There are, as the saying goes, lies, damned lies and statistics – which doesn’t mean that statistics are always lies, but that statistics can, and often are, used deceptively to spin a false narrative. As William Blake so eloquently put it, “A truth that’s told with bad intent, beats all the lies you can invent”.
Case in point, this piece from Australia’s taxpayer-funded left-wing propaganda outfit ‘national broadcaster’, which purports to investigate the statistics behind Victoria’s crime wave. Which it does… to a point.
And that point is a biggie. What they don’t say blares like a klaxon at 4am.
Victoria is experiencing a crime wave, with the number of criminal incidents rising to their highest level on record.
And that’s even reckoning with a system designed to conceal more than it reveals. Such as, for instance, the true scale of crime in Victoria.
When an alleged crime occurs in Victoria at one location on a single date, it is recorded on the police database. This occurs even if multiple offences or multiple alleged offenders and/or victims are involved.
Victoria, like other Australian states, also draws a polite curtain over another key crime statistic: the ethnicity of offenders. Unlike the US, which does record ethnicity, Victoria only records country of origin, which matters a lot when certain demographics are vastly over-represented in certain crimes. Crimes like these:
This followed incidents including a brawl involving machetes at a Melbourne shopping centre in May, a fatal attack on two young boys in September and the daylight stabbing of a woman in the city’s CBD in October.
In the first two, demographics were very pertinent to the crimes. In the third, it’s also alleged that reporting is obscuring more than it reveals.
That’s not all they’re obscuring.
The largest category of crime in Victoria is property and deception offences, growing in 2024/25 to make up two-thirds of all criminal incidents in the state.
It means crimes such as theft, burglary, and arson are more than four times more common than crimes against the person, such as assault.
Well, yes, but so what? After all, citizens are generally far more concerned about crimes against the person than property crime. Leaving that aside, what they’re not saying is that crimes such as assault have increased significantly. In fact, over the past decade, crimes against the person increased at more than double the rate of property and deception offences. That might have been worth mentioning, don’t you think?
Then there’s this:
An illegal tobacco war between organised crime groups has made headlines for several years in Victoria, resulting in more than 100 tobacco stores being set alight across the state.
Organised crime groups from where? Again, the ABC won’t say, but it’s Arab, principally Lebanese, organised crime groups.
There’s another demographic they won’t mention.
Who is committing these crimes?
Authorities say the rise in Victorian crime has been mainly driven by recidivists – repeat offenders committing crimes.
In other words, the teenage gangs on revolving-door bail.
Media and political attention has also been focused on offenders committing crimes while on bail for other offences, with the government facing criticism over its handling of bail laws.
And here come the distractions again:
Statistics show the number of people charged with breaching bail conditions has dropped when accounting for the population.
Which just happens to coincide with a change in the laws that meant certain crimes committed while on bail weren’t even recorded. So, sure, technically bail breaches dropped – but only because police and courts stopped counting most of them.
But that’s nothing compared to the biggest lie-by-omission:
The government coupled the new bail laws with a crackdown on knife crime, with a machete ban put in place in September, and the reopening of a controversial youth justice centre.
And just who is committing most of the knife and machete crime? Don’t ask, because they won’t tell you.
But we can download the data for ourselves, and it tells a very big story that the ABC is ignoring, here.
Sudanese are committing crimes at six times the rate of Australians. Somalis, four times.
But not just any crimes. Africans are 86 times more likely to commit aggravated burglaries (i.e., violent home invasions) and 29 times more likely to commit assaults. And 50 times more likely to steal cars.
And even that is almost certainly an undercount. Because, as I said, Victoria doesn’t record crime by ethnicity, only by nationality. So, those Africans already over-represented in crime statistics are only the first-generation immigrants. Ethnic African children of immigrants are merely counted as ‘Australian’.
Lies, damned lies and statistics, indeed.
