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Melbourne’s Crime Wave Explained: What Went Wrong in Australia’s ‘Most Liveable City’?

Once celebrated as the world’s most liveable city, Melbourne is now confronting a surge in violent crime, youth gang activity, and public disorder. What happened — and why?

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Zoe Booth, Andrew Bushnell
· 12 min read
Collage showing two youths’ portraits, a person with a knife, a man leaning on a shop trolley, and a woman speaking into a mic.

Written by Andrew Bushnell, read by Zoe Booth.

In this video essay based on Andrew Bushnell’s work, we examine the political, cultural, and policing decisions that helped shape Melbourne’s crime wave. We break down the data, explore the rise in youth offending, and look at how ideology-driven justice reforms collided with conditions on the ground.

You’ll learn how Victoria’s policing strategy shifted, why courts have grown more lenient, and why so many locals feel the city has taken a dramatic turn.

View full transcript On 6 September 2025, two boys aged twelve and fifteen were walking home from basketball practice in Cobblebank, an outer suburb of Melbourne, when they were chased and set upon by a group of assailants who then hacked them to death with machetes. Seven teenagers have since been arrested and charged with murder. This double murder has become a flashpoint in the city’s ongoing crimewave. A surge in violent crime and property crime is afflicting the city, still regularly (but less credibly) listed among the world’s most liveable. The youth of the victims and the alleged attackers, their shared Sudanese background, and the possibility that the violence is gang-related have raised inevitable questions about youth offending, policing, and multiculturalism. Reports that the arrestees include a young man photographed just months earlier, brandishing a machete at a suburban shopping mall, have reignited the debate about Victoria’s bail laws and precipitated a ban on machetes. Large bins have been placed across the city in the hope that budding duellists will voluntarily surrender their weapons. The Melbourne crimewave is the most visible manifestation of endemic disorder created by Victoria’s longstanding Labor government, which has been in power for all but four years since 1999. A city that endured the world’s longest COVID lockdowns is now beset by crime, largely because changes to the criminal-justice system have paid more attention to the interests of offenders than to those of victims or the law-abiding public. At the same time, the city is straining under infrastructure and cost-of-living pressures driven by incessant immigration (its population has grown by more than 350,000 since the pandemic) and a productivity collapse due in part to COVID-era excesses. Unpacking and resolving Melbourne’s crimewave, then, requires a fuller understanding of the decline of the city. The Crimewave by the Numbers Between June 2024 and June 2025, the state of Victoria has seen a 16.3 percent increase in the criminal-incident rate and a 13.8 percent increase in the offence rate across the state. For the City of Melbourne, the increase in the offence rate over that period was more than ten percent, primarily driven by increases in thefts from motor vehicles and retail theft. The latest reported rate for the city is lower now than ten years ago, but this is misleading in two ways. First, a rise in the absolute number of crimes is bad by itself. It changes perceptions of crime and safety, and it places strain on police and other services. Second, crime has risen markedly across some inner suburbs, beyond the central business district, over the past ten years. The politics of this last point are significant. Some of the largest increases in crime have been in Melbourne’s wealthier suburbs, the historical heartland of the opposition Liberal Party. The City of Stonnington, for example, which includes Melbourne’s most famous enclave of rich people, Toorak, has seen a twenty percent increase in offending since June 2024. This raises the salience of crime for Liberal voters along with larger questions about the changes these areas are undergoing and why. The other alarming trend is the rise in youth offending to the highest level on record. Young people are disproportionately represented in the categories most driving the crimewave, including thefts and burglaries. Police have also flagged that a small number of repeat offenders among younger cohorts are committing multiple offences. Among these youth offenders, there is also an unavoidable, if uncomfortable, question about their ethnic backgrounds. Sudanese gangs have been linked to up to thirty killings in the past five years. Getting a clear picture of the rate of youth offending among this community is difficult. Since 2015, the number of unique alleged offenders in the ten-to-seventeen-year-old cohort has remained stable, but the percentage who were recorded as Australian-born has fallen from 84 percent to 67 percent while the number whose country of birth is recorded as “unspecified” has risen from seven percent to 27 percent. Moreover, Australian-born status is increasingly unrevealing about ethnic background because of large-scale demographic changes in the city. The problem is substantial enough that some criminal-justice specialists have proposed the creation of an “African court” to administer a culturally specific diversion program, akin to the Koori Court for indigenous Victorians.  The Crimewave as Something New Apart from the amount of crime increasing, Melbourne has also seen new patterns of crime emerge—and it is not just children sword-fighting in the street. For example, the surge of thefts across Melbourne and its suburbs is, in part, because of criminal syndicates, sometimes comprising international students, stealing baby formula and medicines. Earlier this year, Victoria Police estimated that up to seventy percent of the rise in retail theft is attributable to repeat offenders operating in this organised way. More spectacularly, carjackings—all but unheard of previously—have become regular events. In one recent incident, teenagers allegedly crashed a stolen car and then stole the car of a woman who stopped to help. Elsewhere, a spree of car thefts were allegedly committed by a group of teenagers. There are now reportedly about nine carjackings a week. Police believe seventy percent of those responsible are under the age of 25. There is also a thriving black market in tobacco, incentivised by federal tax increases, which has led to a spate of arson attacks and extortion. And speaking of arson, someone recently tried to burn down a synagogue with twenty people inside, amid a surge of antisemitism.  Victoria as an Outlier Importantly, Victoria’s crime problem is largely its own. New South Wales, where Sydney is the capital, has also seen a recent increase in retail thefts and sexual assault reports (up 5.1 and 8.8 percent, respectively, over two years) but it has seen declines in crimes like theft from motor vehicles and breaking and entering. Queensland, home of 2032 Olympics host city Brisbane, has seen falls in robbery and unlawful entry. New South Wales has seen a rise in the number of youth in detention, but Queensland’s most recent figures found a reduction in youth offending. Neither state has quite the same controversy about surging crime, youth gangs, and violent robberies and carjackings. Clearly, the choices of the Victorian government have played a role in creating the crimewave. In 2023, the government amended bail laws to reduce the use of remand by effectively making bail the default position for a range of offences. This law entrenched standard practice for the Victorian judiciary (which, after a generation in power, is mostly Labor appointees): across 2022–24, magistrates granted bail around seventy percent of the time, and the rate was similar in the Supreme Court. During that time, the number of unsentenced prisoners in Victoria fell by about 25 percent. So while the government has recently reversed its bail leniency and pivoted to a “community safety” message, this is largely an exercise in chasing its own tail, and may not overcome the judiciary’s revealed preferences. Just weeks after the Cobblebank incident, a judge in Victoria bailed a fifteen-year-old accused of multiple armed robberies, car thefts, and threats to kill, so that he could travel to Europe with his family. The Role of Criminal-Justice Reform  The decision to reduce incarceration was not made in a vacuum. Before the pandemic, there had been concerns that the prison population was rising at an unsustainable rate, with taxpayers facing the cost of building new prisons (indeed, a new prison will open this year, built at a cost of AU$1.1 billion).  