Voters in key inner-city Victorian seats up for grabs in next month’s state election couldn’t care less about law and order despite the crimewave apparently engulfing their backyards, research commissioned exclusively for Crikey has revealed.
A compilation of state-wide Roy Morgan Research data between July 2008 and July 2010 shows just 2.4% of voters in the knife-edge seats of Richmond, 6.7% in Melbourne and 9.4% in Brunswick rate reducing crime and maintaining law and order an important issue.
But criminals remain a hot topic in some suburban marginals, suggesting the major parties are playing up fears of gangs and thugs to win seats. In the teetering Liberal district of Hastings, 32% of voters rate crime as a concern and significant minorities of voters in Gembrook (21.9%), held by Labor’s Tammy Lobato by 0.6%, and Mordialloc (19.6%), held by Janice Munt by 3.62%, were also riled.
The Brumby government and the Baillieu opposition have struggled to outdo each other in the crackdown stakes, with ministers citing greater search powers, Tasers in the country and the rollout of semi-automatic weapons as reasons to re-elect it. The Liberals want armed guards on suburban railway stations and both sides have promised to ban knife sales to minors.
The Herald Sun has also waged a war on “lenient” suspended sentences given to “s-x offenders, armed robbers, drug traffickers and vicious thugs”. Star columnist Andrew Bolt has called on Victoria Police to tell the truth on ethnic crime, while his editors have urged a crackdown on CBD revellers, which they say are increasingly stabbing each other.
Melbourne has recorded the lowest per-capita violent crime rate of any Australian capital city. In 2009-10, according to official statistics, state-wide crime declined 6.4% per 100,000 head of population year-on-year. Crime against persons outside a family context decreased by 1% from 2008-2009 and the rate has fallen 0.6% since 2000-2001.
Polling impresario Gary Morgan told Crikey that while the inner-city figures were somewhat difficult to explain, “the presence of increased police surveillance in the inner city could make more people feel safer”.
By contrast, Morgan said the issue of open and honest government straddled the city/suburban divide. It was rated at least twice as highly in affogato-belt seats under threat from the Greens, with 20.3% of electors in Brunswick and 13.7% in Melbourne crying foul. But a quarter of denizens in the ultra-marginal ALP electorate of Mount Waverley also said it was important, as did 23.1% in Burwood, 21.9% in South Barwon, 18.4% in Frankston and 16.1% in Jacinta Allan’s squeaker seat of Bendigo East.
Many electors in the marginal Liberal-held electorates of Bayswater (25.0%), Bass (23.2%), South-West Coast (20.9%) and Hastings (18.3%) similarly deemed a lack of corruption a hot button issue.
In June, the Brumby government introduced the Victorian Integrity and Anti-Corruption Commission in response to the Proust report, but the body has been criticised as a powerless patchwork of existing organisations that lacks the capacity to root out entrenched patronage.
Morgan, who is currently engaged in a brawl with authorities over the future of the historic MCG hotel, said “there was corruption everywhere in Victoria in every aspect of state and local government”.
[Polling impresario Gary Morgan told Crikey that while the inner-city figures were somewhat difficult to explain, “the presence of increased police surveillance in the inner city could make more people feel safer”.]
That’s OK, Gary Morgan is not a police or parole officer, a criminologist, a mental health nurse, or a student of jurispridence, so we would not expect him to know why Melbourne is the safest big city in Australia. But to experts in those fields, the lack of voter hysteria on “law and order” is no mystery.
I’m not expert in any of those either, but for some years Victoria has been on a journey of experimental reforms in criminal justice, including special mental health courts, Koori Courts, restorative youth conferencing, independence of the Crown Prosecution Office from the political government, alternatives to prison sentences (just one prisoner per thousand population, compared to 1.8 in NSW), and highly developed prisoner release support programs which help ex-cons make the transition from life inside to life outside.
Actually Victoria has the highest murder rate in the country (3.5 times the per capita rate of NSW) but most of these are underworld murders–the victims pretty much self-select. There’s a lot less domestic or street murder, a lot less rape, robbery, and assault. Newspaper hysterics aside, you are as safe in Victoria as you want to be, which for most people is safer than any other state in Australia. Of course if you want to go looking for trouble, try getting involved in the drug gangs, they will oblige.
Victoria’s criminal justice reforms have been closely studied, and in many cases imitated, by other governments around Australia and around the world. A success story of laboratory federalism. Now threatened by a cyclic resurgence of “tough on crime” scaremongering from politicians and tabloids. And even threatened by the federal parliament which is moving into the street-crime business with federal knife laws.
Would someone please tell the local hacks and pollies to calm down, pick up the phone and talk to the DPP before trying to invent crime rates so they can turn them into votes. And tell those federal morons, both Gillard and Abbott, to f*** off and keep out of it.
What’s an affogato belt? Is it big enough to hold up my tofu trousers?
Shane Maloney,
In the Odyssey, after a 20 year unlucky streak lost at sea, Tiresius advises Odysseus to carry an oar inland, and keep on going until someone points at it and asks him, “What the hell is that silly long thing you’re carrying?” Only then will he be halfway safe.
An arrogato is a thing that, if you are lost in the land of overeducated idiots, you can go and order a cup of it then carry it, without spilling, away from that place and into the smog haze of the western suburbs, until somebody points at it and asks you, “What the hell, is that for shaving or does someone need to change the beer keg?” Then you will know it is safe to buy a coffee without being charged an extra dollar for Free Trade, or go to the chemist without being talked into a Tarot reading.
Affogato, I meant to say, not arigato.
It’s fantastic that corruption is so high on people’s list, and I’ll believe that the next government we get is serious about dealing with it when they release the documents on projects like the desal plant, southern cross railway station, Myki ticketing thing, and any of the other projects that place great quantities of taxpayer cash into private pockets.