“Zali – do you expect primary agricultural land to be destroyed so it can house intermittent and unreliable solar factories? An industrial solar factory near Parkes caught fire the other day. Imagine the damage that was done to nearby cropping and grazing land, which produces Australia’s food and fibre,” CWO REZist members said, asking the Warringah MP where she would nominate them to be built on the peninsula.
The response from Ms Steggall, or whoever was acting as Ms Steggall on her Facebook account, was an attack on farmers: “It is mining that has ripped up prime agricultural land and gas fracking that is using all the water for farming, but I don’t see you complaining about that.”
Really? No-one in her office remembers the massive protests and Lock the Gate movement against fracking coal seam gas?
Here’s a botany lesson: Solar panels and wind turbines are not grown from seeds, they are made with hydrocarbons and shipped here from China and India, the largest intermittent manufacturers and users of coal-fired power. Intermittents cannot exist without mining, and more of it than ever before.
It’s still not an excuse for why you can’t have solar factories in Brookvale or wind towers off Manly, if you are so happy to put them on farms.
Ms Steggall went on: “Aussie farmers will be in trouble if we continue burning fossil fuels …”
Do emissions from China, India and the US stop at the beach?
LIFTER
Mark Zuckerberg for closing Facebook jail.
LEANER
PM Anthony Albanese for avoiding where the problems are after dark in Alice Springs on his northern tour.