‘Focus on facts and fix Sudanese hotspot’: Angus Taylor

Law and Order Minister attacks Daniel Andrews, saying an over-representation of Sudanese in violent crimes must be fixed.

Law Enforcement Minister Angus Taylor says a Sudanese crime hotspot must be addressed. Picture: AAP

Law Enforcement Minister Angus Taylor says crime statistics showing an over-representation of Sudanese-born people in violent crimes show a “hotspot” which governments must focus on and fix.

Mr Taylor’s comments came as Greens MP Adam Bandt accused federal Liberal politicians of “making Melbourne more unsafe” by highlighting the over-representation of Sudanese-born people in crime statistics.

The Member for Melbourne also hit out at the Andrews state Labor government, accusing them of being “suckered into a law and order auction by the Liberals” as they move to introduce new anti-association laws for convicted juvenile criminals as young as 14.

Crime statistics released by the Victorian Crime Statistics Agency yesterday show Sudanese- and South Sudanese-born people are 57 times more likely to be charged with aggravated robbery and 33 times more likely to be charged with riot and affray in Victoria than their Australian-born counterparts in the year to March.

Despite making up just 0.15 per cent of the Victorian population, Sudanese and South Sudanese-born Victorians were responsible for 1.1 per cent of all crime in the state, including 8.5 per cent of aggravated robberies and 4.9 per cent of riot and affray charges.

Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs Minister Alan Tudge seized on the figures yesterday, arguing the same level of crime was not being seen in Sudanese communities in NSW and Queensland, and blaming the Andrews Labor government and a “weak” judiciary for the problem.

Mr Taylor said governments had to “focus on the facts”.

“This is a hotspot. It may not be the only one, but it’s a hotspot: 57 times aggravated robbery and riot and affray 33 times higher,” he told Sky News.

“That’s not true, by the way, in other cities, and this is the important point: we have, we clearly have a law and order problem in Melbourne. There is a hotspot here.

“It needs to be focused on, we shouldn’t be tiptoeing around it, we should focus on the facts, and it is quite reasonable and appropriate to have a fact-based discussion about it, which is what we’re doing.”

Asked why the government wasn’t identifying crime “hotspots” involving other communities, Mr Taylor said they were.

“We have, the Prime Minister has been up in Tennant Creek this week because we know there are issues with alcohol-fuelled violence and rape, and we saw that terrible, terrible case up in Tennant Creek, so we focus on hotspots,” he said.

“It is a law and order problem that the Andrews government needs to be honest about, they need to stop tiptoeing around on this one, sort it out, and if there are others we should sort those out as well.

“There is a lot of talk about sentencing, and is the sentencing strong enough in Victoria.

“These are the things that they need to look at, but it is right and proper that there be a frank, fact-based discussion in the community about this, and that there be calls on the Andrews government to deal with it.”

Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton. Picture: AAP

‘Andrews has created a problem’

Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton said Mr Andrews was in denial about the African gang problem.

“Mr Andrews has created a problem in Victoria where he has weakened bail laws to the point where they’re completely ineffective, and we don’t have problems with Sudanese gangs in New South Wales or in Adelaide or in Brisbane,” Mr Dutton said.

“We have the problem in Victoria, and the problem is of the state government’s making, and until Daniel Andrews shows the leadership that Victorians demand, this problem will not be fixed, and there’s no sense in denying that these victims of crime don’t exist, or that people haven’t had their homes broken into, or that crime is not taking place otherwise.

“He’s living in a parallel universe and he needs to get back in touch with the view of the majority of Victorians.

“That is, they want law and order reinstated, and they want the government to enact legislation that allows proper bail laws, bail laws that act as a deterrent to these people as opposed to an incentive.

“I don’t want to see any further violence in Victoria. Victoria is a great state. Most Victorians want to see the state government clean up the mess of their own making.”

Greens MP Adam Bandt says the Liberal Party is trying to distract attention from poor polling.

Libs ‘making Melbourne unsafe’

Mr Bandt claimed the Liberal Party was “behind in the polls” and attempting to distract from their own failure by “starting to attack a small group of people".

“Two things about that data: One is we’re talking about tens of events out of thousands. We’re talking about a very, very small number, so it’s easy to say that when you look at percentages, but when you come to the raw numbers of events the statistics don’t bear out the kind of picture that the Liberals are painting,” Mr Bandt told ABC radio.

“Secondly, if you want to just look at those kind of statistics, the population that according to Alan Tudge’s logic we should be concerned about is New Zealanders.

“They’re ones that come in second for overall crime and they’re over-represented.”

Yesterday’s statistics show Sudanese and South Sudanese-born offenders rank second after Australians for aggravated burglary and aggravated robbery, and third after Australians and New Zealanders for serious assault and riot and affray.

Mr Bandt said police were saying it was “unhelpful and inaccurate” to talk about gangs.

Victoria Police’s African-Australian community taskforce, Stuart Bateson yesterday said the death over the weekend of 19-year-old Melbourne woman Laa Chol — who was fatally stabbed at an out-of-control party held in a city high-rise by a group of young African-Australians — was not related to African gang violence.

