MADONNA FRIDAY : Why we’ll be voting with hope, not conviction, when Queensland gives government its marching orders
The social phenomenon that has seen Queensland become a gangster’s paradise has its origins in our fundamental mismanagement of the youth crime problem, writes Madonna King. It’s a burden she’s carried for two decades.
Twenty years ago, early on the morning of the 2004 State election, I confronted a stranger coming out of our bedroom. And that moment, when our eyes locked, is etched in my memory two decades later.
His eyes, I later learnt, told the story of drug use. Mine were filled with fear. I remember turning away, trying desperately to protect the four-month old in my arms. I remember my voice deserting me, when I need it most.
A blood curdling scream only came after he had passed me, racing down two flights of steps and into suburbia. The stolen BMW, packed with goodies from almost every room in our home, was abandoned across the road.
Police called it a ‘sneak in’; the opportunity a criminal takes when you wake up, and open a window, or pop outside to pick up the newspaper, which used to lie in wait on the front lawn.
In my house, the opportunity to ‘sneak in’ ended on that weekend, which saw Peter Beattie and his Labor team nab a third term in office, with its fat majority almost untouched.
Steven Miles will not be so lucky. But it’s the same issue – the fear of crime in our homes; the place where we should feel safest – that has eaten away at Labor’s chance of a fourth term in office.
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Of course there are other problems with Labor: complacency, arrogance, cost-of-living pressures, a lack of decision over the Olympic Games, a former premier who stopped listening. The list goes on.
But it’s the voice of a father, in an LNP advertisement, or the image of a mother, the latest victim of crime, bawling her eyes out on television, or even the headlines over the latest youth crime court case that will deliver victory for David Crisafulli on Saturday.
That’s understandable on a level we might not see in the figures, used and misused by both parties in this debate. If we feel fear, it’s real.
I was lucky. In my case, the perpetrator was picked up quickly, tried, and while only out of jail a few weeks’ earlier, he was warned he might be sent back if he kept up this nonsense.
And like many families, our home is now protected by deadlocks and security cameras, and alarms that work in different areas of the house, at the flick of a switch.
But that should not have to be the case in a suburb where our children went to school, where early morning walking groups flood local parks and where we still gather routinely for a few wines on a Friday evening.
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Each morning we wake up and read Facebook community pages, and see how our friends’ cars have been stolen, or view footage of someone trying to open locked doors, in the dead of night.
We no longer relish the 8pm solitary walk around our suburbs, or the bus trip home after a few drinks, if it means more than a 200-metre walk at the other end.
Each week, we hear dreadful cases that are not even making the news any more; the latest in my suburb involving a child, who hid in a cupboard, while criminals ransacked the family home.
We know, or at least hope, cost of living pressures will ease when interest rates drop or we get a promotion at work. We know governments will change. We know any hassles with our children will almost always be resolved.
But many voters – in city and rural areas – can’t see crime, and our fear of it, reducing. And that’s at the heart of a community sentiment that will almost definitely see Steven Miles pack up his office this weekend.
It’s not his fault. By any measure, Miles has led this government with head and heart. But it’s too late to turn the tide.
Will David Crisafulli be able to stop it?
To be more than a one-term government, he has no choice. His government, beginning on Sunday morning, needs to plot the course that will see the number of victims of crime plummet.
He needs to be able to show voters how his plan for juvenile offenders, as harsh as they sound, will make us safer.
And he needs to flip the fear that now envelops so many families, who are checking their doors and even leaving their keys out, in the hope any intruder will take the easy option.
It’s hope, more than conviction, that will deliver victory to David Crisafulli on Saturday.
But he should consider himself on notice: if voters are using a baseball bat to end Labor’s term this Saturday; they’ll keep it under their bed to use again in four years’ time.
