Andrew Rule: How I escaped carjack terror on the Geelong Road

WELCOME to Mad Max territory: Australia in 2017. There seem to be more carjackers than cops on the Geelong Road and on Sunday night it was my turn, writes Andrew Rule.

We need Mad Max and he isn’t out on the Geelong Road.

REMEMBER the Mad Max promo line? “When the gangs take over the highways … remember he’s on your side.”

In 1979 it seemed spooky and scary but futuristic: something that could happen sometime far away.

Well, it has happened. Welcome to Mad Max territory: Australia in 2017. It is called the Geelong Road — the freeway section of the Princes Highway. The gangs are taking over the highway and no-one is stopping them.

There seem to be more carjackers than cops there, let alone all the other places the bad guys consider easy pickings.

Sunday night, it was my turn. Heading towards the city at Avalon around 9.40pm, dead on the speed limit, I see headlights in the rear-vision mirror too fast and too close, then the flash of red and blue lights. As much like an unmarked police car as you can tell in the pitch dark at 100km/h.

I give it maybe 15 seconds, thinking the officer will realise I’m not speeding and will take off to find someone who is. But the red and blue light keeps going, although I wonder idly why there’s no brief blurt of warning siren.

I pull into the emergency lane, kill the motor, lower the window. I’ve spent years telling teenagers it’s smart not to get smart with police who are just doing their job, so it’s a case of follow your own advice.

There seem to be more carjackers than cops on the Princes Highway.

Once it was etiquette to get out to talk to traffic police but these days, after dark, that might be mistaken as some sort of threat — and no-one wants to scare a twitchy young cop with a Smith & Wesson full of .40 calibre bullets. So I sit still, right hand on the key, left hand on the wheel, where the approaching officer can see them.

My mistake. Because the bloke who walked up to the driver’s door was no traffic cop. He was a skinny young roughneck “of Middle Eastern or Mediterranean” appearance, wearing a grubby “high vis” windcheater, the top half luminous orange, the bottom half dark.

Still, he could conceivably have been a brilliantly disguised plainclothes cop. But not only he didn’t offer any ID, he didn’t ask for any. And when he opened his mouth it came out all wrong.

“Do you live around here, mate?” he said, and that was the giveaway: he was pretend friendly, the way a loitering burglar fakes an “innocent” question about a non-existent neighbour when he rings your doorbell hoping you’re not home.

Police privately warned police reporter Andrea Hamblin not to get out of her car at night if pulled over.

I didn’t hear any more of his con the mug out of the car pitch because I knew it wouldn’t be good if he got his hands through the window. I hit the starter and floored the accelerator. The co-pilot called the real police … or what passes for them when you dial 000 and get some Canadian tourist in a call centre somewhere so far away they have never heard of Geelong.

So far, so bad. Half an hour later we pull into the Herald Sun carpark and run across a colleague, police reporter Andrea Hamblin, who had just arrived from Geelong minutes earlier. She had a story to tell: she had been tailgated by a car at Avalon, which had then sped ahead and pulled the same stunt on a white car which she saw pull over and stop … In other words, she had witnessed the incident.

The bad guy’s car was a blue sedan, she said, with blue and red lights flashing in its front window but not behind. She was unsure which make “but not a hoon car.”

She uses the Geelong Road regularly and has seen several strange and possibly sinister things happen in the last year. In fact, she said, police had warned her privately not to get out of her car at night if pulled over but to drive to the nearest “servo” or police station.

Andrew Rule. Picture: Rebecca Michael

Mel Gibson as Mad Max

One swallow doesn’t make a summer and one would-be carjacker doesn’t make a crime wave. But there’s more.

So here’s the story of an extremely senior legal figure, who was driving towards Geelong on Friday, February 10. He was in his Audi sedan.

He was at first bemused, then annoyed, when another Audi pulled alongside him, the four scowling young men in it staring at him as they did a series of intimidating manoeuvres — from tailgating to driving very close beside to driving very close in front, forcing him to slow down.

At first, he thought they were trying to get him to “drag” but he later concluded that might be unlikely, given that at close to 60 he looks more like a judge than a juvenile delinquent.

It seems more likely they wanted to stage some sort of minor collision to get a chance to steal his car.

None of this would surprise former senior policeman Noel Ashby, who went public less last December after being menaced by four young African men in a Landcruiser on the Geelong Road.

The youths tried to force Mr Ashby’s late model Mercedes off the road. When he spied one of them holding a tomahawk he sped away. “Anything could have happened” if he had pulled over, he said.

He knew exactly what to do and when to do it. But what about the rest of us taxpayers and concerned citizens? We need Mad Max and he isn’t out there.