From the office of ROLAND ROCCHICCIOLI

VICTORIA Police did not lead us into our current social malaise. We managed it alone. It is the police who have been left to sort-out the impossible morass created by successive state governments and a cavalcade of extraneous collaborators.

Prominent community leaders — regardless of ethnicity — must stop taking the moral high ground and acknowledge we have a collective responsibility. Apportioning blame and finger-pointing will not steer the foundering barque to the true North!

The police are not culpable for the proliferation of criminality. They are frustrated by the system. They are fighting against a swell of unjust criticism and an abundance of communal indifference.

The police did not create the prevailing zeitgeist of religious intolerance and radicalisation, homophobia, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, racism, juvenile delinquency, misogyny, misandry, xenophobia, drug addiction, recidivistic domestic assault, lawlessness, and the stressful canon of those “wicked-problems” which torment our society. It is of our own making. We watched-on, wittering and complaining, but did naught as we were rendered impotent by malcontents and social revolutionaries who cheerily disembowelled our social mores; brutally abolishing revered hierarchical power structures which have so served our Nation.

Police need more support, not less. Graffiti and hooning might sit at the lower end of criminality but they are offences which impact everyone: they tell a community there are people amongst them with no regard for the law and rules, and commonly they go scot-free. Daily, these offences impact our sense of safety and security; they diminish the peaceful and safe aesthetic which should be the streets upon which we all live.

Drug affected people on our streets, and in shopping centres and carparks, are frightening. They diminish our sense of safety. They are the result of a supply-and demand-equation. When are young people told drugs aren’t awesome? When are they shown the before-and-after photos of lifetime impacts from drug taking; or the inherited influence of drugs which damage the next generation of children?

Respect for law and order is effectively respect for your fellow traveller. When it collapses police must be able to perform their duty with the courts standing-in-support of keeping dangerous people away from the innocent.

Politicians must “get-real” about this subject — and so much of it is dependent on strong leadership: spelling-out in monosyllabic terms the society we want, the standards we will accept, and the way in which we intend to achieve the result. It requires desire and funding. If the right people are in place these outcomes are achievable through prioritising resources, and consistently reiterating the narrative about who we are as a Nation.

People do not immigrate here because we offer less. They come because we are more, and promise better. The Crown and law and order mean something. The police cannot solve the predicament. They are the visible manifestation of the people whom they are sworn to serve. They cannot implement change without our support and approval. To imply our dysfunctional society is a consequence of their unsuccessful methodologies is trite and whiffs of ignorance. The fault lies not with the police but with government.

If we are serious about eliminating the tribulations which blight our lives then we must look, always, to government. It is they, the people’s elected legislature, who must wrought the lasting transformation.

The force for change lies not with the police but with government of the day.

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