Fear is the key. With immigration, it’s the fear of being swamped by teeming millions of the desperately unmoored. With youth crime, it is the spectre of the cold-eyed devil child, coming through your window to murder you in your sleep.
The Victorian government has just dogged its promise to raise the minimum age of criminal responsibility in the state from 10 to 14. It has caved in to pressure from the scientists of talkback radio and the social engineers at the Herald Sun, stoking two of the most primal aspects of the general fear people feel about crime — that it is always rising, and that lawless children are out of control.
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