A spectre is haunting Victoria—the spectre of a youth crime wave. Premier Jacinta Allan, nearly two years into the top job, finds herself besieged by a relentless narrative: brazen young offenders running wild, a state in chaos, a government losing its grip.

The political playbook is older than the Pentridge gallows. The Coalition opposition, now led by Youth Crime Crusader, former Berwick Baker’s Delight stud-muffin, Brad Battin after John Pesutto’s spectacular December 2024 implosion over the Moira Deeming defamation saga, is playing this record til our ears bleed. The party of the well-upholstered is portraying Labor as soft on crime, hell-bent on a breakdown of law and order that would make Ned Kelly blush.

But when you interrogate the data; actually read beyond the screaming headlines and manufactured outrage, a different picture entirely emerges. The “youth crime wave” is less a clear-and-present danger to public safety and more a potent political weapon being wielded to destabilise the government and cynically exploit public anxiety. But will African Gangs 2.0 work?

Sadly for Brad, no-one reads the Herald-Sun. And Labor’s brand is strong in Victoria while the Liberals never got over Matthew Guy and his lobster with a mobster. But make no mistake. This is moral panic by the numbers. A real but complex social issue gets simplified, sensationalised, and weaponised for political gain. Victorians, all Australians need to push back.

The Numbers Game

Let’s be clear from the outset: crime has increased. According to the Crime Statistics Agency for the year to June 2025, criminal incidents in Victoria rose 18.3% to 483,583 incidents. Recorded offences jumped 15.7% to 638,640. These aren’t small numbers. They can’t be dismissed with a wave and a reassuring smile.

But raw numbers are bullshit measures of risk. Context matters desperately.

Victoria’s population has exploded in recent years, adding hundreds of thousands of new residents. When you adjust for population growth, the crime rate is up 13.8%. Still substantial, but contextually different from the apocalyptic raw figures dominating every news bulletin. We’re also experiencing a post-pandemic rebound effect. But let’s not compare Baloney with Knackwurst. Comparing 2025 statistics to the artificially quiet years of 2020-21, when Melbourne endured the world’s longest lockdowns and the streets were empty as a ScoMo self-promo, is statistical sleight of hand.

This isn’t a descent into anarchy. It’s a post-Covid snapback combined with genuine social pressures. Conflating the two serves no one’s interests except those niddering poltroons of the business class Party, the irony-free Liberal brand from scoring political points.

The Youth Crime Mirage

The narrative around youth crime is even weirder. Here’s where the data drops the Libs in a bucket of steaming ordure. Alleged offences by 10-17-year-olds increased 16% in 2024 to 24,550, which Victoria Police says is he highest level since electronic records started in 1993.

These headlines are technically true and genuinely alarming. But statistics can lie. Before you know it, you are up shit creek in a barbed-wire canoe, or the perpetual home of the Vic Liberals.

Here’s what the data actually shows: Victoria Police arrested 1,128 child offenders aged 10-17 a combined 7,118 times in the year to June 2025. That’s an average of more than six arrests per child offender. Total arrests increased 26.7%, yet there were 149 fewer individual child offenders in the reporting period.

Let that sink in like a customer opening a Too Good To Go Bag (Baker’s Delight redefining stale and undesirable) or a young baker discovering the the boss has stolen her wages as she opens her sorry pay packet.

Fewer young people are offending, but those who are offending are doing so repeatedly, driving the arrest numbers through sheer volume of re-offending. This is not a wave of new criminals flooding our streets like extras from A Clockwork Orange. Or young hoons on the Berwick Freeway. This is a small, identifiable cohort of deeply troubled children cycling through the system again and again while our institutions fail catastrophically to break that cycle.

Victoria Police themselves acknowledge that “a small cohort of repeat offenders remain responsible for a large proportion of total crime recorded in Victoria.” Cop talk is a crack up. You’d think that statement might prompt questions about why we keep arresting the same kids six times apiece. Instead, we get more calls for tougher bail laws and longer sentences.

The Youngest Offenders: A Statistical Mirage

The statistics on the youngest offenders are even more revealing. Children aged 10-13 represent fewer than 1 in 300 cases sentenced in Victoria; a minuscule 0.32% of all cases over the decade to June 2021. Children aged 10-11? One in 5,000 cases. Let’s get real.

The “youth crime wave” narrative would have you believe our primary schools are an on ramp into an adult prison. The reality is that childhood offending remains increasingly rare, and when it does occur, it’s typically less serious than offending by older children or adults.

Let Battin bang on no longer. What we’re witnessing is growth in re-offending, not a surge in new offenders. The Victorian Youth Parole Board’s 2022-23 annual report tells us 64% of Victorian young offenders were victims of abuse, trauma, or neglect as children.

Read that again: 64%.

We are criminalising a child protection crisis, then expressing shock when incarceration and punitive approaches predictably fail to break the cycle.

The Beat-Up Machinery

So why the beat-up? The answer lies in the symbiotic relationship between political opposition and a media landscape that thrives on conflict and fear like a Murdoch loves a phone tap.

For Brad Battin’s Coalition, re-plugged and re-booted after their December melodrama and desperate to establish a vestige of credibility, crime is a perennial political winner. It’s visceral. It drives fear straight to the lizard brain. It allows for simple, tough-on-crime solutions that poll well with focus groups and play brilliantly in 30-second grabs. It just didn’t work last time.

By amplifying every incident and framing it as part of a statewide “wave” under Allan’s watch, Battin’s brew creates a powerful narrative of a government losing control. The goal isn’t policy: it’s political destabilisation. Shake public confidence in Labor’s core brand of competent management and present themselves as the only alternative capable of restoring order.

