Criminals aged as young as 11 and 12 in Queensland and NSW are being exploited by organised adult criminal gangs to steal cars and break into homes, and then deliver the stolen goods to their masters, according to recent media reports. Because they are so young, the courts are reluctant to lock them up, even for breaching bail. This does not augur well for the ACT. Here, recent amendments to our criminal laws will see young criminals not even be able to be charged with a criminal offence because they are not 14. Already, if they are 11, they can’t be charged, unlike in NSW and Queensland.
Troubled young people will only be encouraged by a near total lack of deterrence. Why on earth would you not commit crimes if you have no moral compass and if you know you can’t be charged? Why on earth wouldn’t nasty criminal adult gangs exploit vulnerable young desperadoes and encourage them to break into other people’s homes, steal the family car/s (and whatever else happens to be lying around), and then sell those cars to well-organised criminal gangs for a pittance? It’s a no-brainer. It’s already happening in Sydney, and NSW police are actually still able to charge 11- and 12-year-olds; it’s just that they have weak bail laws and courts that are far from robust.
When you combine this with the decriminalisation of possession of all illicit drugs, and hard decriminalised drugs soon to become readily available, then little wonder ACT police are bracing themselves for a big increase in serious crime. This on top of the fact that our hard-pressed men and women in blue are the most understaffed police force in the country.
Canberra will become a beacon for organised crime, and innocent Canberrans will suffer. Some innocent victims and indeed the young criminals themselves may die or at the very least be seriously hurt by burglaries that go wrong and by 11- and 12-year-olds having accidents in stolen, powerful modern cars.
These crazy experiments were unthinkable prior to 2012 when the ACT was governed by a compassionate but sensible Labor party led by Jon Stanhope, who would not have any truck with the Greens. Unfortunately, Katy Gallagher got into bed with the Greens, and she and her successor Andrew Barr let the Greens’ crazy, unrealistic attitude to criminal law take over.
That is not to say that our Greens are not personable, well-meaning people. It’s just that their political social engineering ideas fly in the face of human nature and reality.
Of course, we have only ourselves to blame for voting in, election after election, this no doubt well-meaning Green/Labor government. Maybe the government members of the Assembly would think twice about such obviously impractical, crazy laws if there was a provision in the ACT Sentencing Act that all government members had to be responsible and host in their homes one or two juvenile offenders as part of bail conditions or as part of a sentence order. Maybe then reality would soon sink in.
