Melbourne, capital of Victoria, was ranked the world’s fourth most liveable city by the Economist Intelligence Unit this year. The EIU, in their assessment, certainly missed Victoria’s secret – that behind the soigné veil, she is riddled with disease.
Victoria’s debt is at a record $167.6 billion (roughly the GDP of Slovakia), having grown an astounding $31.4 billion from 2023-24. The state’s debt was merely $22.3 billion when Labor came into government and delivered their first budget in 2015-16. Given this, one might think twice about spending $13 million on amnesty bins to collect machetes as a means to prevent soaring knife crimes.
Even putting aside whether this strategy will dent knife crimes, it might strike one as a bad idea to spend so much money at a time when record numbers of Victorian tenants have been evicted because they can’t make payments due to sharp rises in rent and living costs. Keep in mind, the new Myki upgrade project, costing $1.7 billion, is already $136.7 million over budget, and when the latest report from Infrastructure Australia concluded that cost blowouts to the $34.5 billion Suburban Railway Loop project is very likely.
Nevertheless, as Premier Jacinta Allan pronounced, ‘These knives destroy lives – so we’re taking them off the streets…’ As if machetes, floating on their own accord, are haunting the back alleys of Melbourne, ready to stab unsuspecting pedestrians.
This is the derisory and tremendously expensive response by the Labor government to record numbers of knife-crimes, spurred on by the recently savage murders of two boys in Melbourne’s northwest allegedly by a group of teenagers.
Victoria does have a serious crime problem, particularly with child offenders. According to a recent Victorian Police statement, crime overall has increased by about 13.8 per cent compared to the previous 12 months to the end of June 2025. Weapon offences have risen by 11.5 per cent. Offending by children now represent 62.2 per cent of robberies, 47.7 per cent of aggravated burglaries, and 26.4 per cent of car theft.
The statistics show that 1,128 child offenders, aged 10-17, have been arrested a combined 7,118 times. That’s more than 6 arrests each.
So confident that the machete bins will solve the issue, the Labor government has slashed funding for proven successful youth crime prevention programs. It has also cut police funding by $50 million and reduced funding to Victoria’s courts by $30 million.
Like the Labour government in the UK, Premier Jacinta Allan’s linear thought process seems to suggest to her that if machetes are gone, there will be no knife-crime. With guilelessness worthy of Candide himself, the Victorian Police Minister Anthony Carbines told the media:
‘We are not too bothered who’s handing them in. If they are being handed in, they can no longer fall into the hands of the wrong people.’
It did not seem to have struck the government that criminals intent on committing illegal activities may not surrender their tools, or that other equally deadly implements, many more apt to be hidden than machetes, will be used.
The UK has been a classic example of what will happen when the judicial system focuses exclusively on the tools that criminals use rather than the incentives for crime, or how the legal system should be used to deter criminals and protect the innocent.
Ever since the UK introduced a series of knife bans that increasingly encroached on the freedoms of law-abiding citizens from 2019, knife crime has only gotten worse. Likewise, this machete ban will be nothing more than a band-aid over a gangrenous sore.
So far, some 1,300 knives have been collected in the bins, which works out to be about $10,000 apiece.
This will undoubtedly be heralded as some sort of victory by the Labor government, who has a talent for patting itself on the back.
After all, this government, after a massive spending spree to expand itself during Covid, including two pay rises, delivered among the longest lockdowns in the world and the most Covid-related deaths in the country. Yet, former Premier Daniel Andrews was made a Companion of the Order of Australia and the state is set to pay somewhere up to $100,000 to commission a bronze statue of Andrews.
I’m sure Jacinta Allan, his successor, can find some essential services to cut funding from for this important endeavour.
