From the office of ROLAND ROCCHICCIOLI

VICTORIA is currently witnessing a calculated assault on the rule of law, perpetrated by a generation of offenders who have effectively weaponised their youth. We are no longer dealing with the impulsive errors of adolescence; we are battling a cohort wilfully engaging in high-stakes criminal activity.

Their sense of invincibility is nurtured by a lack of regard for the law and a cynical certainty that as minors they are essentially “untouchable” It has turned suburban streets into flashpoints for machete-wielding teens and home invasions.

Offenders have successfully identified a justice system which has prioritised the perpetrators’ rehabilitation at the expense of the victims’ pain and anguish. It is a moral imperative which must be fixed. The pendulum of offending must be adjusted. The introduction of “adult time for adult crime” in Victoria is not merely a political slogan—it is an essential recalibration.

When youth offenders perpetrate adult-level atrocities they must forfeit the leniency of the Children’s Court. The legal methodology must satisfy public expectation. Increasing the courts’ capacity to inflict appropriate, long-term detaining of these individuals is the only way to restore public confidence. However, the state cannot act in a vacuum. The antisocial crisis is underpinned by a profound lack of parental efficacy.

Teenage criminality is a domestic failure before it is judicial. If parental abrogation is evident, or proven, the law must have the potential to charge parents with criminal responsibility for their children’s criminality. Responsibility is not a divisible concept: parenting is an obligation. When duty of supervision is abandoned they must be held answerable for the wreckage caused by their progeny.

History offers a blueprint which modern society chooses to ignore. The anomalies notwithstanding, any effectiveness of reformatory schools in the past lay in the capacity to provide the rigid, vocational structure which these recalcitrants patently lack. We must reintroduce enforced work and training programmes for perpetrators—programmes which mandate parental involvement to ensure the offenders are not returned to delinquent fostering environment. Parental negligence must carry serious consequences.

Furthermore, we must unleash our frontline. It is essential we increase the authority of police to conduct searches and intervene in suspected criminal gatherings to disrupt offending before it escalates; to intervene before the joyride turns fatal. Empowering police and tightening the judicial net sends an unambiguous message: the era of the free pass is over.

While “tough-on-crime” policies aim to restore public confidence they remain a subject of intense debate among legal experts and social workers. The time for clinical observations has passed. The challenge for the Victorian justice is to find the balance between firm accountability for those harbouring a total lack of regard for the law and the long-term goal of social reintegration.

We must seek a system that prioritises the victim over the perpetrator; of effective reform which is more than social platitudes; a restoration in apprehension of, and respect for, the law; and the application of absolute accountability. A combination of adult sentencing, rigorous training, and holding parents accountable for their children’s wreckage, will advance the required changes and help to store society’s missing pillar: responsibility.

Victoria’s safety depends on courts being empowered to detain, and a police force which is mandated to act. We must choose between the rule of law, or the rule of the lawless.

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