“They’ve said with the most recent tragedy that happened with a young girl over the weekend, that Peter Dutton was quick to jump on and Alan Tudge has been quick to jump on and turn into a law and order issue, they’ve said she wasn’t a member of a gang, it had nothing to do with gang violence, it should be investigated as a crime, and what really worries me is that the intervention from the federal level is actually making Melbourne more unsafe,” Mr Bandt said.

“When you start making this a question of race, rather than a question of, ‘are a few young people getting into trouble?’, when you start to make it a question of race, you make Melbourne more unsafe.

Mr Bandt cited the case of Sudanese refugee Liep Gony who was fatally bashed in the Melbourne suburb of Noble Park in 2007 by a man whose crime was found to be racially motivated after he told a neighbour “I am looking to take my town back. I’m going to kill the blacks.”

“What we saw a decade ago in a very similar situation to this, we saw a young Sudanese man get killed by a white man who said he was out trying to take his town back,” Mr Bandt said.

“That is the kind of atmosphere that the federal Liberals are creating.”

Asked to respond to Mr Tudges assertion that the crime problem did not exist to the same extent in the NSW and Queensland Sudanese communities, Mr Bandt said that if Liberal politicians were really concerned about the welfare of people in Melbourne they would speak to locals.

“They’d be having the conversations like I do on a regular basis with community leaders, with members of the police force, who would say, ‘we don’t think that there is a race-based problem here, but to the extent that there are young people who are some young people who are finding it hard to fit in, what can we do to make them feel like Melbourne is a place where everyone has a place?’,” Mr Bandt said.

“There are a lot of people doing a lot of really good work, but objectively, they’re facing some trying situations across the board. It’s not to do with races, it’s all young people across Australia.

“One in three young people within Australia either don’t have work or don’t have enough work. They’re underemployed. Now that is a national crisis. And then when you come down to whether or not your skin is white, it’s much more difficult for people from non-Anglo backgrounds to find work. The stats bear that out.”

“We had a program put in place, the Migrant Communities Employment Fund, that was aimed precisely at helping get people from non-Anglo backgrounds into work, and the federal government came in and they axed it, so they’re doing the classic thing of axing the support services that might be there to help people feel like Melbourne is a place where everyone has got a place, and then afterwards, realising that they’re in trouble in the polls, turning around and blaming people whose skin isn’t white.

“We do know that people coming from places like Sudan and South Sudan, many of them have come over here perhaps as teenagers in an environment where they didn’t have the fortune of being able to go to school.

“In South Sudan in particular, there’s been a history of people being conscripted from a very young age to go off and fight, and then that’s part of the reason that they’ve been correctly granted refugee status and allowed to come to Australia, and then when they come here there are a lot of people doing a lot of good work, who say here’s how to settle into Australia, and here’s what Australia looks like, and it’s precisely because of those values that people want to come here in the first place, and so we should be saying, ‘what can we do to support that work in the community?’”

Andrews government ‘joining Liberals in law and order auction’

Mr Bandt accused the Andrews Labor government of being “about to join the Liberals in a law and order auction” over their plan to expand bikie-busting anti-association laws to apply to teenagers who commit home invasions, armed robberies, carjackings and other violence crimes.

Under the legislation, which is being introduced in Victorian parliament today, police officers of the rank of sergeant or above would be able to issue unlawful association notices to people as young as 14 who have a conviction for a serious crime.

“From what we’ve seen from the papers today, it suggests that Victorian Labor is now looking at trying to take the state down the Queensland route, where it’s guilt by association, and where even if you haven’t committed any offence, all of a sudden because you happen to be of a particular group, or being near particular people then all of a sudden you become guilty,” Mr Bandt said.

“This was subject to a lot of challenge elsewhere around the country, it’s also Joh Bjelke-Petersen-type stuff, and Labor, it seems that they’ve been suckered into a law and order auction by the Liberals and I think it will make things worse.”

Mr Bandt hit out at a call from WA Liberal senator Dean Smith for a Senate inquiry into immigration, despite his party simultaneously maintaining that Australia should take more humanitarian refugees, but that our rate of population growth is unsustainable.

“At the moment this isn’t something that we’ve discussed in the party room. At the moment I don’t think that there’s a reason for panicked inquiries about what the target should be and setting a target,” Mr Bandt said.

“I don’t think that’s the right way to go. I think if we want to talk about how we tread more lightly on this planet, there’s a lot of things that we could be looking at: ending the amount of waste that we’ve got, ensuring that there’s greater infrastructure, more public transport, that would mean that we’d have a lot less impact on the planet.

“There’s two bigger things I think that if we fixed up the planet would thank us for much better. One is the amount of resources that we use, and we’re going at a completely unsustainable rate in Australia on that, and the second is the amount of infrastructure that we’ve got, that when you don’t plan properly for infrastructure, then your cities and your regions start to feel overcrowded.

“Fix those up, and I think you go a long way to addressing the issues without having to delve into some argument about whether we have an arbitrary target or not.”