Machete madness

life and crimes. A lot of interest in recent days about machetes and the machete ban, the attempt by the state government to impose a ban on sales and machetes. Now, I think we shall get a few things straight about what this salesman is and what it isn't. It is clearly a cynical and insincere moved by a literally and morally bankrupt government whose real attitude is revealed by the fact it's done nothing about this in thirty odd years since the late Les twenty men started agitating for controls

on edge weapons to cut down on gang violence. Now Les twenty men, most of us will know, started up as a youth worker out in the western suburbs. Back in the eighties and certainly by the early nineties he was calling for controls on eedged weapons because of the increased use of knives and similar things by youth gangs, mostly out in the West and the North and elsewhere, and he didn't really get a big response from his

very good friends in the government, the state government. It was only recently, in recent weeks that the state government, this is the state government that has governed Victoria for twenty two of the last twenty six years, that state government has finally decided it would bring in a ban on selling machetes or controls on selling machetes. And as I've just said, I think it's insincere and to some

extent it won't be effective. But the government's motives and perhaps lack of honorable motives, does not alter the fact that this is a step in the right direction. So we can bag the government for not acting for too little, too late, for not really meaning it. We can beag the government for letting repeat offenders out on bail, and

so we should. But a ban on the sale of machetes, although it is doomed to some failure because the people that use machetes to try and kill others and cut their arms off and fingers off and so on are criminals, and they aren't necessarily buying these things, they're stealing them. But a ban is the right way to go because in the end, it's the only way to start the ball rolling. And let's look back at our own history

and see some other examples of that. So, as some critics have pointed out, and I think they're largely right as far as it goes the mere active banning sales of machetes and edge weapons over twenty centimeters long, it won't end the bad behavior that led to the ban, because criminals steal rather than by because they're by definition people who break the law. Otherwise, as one wag said the other day, the Premier could just quote ban crime unquote.

That would be easier. But you know he was being funny. Given that this government has run the state for most of the last quarter century, it's fair to say that when things are going wrong, perhaps it should be sheeted home to that government. And this government has ignored this sort of thing, this rising tide of violence and gang warfare and so on, and they've largely ignored police views

for most of that time. Now know that the government won't agree with that, and the Police Minister won't agree with that, and possibly some tame police commissioners might not agree with that. But it's fair to say that there are people in cabinet and in the bureaucracy, and possibly some in the judiciary who are deep down, if not anti police, at least suspicious of police motivations and police activities and police views of the world. Now, some of

those people have their reasons. Many of them have been defense lawyers and have seen the dark side of police work, let's say, But they and we should be careful not to throw out the baby with the bathwooter, because the police are, for all their faults, perceived alleged faults, they

are at a sharp end of this. They are on streets coping with people that are killed, people that are disfigured, people that are put in hospital with terrible wounds from all the violent things that happen, from gun crime through to machete crime, and people driving cars too fasten running over each other. And so their views should be respected

at many levels. Now, regardless of the government's lack of conviction on this issue, it ultimately works to some extent because it ultimately will get fewer large knives, machetes and similar weapons you know, samurai swords, whatever they might be. It ultimately gets fewer of them on the street. Because if there are fewer of them in the community, there will be a trickle down effect that will at some point help us in our quest to make the streets safer.

If we crack down on cynical, greedy reptiles who sell cheap and nasty weapons to bad kids, it can only help chop it off at the sauce, chop off some of it at the source. If we can get all retailers, legit retailers of knives and axes and all those things to have them under lock and key, that will cut down theft opportunistic theft by lunatic teenagers who aren't deep thinkers.

They can't plan anything, they're not heavy thinkers. And if you can block them at the spot where they might steal something and then run outside and hit somebody with it, that is a win. It's just like the big effort that was made, it has been made and continues to be made to cut down the sails and the theft

of spray paint cans to beat the graffiti boom. If you walk into Bunnings or any big hardware shop, the spray cans are locked up behind the mesh cabinets there and you have to go over and ask an assistant who makes an assessment of your age and propensity for doing the wrong thing, and then unlocks it and you buy what you want. But it means that a you've been sort of looked at, and b you're not stealing

it because it's behind a padlock. This sort of restriction makes it harder for essentially lazy, stupid kids who act on impulse. Now let's have an example from the past. It's about one hundred years since my great grandfather was a policeman between the wars in Melbourne, and in that time, in the nineteen twenties, post World War One, there were a lot of guns around, a lot of handguns around.

