On Wednesday morning, Sussan Ley flew into Melbourne on a mission: to sound the alarm on the city’s “out of control” crime crisis, flanked by two fellow non-Victorian members of her shadow cabinet – Queensland’s Andrew Wallace and New South Wales’ Julian Leeser.
In an op-ed for the Herald Sun, the federal opposition leader painted a grim picture of Melbourne, comparing it to the 1920s – a time, she wrote, the city was “overrun by crime and political violence”.
“Strikes turned ugly, gangs roamed the streets and ordinary citizens were forced to hire private guards to keep their families safe,” Ley wrote. “A century on, this echoes Victoria today.”
Sign up: AU Breaking News email
The Liberal leader doubled down in appearances on the Today Show and at a press conference, declaring that Melbourne had gone “from the most livable city to the crime capital of Australia.” Melbourne is now ranked fourth on the Economist’s Global Liveability Index – and remains the highest of any Australian city.
“This Labor government has not got the situation under control. What we must do is back the police, restore community safety and toughen our laws,” Ley told reporters.
But by Thursday, Ley’s crime crusade had collided with constitutional reality.
In an interview on ABC Radio National that made for awkward listening, Wallace, the federal Coalition’s new shadow attorney general, was forced to admit the obvious: crime isn’t a federal issue.
“Crime, criminal law is predominantly the purview of the states and territories,” he said.
Pressed by host, Sally Sara, Wallace conceded that while youth crime was “the number one issue burning on Victorians’ minds”, the federal Coalition had no policy to address it.
Sara: “So apart from calling it out, do you have a policy on youth crime right now?”
Wallace: “We’re not the government in Victoria. The government of Victoria has the predominant responsibility of passing criminal laws”
And later in the interview:
Sara: “Just to be clear, apart from calling out this issue, this is a state issue and you don’t have a policy on youth crime?.”
Wallace: “We are developing our policies at a federal level.”
Both Wallace and Ley pointed to their push for mandatory minimum jail terms for federal child exploitation offences and raised the case of a Victorian parent who was given a four-year-and-nine-month jail term – with a non-parole period of two-and-a-half years – after sexually abusing their daughter, as well as producing child abuse material.
It’s a sentence that even Victorian government ministers privately concede doesn’t line up with community expectations. But it has little to do with the real issue in Victoria: a cohort of repeat offenders responsible for a disproportionate number of criminal incidents in the state.
So, why were the federal Coalition here?
Politics, according to Jacinta Allan.
The Victorian premier pounced on the visit, channelling her predecessor Daniel Andrews, who went toe-to-toe with the Morrison government during the pandemic and emerged victorious, famously lashing then federal treasurer Josh Frydenberg as “not a leader, he is just a Liberal”.
“We’re seeing from the current leader of the opposition that she’s following the same anti-Victorian pattern of behaviour that the federal Liberal party have perpetrated on Victoria year after year after year,” Allan said on Wednesday.
She also conjured the spectre of Peter Dutton’s infamous 2018 comments about Melburnians being afraid to go out for dinner – a claim that bombed with locals and haunted him all the way to the 2025 federal election.
“We all remember when the previous leader of the opposition, when he was a minister, came to town making some of the most outrageous claims about Melbourne and safety issues in Melbourne,” Allan said.
“Whether it’s the federal Liberal party or the state Liberal party, they’re all about punching down on Victoria and Victorians … Victorians deserve better than this reckless, divisive politics that we’re seeing time and time again from federal and state Liberal party members.”
There is no question Victoria is facing a crime issue. The state’s crime rate has increased by 13.8% in 2024-25 compared to the previous financial year, with theft the fastest growing and most common crime in Victoria. About 5,400 serial repeat offenders – including more than 1,100 youths – are responsible for 40% of offending in the state, police say. And the Age’s latest Resolve poll showed Victorians felt less safe in their own home than they did a year ago.
The Victorian government has responded with tougher bail laws and is now mulling sentencing reform. Ministers hope such measures will have a tangible effect on the crime rate ahead of the 2026 election, as similar reforms took the heat out of the crime debate in 2018, and will be comforted by the fact that despite the state opposition’s relentless campaigning, the Coalition only had a 7% lead in the Resolve poll on the question of who would better manage the issue of crime and antisocial behaviour.
There is little the federal government – and even less the federal opposition – can do to tackle the issue of crime in Victoria. Ley’s visit, it seems, was more of an attempt to shift the focus from the growing internal fractures within her own party after its historic election loss in May.
The visit handed Allan a rare political free kick that should serve as a warning to Ley: if she plans to visit Melbourne again she’ll need more than just talking points and a scare campaign – or risk suffering the same fate as her predecessors.
Benita Kolovos is Guardian Australia’s Victorian state correspondent