It worked a treat in Brisbane. And in Trump-land. Next they’ll be eating the cats and the dawgs.

Our mass media is happily playing along. Commercial networks and tabloids have always thrived on crime, along with the testosteronic blend of footballers and WAGS. It’s cheap to cover, emotionally engaging, and drives ratings like nothing else. Fear sells better than hope, and prurience and vicarious thrill-shock beats analysis every time. Just ask Rupert.

More alarming is the increasingly tabloid ABC, (a tragic parody of its former self) which leads with shocking statistics and political accusations before burying the crucial context later in the article; if it’s there at all. Public perception is shaped by headlines, not nuance. Most of us never read past the headline. The media knows this. Advance knows it. They’re counting on it.

The collective amplification of moral panic creates a feedback loop: a political claim makes a headline, which creates public anxiety, which justifies more political pressure, which generates more headlines, which drives more public fear. Round and round it goes, a perpetual motion machine of manufactured panic. It certainly beats thinking up welfare policy.

The result? A distorted public perception that equates a complex social problem involving roughly a thousand deeply troubled children with a simple law-and-order failure requiring only political will to solve. Spoiler alert: if sounds like the drunk in the pub; don’t trust it.

The Real Problems, Ignored

This isn’t to say there isn’t a real problem. There is. The rise in property crime, particularly theft from motor vehicles (up 39.4% to 86,351 offences) and retail theft, is palpable and often linked to cost-of-living pressures that are crushing vulnerable families like a vise.

The challenge of chronic re-offending by this small cohort of young people is immense and genuinely testing our systems. These are real issues causing real harm to real people in our communities. Dismissing them as statistical noise would be as dishonest as the current moral panic.

But the solution isn’t just more police and tougher bail laws. These approaches fail to address root causes. They do, however, put more kids in gaol, further crowding our already overcrowded prisons with damaged young people who emerge more damaged than when they entered.

But we’re arresting the same 1,128 children over 7,000 times. If arrest and incarceration were working, we wouldn’t be seeing such catastrophic system failure. Such mindless repetition. We’re arresting the same 1,128 children over 7,000 times. If this were a sitcom, someone would have canceled it by now for repetitive plot lines. But it’s not entertainment—it’s expensive, destructive, and the only people laughing are those who profit from the cycle.

RMIT University criminologist Marietta Martinovic puts it bluntly: “If we put them onto the trajectory of punishment, we are really going down the completely wrong road, where we will engage them early in the criminal justice system. And that will just perpetuate the offending cycle. There are no short-term, quick, cheap solutions to this.”

The Incarceration Delusion

Incarceration of children should be a last resort, not a first response. Yet our political discourse increasingly treats it as the only response, because it’s simple, satisfies our punitive instincts, and it polls well with voters who’ve been frightened into demanding action; any action.

We ignore the inconvenient truth that we’re dealing with a child welfare crisis masquerading as a law enforcement problem. When 64% of young offenders have experienced abuse, trauma, or neglect, our response shouldn’t be more punishment. It should be genuine therapeutic intervention, trauma-informed care, and support for families in crisis before they produce the next generation of damaged kids cycling through the system.

But that’s complicated. It’s expensive. It doesn’t provide the immediate satisfaction of seeing someone punished. And you can’t fit it into a 30-second political ad or a tabloid headline.

What We Actually Need

If we are serious about community safety; actually serious, not just performatively outraged; pearl-clutching; we must stop falling for the political and media pantomime.

We need to demand a conversation that goes beyond the front page and the soundbite. We need to talk about poverty, trauma-informed care, youth disengagement, and mental health support. We need to ask why our child protection systems are failing this small group of children so profoundly that they end up cycling through the criminal justice system six times apiece.

We need to ask why we’re willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars per year incarcerating a child—it costs more than sending them to the most elite private school in Geelong; but won’t invest a fart of that in early intervention and support for struggling families.

We need to get real and recognise that when 64% of young offenders have experienced abuse, trauma, or neglect, our response shouldn’t be more punishment, but genuine therapeutic intervention and support before the damage becomes irreversible.

The Real Crime Wave

The real crime wave in Victoria is a wave of misinformation and moral panic. It’s a political stunt designed to exploit fear, test a government’s resolve, and avoid the difficult conversations about inequality, trauma, and social investment that might actually address the problem.

It’s easier to demand harsher sentences for a thousand troubled children than to confront the systemic failures that created them. It’s simpler to promise tougher bail laws than to fund the mental health services, family support programs, and early intervention initiatives that might prevent the first offence.

Until we see it for what it is, we will continue to pursue policies that create more victims; both in the community and in the broken lives of the children we have collectively failed. We will continue to arrest the same small cohort of damaged young people again and again, wondering why the numbers keep rising, while refusing to acknowledge that the problem isn’t enforcement.

It’s everything that happens before the first offence.

The real question isn’t whether youth crime is rising. It is. The question is whether we’ll face it with intelligence and moral courage, or whether we’ll keep feeding the same thousand children into the same broken system, arresting them six times apiece, and calling it justice.

Brad Battin’s Coalition wants tougher laws. Labor wants to look tough while talking compassionate. Meanwhile, a thousand traumatised children cycle through our courts like so many lost sheep through a pen that only makes them more dazed, confused, hurt and broken.

Someone’s getting what they want from this system. It just isn’t the community, and it certainly isn’t the kids. But the Trumps and the Brad Battins of this world couldn’t give a toss.

And as for our hand-shy kelpie, cowed and fed on scraps, our ABC, just stop the nonsense.