A city enlightened

Commissioner Graham Ashton  enjoys the full confidence of Premier Daniel Andrews. If thugs of African appearance are recorded at 3kph over the limit while leaving a home invasion, Mr Andrews knows they will be issued with the appropriate speeding fine.

Once upon a time, in a Melbourne now vanished, cars bore green-and-white number plates with the slogan “Garden State”. That didn’t work out well, as the plates were produced by prisoners who made it their sly habit to urinate into the workshop’s paint hopper. This made the lettering fade and difficult for revenue, er, speed cameras to pick up, threatening the state’s fine-led economy with insolvency.

So the number plates’ colour scheme was changed, likewise the motto they bore. The latest licence-plate boast is that Victoria is the “education state” — and, just for once, there is no reason to doubt the authorised word from Spring Street.

Yes, we really are so much better versed these days, so savvy there is no longer any need to mention that which can be taken for granted. Consider this morning’s Age, which reports (sort of):

Police are hunting three men after a couple was forced to barricade themselves in their bedroom during a violent home invasion in Melbourne’s south-east.

The couple were asleep in their Loller Street home in Springvale when three male offenders forced their way through the front door just after midnight on Sunday.

The two occupants of the home woke up and tried to barricade themselves in their bedroom.

However, one of the robbers forced a metal pole through the door, hitting the 47-year-old man in the stomach.

He sustained minor injuries.

And that was it, a five-paragraph squib reporting what even as recently as a decade ago would have been front-page news. Now, though, such incidents are so commonplace they are worth only the same column centimetres as little earthquakes in Peru and crashes involving less-packed-than-usual Indian buses.

Also unmentioned, because familiarity has left few readers in need of enlightenment, the ethnic background of the home invaders.

Yes indeed, we’re quite the educated lot in Melbourne these days.

For more on crime and policing in Victoria, follow this link to 3AW’s Neil Mitchell, who was leaked a VicPol report on another weekend eruption of midnight multiculturalism, this time in a CBD high-rise. Interesting to note is Mitchell’s quoting of the report’s advice to officers that the media not be informed nor its inquiries answered.

Education is valued in Victoria, as noted. But the authorities apparently believe too much of it can be a bad thing. Residents sleeping with cricket bats by their beds would agree that the lesson has been well and truly absorbed.

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