The idea of criminal-justice reform was that nonviolent offenders could be better punished by a combination of community service, home detention, and other restrictions on their liberties. It was an idea popular enough that even Donald Trump signed a criminal-justice reform law. However, there was always the risk that, if reform was just about reducing incarceration, the government could simply let people out of prison—and this is what it has done. In December 2024, Victoria’s incarceration rate fell to 107 per 100,000 people. This was far lower than any other Australian state (NSW’s rate was 192 at that time, Queensland’s 251), and one of the lowest rates in the developed world, down from a high of 157 per 100,000 in 2019. In 2020, Victoria and many other states reduced their prison populations during the pandemic on public-health grounds, and Victoria’s has remained at that lower level. The fall has not only been among unsentenced prisoners, but among convicted criminals too. Moreover, statistics on sentenced prisoners’ most serious offences reveal that since the prison population peaked in 2019, incarceration has become less common for not only nonviolent offences but also for some offences that more obviously threaten community safety. Between 2019 and 2024, there were falls in the number of people incarcerated for manufacturing or cultivating cannabis, fraud, and non-motor vehicle theft (like those organised retail theft gangs). But the largest reductions were seen among those convicted of violent and threatening crimes: breaching community orders and violence and non-violence orders, robbery and extortion, and assault. Overall, the sentenced-prisoner population has fallen by more than 1,200 persons since 2019, largely driven by leniency towards violent criminals and invasive property crimes. This is not what criminal-justice reformers had in mind. In hindsight, it was naive to expect that this government would adopt pragmatic reforms rather than hew to ideology. Because Victoria is not just crime-ridden, it has been corrupted. Victoria’s crimewave is a problem of permissiveness towards favoured “marginalised” groups and overbearing tactics towards law-abiding citizens who might object. The result has been a breakdown in law and order combined with extraordinary growth in the government’s scale and reach. The Victorian government has blown its budget on expanding the public service and big-ticket infrastructure projects. It accrued debts of more than AU$150 billion and lost its AAA credit rating, with further downgrades possible.  All of this has been in the service of a vision of “transformative change,” which has two main priorities. First, the centrepiece of the government’s cultural agenda is the elevation of indigenous rights. School days and government meetings now begin with an “acknowledgement of country” and government brochures refer to the city as Naarm. The government has recently passed a treaty law that will create a representative body for indigenous people with special rights to influence policymaking. Its ambitions include targets related to reducing the “over-representation” of indigenous Victorians in the state’s prisons, a motivation for the government’s previous weakening of bail laws too. Second, the government has spent vast sums on infrastructure. While some of this has been needed, it has mostly been delivered over-budget, amid widespread concerns about corruption in the Labor-affiliated building union. And some of it seems ideologically driven. The Suburban Rail Loop is a proposed subway that will link areas marked for high-rise development to accommodate the city’s migrant populations. Not coincidentally, the previous premier, recently spotted at a Chinese military parade, signed up to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, while the current premier recently toured that country to promote investment in the line and associated property development opportunities. These two policies are linked—the former is used as a cudgel to bully public acquiescence to the latter. Indeed, Melburnians are subjected to a barrage of state propaganda. Public buildings and public transport are regularly decorated for various causes touted by the government, which also never fails to credit itself on signage around public works.  The ultimate point of the transformation is redistribution—of people, voters, crime, and quality of life itself. Consider, for example, that the rise in crime in Melbourne’s established suburbs has been precipitated, at least in part, by their densification, a trend the government has announced it will accelerate as it seeks to build “affordable homes” in “areas people want to live in.” This trend has already seen the Liberal Party chased out of these suburbs’ federal electorates. It promises to render them utterly irrelevant, assuming it has not already done so.  Disorder is the best way to understand all of this. Some institutions are losing or abandoning their authority, while others are overstepping theirs as the state is repurposed towards the narrow ends of the government. This is a two-tier justice system created to redistribute goods across society. It is just winner-picking. The process has not yet been completed—recent independent reviews have attempted to address opaque decision-making and politicisation in the public service—but it is advanced, including in criminal justice. Putting Things Back in Order Among criminal-justice reformers, a common line is that it is better to be “smart on crime” than “tough on crime.” But sometimes being tough is the smart choice. This is not a new observation, but halting the crimewave starts with policing. There is evidence that the pandemic laws weakened people’s trust in Victoria police, an effect which, according to polls, seems to have persisted. Trust in the police is generally correlated with police effectiveness and public cooperation. Rebuilding that trust might begin with targeting policing and engagement to areas in which crime occurs or originates. Far from merely displacing crime, targeted policing has a positive effect on neighbouring areas. This should be understood as “needs-based policing,” recognising, as in Cobblebank, that the law-abiding people in these areas (of whatever ethnic or cultural background) are those most in need of police protection. Another good place to start would be cleaning up the streets. In the 1990s, New York City famously employed a “broken windows” strategy, the basic idea of which was that cracking down on small crimes would prevent and deter criminals from committing larger ones. Melbourne has become a dirty, unkempt place. Public spaces are covered in litter and defaced with graffiti. Clean it up—and enlist some nonviolent offenders to help. Beyond policing, though, for Melbourne to recover, more people will have to go to prison. There is no good reason for Victoria to have fewer people in prison for serious crimes now than it had before 2020, especially not when the city has grown so rapidly. Reformers can be comforted by the simple truth that no-one really cares about the cost of prisons anyway. Even the government now admits this with its messaging. The test for criminal-justice policy, ultimately, has always been community safety. Criminal justice is fundamental to the state. It is the one function that (more or less) everyone agrees the state must perform. The hope is that in getting criminal justice right, the next government, whenever it comes, might be able to undertake the harder work of undoing the corruption of the state and making Melbourne liveable again.

