{"id":217278,"date":"2025-10-16T08:12:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-16T08:12:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/217278\/"},"modified":"2025-10-16T08:12:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-16T08:12:07","slug":"sussan-leys-melbourne-crime-crusade-achieves-little-more-than-a-political-free-kick-for-victorian-labor-victorian-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/217278\/","title":{"rendered":"Sussan Ley\u2019s Melbourne crime crusade achieves little more than a political free kick for Victorian Labor | Victorian politics"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Wednesday morning, Sussan Ley<\/a> flew into Melbourne on a mission: to sound the alarm on the city\u2019s \u201cout of control\u201d crime crisis, flanked by two fellow non-Victorian members of her shadow cabinet \u2013 Queensland\u2019s Andrew Wallace and New South Wales\u2019 Julian Leeser.<\/p>\n

In an op-ed for the Herald Sun, the federal opposition leader painted a grim picture of Melbourne, comparing it to the 1920s \u2013 a time, she wrote, the city was \u201coverrun by crime and political violence\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cStrikes turned ugly, gangs roamed the streets and ordinary citizens were forced to hire private guards to keep their families safe,\u201d Ley wrote. \u201cA century on, this echoes Victoria<\/a> today.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sign up: AU Breaking News email<\/a><\/p>\n

The Liberal leader doubled down in appearances on the Today Show and at a press conference, declaring that Melbourne had gone \u201cfrom the most livable city to the crime capital of Australia.\u201d Melbourne is now ranked fourth on the Economist\u2019s Global Liveability Index<\/a> \u2013 and remains the highest of any Australian city.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis Labor government has not got the situation under control. What we must do is back the police, restore community safety and toughen our laws,\u201d Ley told reporters.<\/p>\n

But by Thursday, Ley\u2019s crime crusade had collided with constitutional reality.<\/p>\n

In an interview on ABC Radio National<\/a> that made for awkward listening, Wallace, the federal Coalition\u2019s new shadow attorney general, was forced to admit the obvious: crime isn\u2019t a federal issue.<\/p>\n

\u201cCrime, criminal law is predominantly the purview of the states and territories,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Pressed by host, Sally Sara, Wallace conceded that while youth crime was \u201cthe number one issue burning on Victorians\u2019 minds\u201d, the federal Coalition had no policy to address it.<\/p>\n

Sara: \u201cSo apart from calling it out, do you have a policy on youth crime right now?\u201d<\/p>\n

Wallace: \u201cWe\u2019re not the government in Victoria. The government of Victoria has the predominant responsibility of passing criminal laws\u201d<\/p>\n

And later in the interview:<\/p>\n

Sara: \u201cJust to be clear, apart from calling out this issue, this is a state issue and you don\u2019t have a policy on youth crime?.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wallace: \u201cWe are developing our policies at a federal level.\u201d<\/p>\n

Both Wallace and Ley pointed to their push for mandatory minimum jail terms<\/a> for federal child exploitation offences and raised the case of a Victorian parent who was given a four-year-and-nine-month jail term \u2013 with a non-parole period of two-and-a-half years \u2013 after sexually abusing their daughter, as well as producing child abuse material.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a sentence that even Victorian government ministers privately concede doesn\u2019t line up with community expectations. But it has little to do with the real issue in Victoria: a cohort of repeat offenders responsible for a disproportionate number of criminal incidents in the state.<\/p>\n

So, why were the federal Coalition here?<\/p>\n

Politics, according to Jacinta Allan<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Victorian premier pounced on the visit, channelling her predecessor Daniel Andrews, who went toe-to-toe with the Morrison government during the pandemic and emerged victorious<\/a>, famously lashing then federal treasurer Josh Frydenberg as \u201cnot a leader, he is just a Liberal\u201d<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re seeing from the current leader of the opposition that she\u2019s following the same anti-Victorian pattern of behaviour that the federal Liberal party<\/a> have perpetrated on Victoria year after year after year,\u201d Allan said on Wednesday.<\/p>\n

She also conjured the spectre of Peter Dutton\u2019s infamous 2018 comments<\/a> about Melburnians being afraid to go out for dinner \u2013 a claim that bombed with locals and haunted him all the way to the 2025 federal election.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe all remember when the previous leader of the opposition, when he was a minister, came to town making some of the most outrageous claims about Melbourne and safety issues in Melbourne,\u201d Allan said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhether it\u2019s the federal Liberal party or the state Liberal party, they\u2019re all about punching down on Victoria and Victorians \u2026 Victorians deserve better than this reckless, divisive politics that we\u2019re seeing time and time again from federal and state Liberal party members.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is no question Victoria is facing a crime issue. The state\u2019s crime rate has increased by 13.8% in 2024-25 compared to the previous financial year, with theft the fastest growing and most common crime in Victoria. About 5,400 serial repeat offenders \u2013 including more than 1,100 youths \u2013 are responsible for 40% of offending<\/a> in the state, police say. And the Age\u2019s latest Resolve poll showed Victorians felt less safe in their own home than they did a year ago.<\/p>\n

The Victorian government has responded with tougher bail laws and is now mulling sentencing reform<\/a>. Ministers hope such measures will have a tangible effect on the crime rate ahead of the 2026 election, as similar reforms took the heat out of the crime debate in 2018, and will be comforted by the fact that despite the state opposition\u2019s relentless campaigning, the Coalition only had a 7% lead in the Resolve poll on the question of who would better manage the issue of crime and antisocial behaviour.<\/p>\n

There is little the federal government \u2013 and even less the federal opposition \u2013 can do to tackle the issue of crime in Victoria. Ley\u2019s visit, it seems, was more of an attempt to shift the focus from the growing internal fractures<\/a> within her own party after its historic election loss in May.<\/p>\n

The visit handed Allan a rare political free kick that should serve as a warning to Ley: if she plans to visit Melbourne again she\u2019ll need more than just talking points and a scare campaign \u2013 or risk suffering the same fate as her predecessors.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On Wednesday morning, Sussan Ley flew into Melbourne on a mission: to sound the alarm on the city\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":217279,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":["post-217278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217278"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217278\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/217279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}