Desperate Jacinta Allan takes off gloves on bail to shore up leadership

Labor’s bail crackdown personifies how serious youth crime has become in Victoria.

Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan. Picture: Valeriu Campan

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The bail law reforms are classic Victorian Labor.

Stand back and wait for a problem to blow up, maybe even create the problem.

Then try to blow up the blow up with a big bang policy shift.

The fundamental of the policy reform is the notion that where there is pain – both political and criminal – that pain should be worn by the offender.

In a superficial sense, it’s not a bad way of looking at things.

Years ago Peter Dutton belled the cat on youth crime in Victoria, only to be widely condemned for his commentary, some of which was overblown.

But beneath the politics of the time, there were truths.

Principally, that youth-related crime has become a visible problem and was impacting in all sorts of negative ways on the community.

Chopper footage of fleeing offenders and arrests in a major youth crime blitz in Melbourne suburbs.

Youth crime has soared to its highest levels since 2010, but at the core of the problem is the fact that while crimes by youths are up, the number committing the offences isn’t.

What is happening is a hardened core of offenders has been running amok, stealing expensive cars, wielding machetes, terrorising households.

They are not from one ethnic group and often are being fuelled by higher level criminal gangs who sub-contract the dirty work.

These criminal gangs are akin to high-level drug lords who leave the selling to often street-level addicted offenders.

The cabinet has decided that too many offenders – young and old – are being set free to reoffend.

Wednesday’s announcement is a backflip for Jacinta Allan after Labor less than 18 months ago made it easier for courts to grant bail.

See the political downside?

Allan has acted, only because Labor helped engineer the mess.

And it is a mess.

Offending – particularly by youths – is now overt.

Take the Ferguson family.

One child and his friends robbed and belted up by a youth gang from the outer suburbs during the Covid lockdown.

Father and youngest son caught up in a smash-and-grab raid by a gang of very identifiable youths on a phone shop in inner Melbourne.

A few weeks ago, a gang of kids driving recklessly through our suburb in a foreign car that was either stolen from someone or on “loan” from an unsuspecting parent.

Many nights the police helicopter can be heard hovering overhead as the latest Audi rips through the streets.

More chopper footage of fleeing offenders and arrests in Melbourne suburbs.

The offenders are targeting expensive cars, “requiring” them to break into inner city houses to steal keys. Sometimes they carry machetes, sometimes they don’t.

It speaks volumes that the reforms include a statewide ban on machetes.

Peter Dutton has overcooked his rhetoric on Victorian crime in the past, but like an amateur sleuth, he was onto something.

The bail issue is broader than just youths but it will be interesting to see what happens when these young offenders start getting jailed.

Jail will do them no good at all, seriously damaging their futures.

But their collective behaviour is so bad that they - and their families and communities - have brought it on themselves.