Victoria’s leadership is complicit in its deadly Third World crime wave

The funeral for Dau Eibino Akueng who was fatally stabbed on his way home from basketball in Melbourne's western suburbs in September. Picture: David Crosling

It was only a matter of time. Two Saturdays ago, our street in Melbourne suffered a home invasion by the usual thugs, violently confronting sleeping victims, stealing their car and smashing it into parked vehicles. The best advice from Victoria Police: leave car keys at the front of the property to reduce the risk of future attack. 

I have worked in many violent Third World countries and failing states. I just never thought my family would be living in one.

It is not the fault of the police. As in many failing states, they are implementing government policy. During Covid, under that policy protesters were hit with pepper spray and rubber bullets while Black Lives Matter supporters were free to do as they pleased.

Now, amid Victoria’s worst crime wave in memory, it is government policy for thugs with several charges of machete-wielding violence to roam Melbourne.

It is policy that 85 per cent of young criminals are released into community service.

It is policy that, since Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacre in Israel, violent anti-Australian Islamist protests have flourished on our streets while local businesses suffer and day-trippers must endure cries of “Allahu Akbar”.

It is policy for a man who raped his daughter to call himself a woman and serve time in a female prison. And it is policy for our potholed, graffiti-scarred state – almost $2bn in debt – to have its hand outstretched to China.

No doubt readers can add to this list. You may wonder how it is all connected. Each policy chips away at the stability of our society while eroding our state of mind and the confidence we have in our system.

In my words on this page on September 5, I likened Melbourne’s violence to scenes from Grand Theft Auto. A day later, on September 6, a machete-wielding gang attacked Dau Akueng, 15, and Chol Achiek, 12, killing them in Cobblebank, west of Melbourne. So much for the $13m machete bins.

Youth gang violence has claimed 20 lives in Melbourne across the past five years, driving some African families to send their children back to Kenya and Uganda – countries where I have worked. What a sad comparison.

There is an old Ugandan saying, “ladit tye ki lwak”: leaders must stand with the people to guard against crime, not hide in safety. Little chance of that in Victoria. Fear of violent crime is robbing Victorians of peace and security, while those in power have become enablers of the collapsing community trust. This phenomenon – political leaders acting against a nation’s self-interest – is what American historian Barbara Tuchman describes in her 1984 book, The March of Folly.

As leadership continues failing us, Victorians must adopt a crime-prevention mindset, which means learning to defeat the “attack cycle” and reduce the risk of victimisation. The police advice about the car keys aims at this.

Police officers are doing the best they can within the constraints imposed on them.

For years I worked in high-risk environments and ran kidnap-prevention programs. Instead of teaching people who struggle with a push-up to disarm AK47-wielding gunmen, the focus in dangerous countries was on avoiding being kidnapped while still getting the job done. Hardly as cool but far more effective.

One lesson from African vil­lages is that tight community connectivity acts as a force multiplier for detection and disruption. Often, we do not know who lives at the end of our street. In northern Cote d’Ivoire, with the Dozo hunters and village chiefs, we linked settlements across a vast area into a spider’s web that trapped al-Qa’ida operatives.

Melbourne can do the same against crime, empowering communities not to become victims while politicians and elites debate the root causes they created.

Yet the community needs help. Government policy is stuck in a reactive cycle. There is no strategy. Police could assist by being more proactive in letting us know the evolving habits of offenders. Why was that property in our street a target? As in many unstable environments there will be a hardened group whose general movements and area of operations will be known to authorities.

Meanwhile, the opposition is feckless; its recently replaced leader apparently believed he also needed the Chinese Communist Party’s red-carpet treatment when he jetted off to China earlier this month. The CCP would not tolerate this crime wave.

The point is: to whom do we turn? In Third World countries I can tell you where it goes. We do not want that here. This is Australia. Our values, patriotism, mateship, community trust and the sacrifices of generations past must not be taken for granted.

But we are all being taken for granted, especially by those who create government policy allowing crime to thrive.

Being a victim of crime is traumatising. So is the risk to society from poor leadership. Winston Churchill lamented the fatal fallacies that beset the West before World War II: delight in smooth-sounding platitudes, refusal to face unpleasant facts, pursuit of popularity irrespective of the state’s vital interests.

Our political class today offers a picture of fatuity and fickleness – devoid of guile yet not of guilt, free from wickedness yet complicit in unleashing an undesirable society. In the meantime, timid reforms and endless excuses are no match for the machete-wielding gangs terrorising our suburbs.

Dr Jason Thomas is director of Frontier Assessments.