“We cannot arrest our way out of this. It’s that simple … The whole arrest, charge, bail, remand, court system, justice system, youth detention, can’t be just the answer.”
When Victoria Police’s Sergeant Tem Hawkes said these words to The Age two years ago, rising youth crime was already a long-standing problem. As we reported in our youth crime investigation in 2023, adolescents and early teenagers (aged 10-14) were the fastest-growing cohort of youth offenders involved in violent crime.
At Werribee Police Station, Hawkes and his fellow officers were part of the Embedded Youth Outreach Program (EYOP), in which youth workers accompanied police on patrols to try to give young people a pathway out of crime.
Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan’s government appears to be prioritising political optics over considered policy.Credit: Eamon Gallagher
The program was not born out of woolly idealism but out of a hard-headed assessment by all involved that traditional law-and-order responses weren’t working, and could in fact be making things worse. Its interventions with young people reduced their reoffending, even as rates of offending beyond the program continued to rise, according to a Swinburne University evaluation that forecast 1000 fewer offences on an annual basis as a result.
This week’s news that youth crime is reaching record levels comes against a very different backdrop. The state government, struggling with budgetary woes in other areas, has cut back funding to EYOP and the Youth Support and Advocacy Service, which provides the program with social workers, and returned to pouring money into prisons.
All the while there is real community concern about rising crime rates, especially youth crime, with neighbourhoods increasingly turning to private security and home-surveillance devices.
From Labor promising to raise the age of criminal responsibility to 14 – a first step to dealing with the youngest offenders outside the setting of jail, which is proven to turn many of them into adult criminals – we now have Attorney-General Sonya Kilkenny measuring success by the doubling of young people on remand since last year.
From its reversal on changing the age of criminal responsibility to the about-face on bail laws to the recent hop, skip and jump to a machete ban after the Northland shopping centre brawl, the Allan government gives the impression of making up its responses on the run, after scanning the headlines and considering only the political optics.
We know that none of the key stakeholders in trying to reach young offenders were consulted over these changes. Indeed, as chair of the Yoorrook Justice Commission Professor Eleanor Bourke said: “This decision [to reverse course on the age of criminal responsibility] is so contrary to the evidence it is difficult to comprehend.” The same concerns were voiced over bail laws by the state’s outgoing commissioner for children and young people, Liana Buchanan, in March.
The police might be expected to have a very different view of these problems, but even their union secretary, Wayne Gatt, lamented “the constant yo-yo effect ... The government’s endless vacillation on law and order issues”. While we commend the police on their efforts to protect the community from violent offenders, they must be supported by a clear strategy to tackle recidivism and prevent young people turning to crime in the first instance.
This is not the only crime problem the state government should have seen coming, but allowed to fester.
This inability to tackle major social issues until they become political headaches can be seen throughout the government’s in-tray. When, in October 2023, The Age published in full a report commissioned by the state government from Better Regulation Victoria on the illicit tobacco trade, it had already been sitting on ministerial desks for over a year without being addressed.
Having finally decided to create a licensing and enforcement system in March 2024 – though it will not actually come into force until early next year – the government faces questions over resourcing and the strength of the measures proposed to deal with what is now a multimillion-dollar criminal ecosystem. As we have reported, organised criminals have enticed young people with as little as $500 to torch tobacco shops.
The revelations made a year ago by our Building Bad investigation of massive criminal infiltration of the CFMEU and the construction sector produced a similarly lacklustre response.
When chief investigator Geoffrey Watson, SC, told us in March this year that the problems were still there and that the inquiry commissioned by the Allan government “operates as a cover-up because it didn’t get to the bottom of anything”, Premier Jacinta Allan started talking about the “immediate establishment” by Victoria Police of Operation Hawk, which turned out to already exist.
There is no doubt that the opposition’s continuing failure to focus on holding the government to account is part of this malaise. So too is the length of Labor’s tenure in office, which has encouraged a high-handed approach both to consultation and to information about what they are (or aren’t) doing. But until they start to treat these deep-seated problems as ones where they have to take the public into their confidence, they should not be surprised that confidence in their approach declines.
Victorians should expect a government that lays out a transparent strategy, how it will support it and when it will act upon it. Government by announcement can’t take the place of well-considered policy measures. Unless that principle is applied first and foremost to the plight of our youth, this state’s future is bleak.
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