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‘Something doesn’t add up’: the small Queensland town united in its fight against speed camera fines
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2023
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I get that the Katters have youth crime as one of the biggest topics they run on (I also suspect they don't have any sustainable plans to address it). But how much youth crime can there possibly be in a podunk town of 811 people? Don't conflate two distinct topics to score political points.
As someone who grew up in Malanda... not much crime there as far as I know. Everyone in the town is on a first name basis and friendly.
But other towns only slightly larger in the same area are out of control. I'm talking nuisance crimes - such as a kid smashing in the windscreen of your car with a baseball bat or spray painting a penis on your shop sign or straight up burning a business building to the ground for no reason other than they think it's funny.
If it was once in a blue moon... ok. That's what insurance is for. But when you're personally a victim of stuff like that several times a year and so is everyone else you know... it's borderline unliveable. The police force are so under-funded most of these crimes don't even get reported. They show up four days later and take a few notes, and that's it.
As for what Knuth is doing about it... not much he can do other than complain. Police are run from Brisbane and it's clear they don't think it's a priority. Shit's been getting worse every year for as long as I've lived here. Supposedly they need 150 additional officers for the district and recently hired four. They don't report how many retired or quit in frustration (I suspect more than four).
Last time I had a chat with a local Malanda officer, he said he's in hot water because an independent audit reported people speeding regularly on a stretch of highway but where he'd never issued any speeding fines. It was a down hill where you need to be riding the brakes to stay within the speed limit and was recently reduced from 100km/h to 60km/h for no reason — the road is safer than it ever has been, due to upgrades, and there was never a crash even before the safety improvements. I'm talking a nice wide straight highway with nothing but cow paddocks on either side of the highway. Even if you "crashed", you'd harmlessly get stuck in the mud and the next car to drive past would help you get out of the mud. I wonder if he's been replaced by someone who's happy to issue tickets instead of helping with real problems (I don't live there anymore).
I have zero doubt that youth crime is a problem in many places, and I am certain that a lot of speed enforcement is purely revenue-generating. I simply bristle at reductive statements from politicians like Knuth who only have complaints and no plans. Both of these issues are non-trivial to address, but nobody wants to hear about complexities, because that means change will take time. They just want things to change now, and that's not happening.
Yeah see that's exactly what gets everyone worked up. On one hand Youth detention centres are so overcrowded and understaffed the kids have to be locked in their cells 23 hours a day - a horrific breach of human rights if it was done to an adult, let alone kids. And on the other hand some of the crimes the kids are committing are even more horrific than that (seriously, I don't even want to write about some of the stories I've been close to).
The people in those towns want the state premier (not just a single politician from a minor party) to drop whatever they're doing and deal with this. Now. Right now. It's hard for us to imagine anything else more important that could possibly be on the premier's desk than this issue. But instead we get told "the problem is complex". We know it's complex. We're living it.
So what do you imagine the state premier and government can do to address the problem right now, that will bring meaningful change in a short time?