The Nationals Member for Murray Plains, Peter Walsh, reckons Victoria is on a fast track to anarchy because the justice system is so badly broken.
Mr Walsh says in Echuca this morning a business owner armed himself with a baseball bat to chase a shoplifter.
Within an hour of him posting a video on a community page to warn other businesses, it had received hundreds of supportive comments.
“People only take the law into their own hands because the law is failing them – over and over,” Mr Walsh says.
“The Allan Labor government is directly and irrevocably responsible for that – that’s where the bucks for better policing and courts come from and that’s where the buck stops.
“The very cornerstone of our society, that the police and the courts are there to protect us all, is crumbling and now there is a genuine danger something is going to go terribly wrong when an innocent business owner, or homeowner, fights back because the system is not doing its job,” he says. “Premier Allan is not doing her job; she is making things worse.
“If the system was working then you would not have hundreds of people applauding a potentially deadly response to this blatant theft – what might the outcome have been if the alleged offender had turned and fought back? Many would not condone vigilantism, but I can totally understand it. Being violated in your business or your home is shocking.
“No-one can miss the headlines or the stories on the TV news out of Melbourne every day, where machetes are being used to settle scores and claim territories – that’s about as savage as you get.
“But when you move into regional Victoria there has always been that buffer of distance from the problems which have been growing exponentially in Melbourne under Labor for the past decade – well that’s not the case anymore.”
Mr Walsh says grassroots theft from shops and homes is becoming rampant across regional Victoria and our already understaffed, overworked and unsupported police are now overwhelmed by a lack of support from the court system and mountains of paperwork.
He says for a town the size of Echuca, and its surrounding communities, to only have two or three police cars – “if that many are even available at any given time” – covering literally thousands of square kilometres is a joke. Especially once the sun goes down.
“When people in my hometown are resorting to weapons as dangerous as baseball bats, and are prepared to go after people with them, we have got a real problem,” Mr Walsh says.
“But look around, in Rochester we have the tobacco wars seeing a shop firebombed and it was only pure luck the owner of an adjoining business, who has a residence there, was not killed, simply because he was not home that night, because he got burnt out too. And we had another fire attack in Cohuna which crippled other local businesses as well.
“Victoria doesn’t need more Jacinta Allan spin, it needs powerful and immediate action where offenders don’t get bail to commit further crimes, where the convicted don’t walk with a fine because they feel remorse, where the perpetrators don’t have more rights than the victims, or anarchy might just be the start of something even worse.”
