The Victorian Parliament is in a self-congratulatory state. They have banned machetes. Hurrah! That’s the end of youth crime. No more embarrassing videos of youths brawling with massive blades in shopping centres. No more tricky questions about the ethnicity of offenders. No more chit-chat about bail laws.
Wishful, ignorant thinking.
When the shelves of Bunnings are bare, stripped of machetes, chainsaws, crowbars, cricket bats, and pitchforks, Victorian gangs will attack each other with the 200,000 illegal guns in Australia … or breadknives. Who knows.
Meanwhile, it’s too bad if you’re a business that sells machetes for perfectly legal purposes. The government decided, on a whim, that your product no longer exists.
Also, too bad if you live on a rural property or like to go camping. Inner-city Melbourne can’t get its youth crime problem under control, so your essential outdoor item is banned. Enjoy cutting through the undergrowth with a toothpick.
That’s not a knife. This is a knife…
It’s the end of our Crocodile Dundee spirit.
Australians have had enough of the government knee-jerk banning items that the vast majority of the community uses safely.
Here is the truth: the people swinging machetes at each other should be in jail. If there is no space in the jails, send them to the desert or chain them together to build a railroad.
A few years of hard labour would soon sort those teenagers out. It would certainly make them think twice about grand theft auto.
Instead, lax bail laws and sentimental courts have been putting dangerous teenagers back on the streets. Remember the 14-year-old with 388 charges dropped? Remember when one was released on bail after allegedly being involved in a high-speed chase with a stolen car, but the court was told he was a refugee worried about his visa being cancelled? In one case, it was reported that a 15-year-old accused of a machete attack was on four sets of bail. How is that possible?
Police in Victoria say 84 aggravated burglaries were committed by kids aged 10-13.
We were at home watching Disney films at that age, not robbing our neighbour.
Victoria doesn’t have a machete problem. It’s got a youth crime problem. A gang problem. And a parenting problem, by the sounds of it. Otherwise, how do you explain 10-13-year-olds wandering around breaking into homes?
The crime-riddled state will use new laws to criminalise the ‘posting and boasting’ of criminal behaviour. It’s an attempt to stop people committing criminal acts for attention online.
Yes, Australians have copied the trends circulating in the UK and America where influencers break into people’s homes or commit acts of vandalism for online prestige.
Of course, if police arrest influencers for the crimes they commit, we don’t need laws about posting the acts. It is a very simple demonstration of governments using poorly policed petty crime as an excuse to introduce new digital laws.
Indeed, most problems come down to a failure of police and the courts to deal with the original criminal act.
The Left’s fascination, driven by UN humanitarian wailing, to be ‘soft on crime because racism’ (or something), has created a new class of young adults who embraced criminality as being ‘cool’. That’s also the natural response to a puritanical virtue industrial complex.
Every sensible adult operating outside the political bubble knows that Jacinta Allan’s ‘solution’ of banning machetes won’t work because machetes aren’t the problem.
Machetes have been around for a long time.
The criminals are new.
We can’t keep deducting rights, privileges, and items from Bunnings’ shelves every time crime gets out of control or the joke about Victoria being the Southern State of China won’t be a joke, it’ll be reality.
It is already an offence to wave machetes at each other in public. There was no need for a new rule. Can we please stop creating laws and start policing the ones we have?