And one reason, of course was that there'd been World War One and before that the Boar War, and Australians went to the war and they came home with servannirs and many of them brought home army pistols. They brought home pistols they'd servenired from the enemy. You know, we've talked about this on this show before. I remember a family in Gippsland that had, you know, half a dozen lugers or something from World War One. This was a pretty typical thing in the bad old days or the

good old days. Guys would come home from the war with the pistols and all sorts of weaponry. And in the twenties, the governments of the day around Australia, I think, were a bit worried about certain things. They're worried about the rise of communist activism and are worried I think about probably a rising crime. Because twenties was a pretty willing time. A lot of people who've been in the

war were disturbed by it. They were the prayers, They were angry, they were injured, some of them were suicidal. They were aggressive. And for those guys to have you know, forty five caliber Webly pistols under their pillow was not always a great thing because it could lead to many bad things. And so the government said, okay, let's cut

down on these, let's register handguns. And also they brought in a law that said you can't go selling handguns in hardware shops, which they used to be sold, you know, from the gold rushes. Until nineteen twenty five or nineteen twenty seven or something. You could buy a handgun, a revolver, or a semi automatic cold pistol for that matter, in a hardware shop or any gun shop or anybody that

basically wanted to sell them. They stopped that, and obviously it didn't remove every handgun from every street in Australia, but it cut down the number of them. It made it harder to get them, and it meant that every time the police arrested someone in the street with a handgun, which was you know, it was then illegal to carry a concealed weapon, they had the law to back them to remove it and confiscate it, and that was one

less handgun on the street. We saw the same thing applied seventy years later in nineteen ninety six post port Arth, when the governments around Australia more or less held and said, okay, finally we're going to bite the bullet and we will essentially ban semi automatic weapons and these sort of semi military type weapons, which should become pretty common in Australia posts World War Two right through to the nineties because a lot of people weren't hunting and so on, and

you could buy semi automatic weapons, and so many people had them. Funny thing in my own family, my mother and my grandmother both handed in semi automatic twenty two rifles. My grandmother earlier than that, back in the seventies, had handed in several handguns because her father, the old retired copper, had kept several that clearly he had taken away from criminals, and he'd forgotten to hand them in, and so when

he died, she found an x amount. I don't know if there were two or three or what they were. She handed them into the police, and I suppose they were logged properly and disposed of or else the police just put them in their glove foxes. I don't know. But anyway, the point is it did help remove guns from the community. And if you cut the numbers down, it means the opportunity for opportunistic theft is cut and it means, yeah, sure, cashed up crooks they can buy handguns.

We all know that if you've got five grand, six grand, eight grand, ten thousand dollars or more, you can contact underworld sources who can obtain any sort of weaponry for you at a price, and you pay the money and you get the gun. That's true. However, every silly kid from out in the burbs that's running around fighting each other, they haven't got that sort of money and they can't

access that sort of firepower. What the laws did was remove thousands of handguns and tens of thousands of long arms from the community, so that it meant that every idiot burglar, every idiot kid couldn't just push open a shed door or somebody's back door and put their hand on a weapon and steal it, because suddenly those weapons were either handed it during an amnestem, weren't there, or what's just as effective, probably they were locked up in

secure safes, which made it a lot harder to steal them. And therefore it's clear and this is not a popular view among shooters because they get stirred up about these things, but the reality is that the tougher rules have made it harder for idiots and thieves to put their hands on guns at the drop of a hat. It's made it that much harder. It hasn't made it harder for cashed up crooks, sophisticated crooks, no, no, no, But it has at least made black market weapons extremely expensive, and

that in itself isn't a bad thing. What's better an illegal handgun for sale for ten thousand dollars or for sale for two hundred. Well, I think that ten thousand dollars options better. It just reduces the numbers. Now, we can't prove a negative. You never can, so we'll never know how many lives have been saved by the laws that have removed all those handguns and all those many more long arms from the community, leaving thinner pickings for the crooks. But have no doubt that it has saved lives.

