Editor’s view: Home truths cut through in state of fear

Youth crime is no urban myth, nor a media generated community panic, writes the editor. It’s now factored into our ordinary lives.

There are many adjectives which Queenslanders have employed to describe Campbell Newman over the years but “fearful” is not among them.

Yet tonight, as a story in today’s Sunday Mail reveals, the former hard-nosed Queensland premier who began working life as an army engineer, and whose own political pugnaciousness unquestionably contributed to his downfall in 2015, admits freely that he is fearful, increasingly anxious and genuinely concerned for his own personal safety.

In a Sky News documentary screened tonight, the same Newman who launched a legislative assault on bikies and simply dismissed the threats and intimidation which followed reveals it is kids roaming the street outside his home that scare him.

He locks his bedroom door every night, horrified by recent events which include a stabbing murder only 1000m from his home.

“I’m ready for them to come through my back window,’’ he says.

Newman, more than eight years removed from high office, is not dissimilar to average folk with a limited ability to formulate public policy. He is now not a member of any political party.

Former premier Campbell Newman with security bars at his home in Windsor. pic Lyndon Mechielsen/Courier Mail

And while his ideological affiliation with the conservative side of politics remains, his opinions are largely bipartisan in the sense they are being expressed in all quarters, right across this state.

His remarks will resonate with mums and dads who go to bed at night now wondering whether their car will be stolen. Youth crime is no urban myth, nor a media generated community panic. It’s now factored into our ordinary lives.

Those security cameras which only a few years ago were the sign of a wealthy homeowner living in a large compound are now winking at us as we knock on the door of ordinary Queensland suburban homes.

Queenslanders now sense that many of these youthful criminals have no framework of reference for ordinary behaviour – that they will, quite literally, kill you if you disturb them in their attempts at theft, and then have little capacity for self-reflection after the event.

That lack of a capacity to grasp the enormous damage they have caused to a fellow human being is noted by many youth workers who see, time and time again, how many of these serious offenders have been totally divorced from any sympathetic human connection almost from the day of their birth.

Newman, with an indisputable grasp of public policy stretching back 20 years to his days as Brisbane mayor, has some cutting criticisms to make of the Labor state government on this issue.

Queenslanders don’t want to play politics with this issue but they too are grappling with the same questions.

This government cannot deny, and will not deny, its policies on youth crime have been developed through a more academic prism which is opposed to incarceration as a method of rehabilitation and reflects criminal justice trends going back half a century.

But, as Newman points out in his blunt manner, that system hasn’t worked.

Newman sees a principal purpose of criminal justice as keeping people safe from violence.

Yet he is against locking children up in detention centres.

Instead, he sees an answer in youth offenders being signed up to community service or being sent off to boot camps remote from our major population centres.

Many Queenslanders will now agree that anything is worth a try.

Watch Jonathan Lea’s special investigation “Youth Crime & Punishment” on Sky News, Sunday 7.30pm QLD / 8.30pm AEDT

Originally published as Editor’s view: Home truths cut through in state of fear