$2.4 Million Crane Vandalised in State’s Youth Crime Blitz

A general view of Cairns, Australia, from above taken on April 16, 2021. (Caden Pearson/The Epoch Times)

A north Queensland business is reeling after youths heavily vandalised a $2.4 million (US$1.68 million) crane while bragging about it on social media.

Business managers say an excavator worth $500,000 was also damaged in the attack on the weekend, which comes amid a tide of violent criminal incidents involving juveniles in the state.

In a Snapchat video, the two youths can be seen striking the windscreen of the multi-million-dollar crane in the tropical city of Cairns multiple times with a large piece of timber.

Both young men can be heard swearing, and the subtitle, “[Because] we can,” is displayed along the bottom half of the video.

The vehicle was later found covered with graffiti and seen with a fire extinguisher lodged in the front windscreen, according to images from the company Century Cranes.

“We are unsure whether the equipment will need to be written off as we are still getting that evaluated,” general manager Bianca Wilson told News Corp.

“The problem is if it is, these machines can’t just be bought. There is a two-year wait, so that is going to be problematic.”

She said youths had become increasingly “brazen” in their criminal activity, and she hoped the community did not have to resort to vigilantism.

North Queensland, like much of the state, had to deal with a spike in criminal re-offending from juveniles.

In October 2022, the city of Cairns recorded over 1,000 vehicle thefts that year, according to the Cairns Post.

Residents All Have Stories to Tell

Further south, in the state’s capital of Brisbane, it is common to encounter residents with their own stories or run-ins with youth crime.

In the southern suburb of Underwood, eyewitnesses told The Epoch Times they saw a youth of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander appearance stealing a utility vehicle before crashing it into a tree.

A vehicle allegedly stolen and driven into a tree along Centennial Street, Underwood, in Brisbane, Australia, taken on Dec. 15, 2022. (Courtesy of an Underwood resident)

While another resident in Salisbury saw two youths—through his home’s CCTV—eyeing his parked vehicle from the street. When he ran outside to speak to them, the two ran off.

To the southwest, bus drivers have simply refused to drive to the suburbs of Inala and Forest Lake, citing the high volume of violent incidents occurring on public transport.

“Since Christmas, it has gotten even worse; there have been about 24 incidents; assault, spitting, abuse, threatening drivers, passengers attacking the bus from outside with bottles and rocks,” Tom Brown, assistant state secretary of the Rail, Tram, and Bus Union told The Australian newspaper.

Yet the worst and most notable incidents have been alleged murder and manslaughter incidents in the north of the city.

In Wilston, a 43-year-old man’s body was found on Newmarket Road after he had been fatally stabbed. Police allege a 17-year-old used a 45-centimetre knife (17.7 inches)—which authorities describe as a “small machete”—to attack the man.

While 41-year-old Emma Lovell in Brisbane’s North Lakes was also fatally stabbed after she and her husband confronted two 17-year-old youths who had broken into their property on Boxing Day.

Weak Laws Blamed for Chaos

Weak penalties and sentencing have been blamed for the ongoing crime wave.

Former Premier Campbell Newman said the criminal justice system was in “terminal decline.”

“For almost the entire period from 1989 to 2023, apart from five years of conservative governments, the Labor Party has created a system through the appointment of judges and magistrates that interpret the laws,” he previously told The Epoch Times.

“We have seen, over the last month-and-a-half, things that should have never happened. We should never have got to the point where people are going out with knives and feel they can use them,” he said.

Queensland federal Senator Matt Canavan said incidents of law-breaking have increased since 2019 since the current government changed the Youth Justice Act to be softer on imprisonment.

“In the words of the government’s Explanatory Note about these changes, they had the ‘objective of removing legislative barriers to enable young people to be granted bail,” he wrote in an op-ed in News Corp’s The Courier Mail.

“The changes told judges that the principle should be ‘detention as a last resort,’ and that ‘the bail decision-making framework’ incorporated an ‘explicit presumption in favour of release.’”

Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk has tried to toughen the laws in response to the incidents, including upping penalties for crimes committed at night, increasing the maximum penalty for stealing a car, and raising penalties for boasting about crime online.

“They need to have programs … to see that they will actually have work when they leave prison,” Palaszczuk told reporters.

“Some of these young people have complex backgrounds, and … we need to help break that cycle of crime.”

Queensland topped the country with the highest rate of repeat offenders within 12 months, according to Productivity Commission data released on Jan. 24.