It must have saved lives, probably scores of lives, in some way or another, because we have a bigger population than we ever had. We've got a pretty excitable population. We've got ethnic groups that staying to dislike each other intensely, and the easy availability of weapons would only tend to accelerate our society into becoming more like America and South America and various other places where there are too many

guns and too many angry people. There's another similarity between those sort of band or semi band controlled weapons and the machetes now they aren't essential. The reality is this, regardless of what we all think our rights are. And I mean, if I've got a semi automatic and I've got a machete in the boot, I'm not going to cause much harm because I'm a very respectable, middle aged man and I'm not inclined to go, you know, down the street chasing other people and entering into gang warfare

and trading in drugs and all the rest of it. However, people like me are not the problem. The problem is all the other guys that do the bad things, and in the real world, we don't need to make it easy for them by having all these things at their fingertips. In the real world, semi automatic weapons are not that

essential to farmers or even professional shooters. To be fair, of course, many farmers and professional shooters and other sporting shooters did have semi automatic weapons back when it was legal to have them. As I just said, my mother and my grandmother handed in semi automatic rifles post nineteen ninety six. Most families, farming families and others did do that. Many truckloads of them were handed in. But were they really needed. Well no, because you can use a bolt

action rifle effectively. You've got to kill a sheep or a cow or a horse or something on a farm, or shoot at kangaroos, or shoot it whatever it is you're shooting at, you can use a bolt action rifle very effectively. Really, is it vital to have a semi automatic I have said they're back in the drought of sixty seven. Ye oh, such and such a farm I had to shoot three thousand sheep. And you know he would have got tennis elbow if he'd had to cock the rifle with a bolt each time. Maybe so, but

that is a once in a lifetime event. That isn't really an issue for which you need an automatic rifle. It's just not true. Really. Besides which, most good hunting rifles, deer rifles and the like, most of them are bolt action. Anyway, because semi automatics to some extent are derivative of military use, one could make a sweeping assertion and say that semi automatic weapons are derived largely from a military background, and

therefore to some extent are anti personnel weapons. Now, we want our army to have those, we want some people in our police force to have those, but we don't want every Tom Dick and Harry to have them for a good reason. But every Tom Dick and Harry should be entitled to have a bolt action rifle or something if they have a legitimate reason, if they're sporting shooters or farmers or hunt you know, professional hunters, whatever, of

course they should. Now, what's this got to do with machetes, Well, got a bit to do with the Machetes are no use. Let me say this and I will argue with anybody about this out in the real world, in Victoria, in Southern Australia, in Tasmania, in New Zealand. Machetes are no use. They are a nasty thing that is neither one thing or other. It's not a farm tool. You go to a farm where they've got trees and they've got bush, and they've got all sorts of things to cope with.

They have full size axes. Yes, they have chainsaws. They have hand saws. They have pole saws for cutting branches that are above your head. They have shovels for digging. They have fern hooks and to implement now, but I grew up with them. Fern hooks and long handled slashes. These are for cutting thistles, for cutting ferns, and they have hoes for cutting thistles and things, but not machetes. They just aren't much use. You want to cut kindling, you use a real axe. Some little old ladies might

use the tomahook. But I can recall my father, who was an expert axeman, saying tomahawks are no use except to cut your fingers off or you know, maybe it's the sort of thing that people who couldn't lift a full size act can lift a tomahawk. But they're really not much use. You could kill a chock with one. Yeah, you can cut your fingers off with one accidentally while you're trying to split kindling, because they're not particularly good at that. They're not heavy enough. Machetes are even worse.

They've got this long, sharp blade that's effectively very dangerous for you to use when you're handling it yourself. And what do you do with it. Well, they're made for jungle. They're made to slash your way through the jungle. They're made for cane cutters. Cane knives we use for cane cutters to cut cane. They're made to cut bamboo again

in the jungle. Now have been some use for them are in the cane fields of course of northern Australia and other places, and those sort of machetes bush knives call them what you like, they are and were useful in that sort of jungly setting where there's undergrowth that's very thick and heavy and you've got to hack your way through it and you want to something in your hand,

if there's snakes, et cetera. But I have to say that in all these years of traveling around and seeing other places seeing what people actually use, the only place I personally have seen machetes alias bush knives in use is in Papua New Guinea, and that is where people use them for a lot of things. Really, they're a very handy thing around the villages in Papua New Guinea where there's continual undergrowth and where they like to hack stuff away. Also I noticed another thing in Papua New Guinea.

Hundreds and hundreds of people have very nasty scars on their heads and on their arms, and I saw a lot of disfigured people who have been badly cut. And there are also quite a lot of dead people there who have been very badly cut. So even in those few countries where those instruments, or those implements or those weapons are in use, they're used more often for bad purposes than good ones. Thanks for listening. Life and Crimes is a Sunday Herald Sun production for true crime Australia.

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