On Saturday morning, I awoke to news that a friend’s home one kilometre away was the victim of an attempted home invasion.
The bandits climbed over a neighbour’s side fence and attempted to force their way into the rear door.
Luckily the neighbour awoke, made a racket, and they ran away.
The following day, the police said several homes in the street were ransacked.
A similar thing happened to me last year when I awoke to see two bandits attempting to force their way through my side gate before I chased them off. My car has also been broken into several times.
My WhatsApp group of 30 local school dads posts weekly videos showing attempted burglaries in the local area.
Unfortunately, these aren’t localised events, with the Greater Melbourne Area experiencing a spate of attempted home burglaries and carjackings by machete-wielding gangs.
The situation has gotten so serious that resident groups in wealthy suburbs have started employing private security to police the streets.
Premier Jacinta Allan last week conceded that her current bail laws are failing Victorians and the violence plaguing the state was “completely unacceptable”.
“It’s why the laws need to be changed and they will”, she said outside parliament last week.
“I understand that the current laws, the current settings, are not working”.
“It’s completely unacceptable to see these repeat patterns of criminal behaviour”, she said.
A statewide ban on machetes will be proposed by Cabinet this week after the Allan government, for more than a year, stubbornly resisted calls to put such a ban in place.
A record 14,797 knives, swords, daggers, and machetes were seized in 2024, renewing calls for a tougher weapons crackdown.
The stories are all too common. Teenagers commit assaults, burglaries, or carjackings only to receive a slap on the wrist and be released back into the community to commit more crimes.
Melburnians shouldn’t have to fortify their homes like Fort Knox and sleep with one eye open.
If half as much effort were placed on law and order as was spent policing the pandemic lockdowns and mask-wearing, Melbourne’s crime wave would be finished.
Law and order are essential state government responsibilities, and the Victorian Allan Government failed dismally.