Chapters

[00:00] - Introduction to the crime incident with two boys attacked in Cobble Bank.
[00:14] - Arrest of seven teenagers and the broader context of Melbourne's crime wave.
[00:28] - Discussion on multiculturalism, youth offending, and gang violence.
[00:43] - Report on a young man with a machete and Victoria's bail laws.
[00:55] - Introduction of a machete ban and crime statistics.
[01:09] - Analysis of Melbourne's crime wave and its connection to governmental policies.
[01:24] - Issues with the criminal justice system and urban pressures.
[01:37] - Population growth and its impact on Melbourne.
[01:51] - Conclusion on the need for a deeper understanding to resolve the crime wave.
[02:02] - Statistical increase in crime from June 2024 to June 2025.
[02:18] - Comparison of current and past crime rates, highlighting nuances.
[02:31] - Focus on increased crime in certain Melbourne suburbs.
[02:44] - Crime politics and its effect on political parties.
[02:58] - Discussion on youth offending and ethnic backgrounds.
[03:26] - Media portrayal of youth offending and its statistics.
[03:54] - Proposal for an African court for culturally specific programs.
[04:08] - Changes in Australian-born status and ethnic background data.
[04:23] - Examination of new crime patterns in Melbourne.
[04:53] - Organized theft and its contributors.
[05:22] - Regularity of carjackings and the demographic involved.
[05:51] - Issues of a black market in tobacco and a recent arson attempt.
[06:02] - Crime comparison between Victoria and other states.
[07:01] - Victoria's bail laws and their impact.
[08:09] - Broader impacts of reducing incarceration rates.
[09:16] - Statistical changes in incarceration over the years.
[10:14] - Discussion on leniency in sentencing and its outcomes.
[11:02] - Criticism of cultural and governmental approaches in Victoria.
[12:21] - Infrastructure spending and accusations of corruption.
[13:03] - Overview of governmental policies and urban trends.
[13:59] - Commentary on institutional roles in the crime wave.
[14:27] - Recommendations for addressing the crime wave through policy changes.
[15:49] - Argument for increasing prison populations for serious crimes.
[16:17] - Conclusion about Melbourne's future and governance needs.
[16:30] - Credits to the author, Andrew Bushnell, and publication details.

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