Victoria didn’t fight youth crime; it funded a prop department. Thirteen million taxpayer dollars bought a fleet of red steel confessionals—“machete amnesty bins”—that were supposed to coax armed offenders into posting their blades like overdue library books. They didn’t. The only things that went in were drizzle, Doritos dust and ministerial talking points. Now the bins are being carted to the smelter, and the government wants points for “circular economy.” That’s not policy. That’s recycling the scene of the crime. This is Machete Bin Laden2.
Let’s be clear: this wasn’t a mistake around the edges. It was fantasy at the core. The premise assumed the most impulsive, least rule-bound people in the state would voluntarily travel to a council car park, in daylight, to self-incriminate into a mailbox painted road-cone red. It assumed the sight of a bin would do more than lighting, patrols, youth workers, courts that run on time or a cop at the right corner at the right hour. It assumed a press conference could substitute for outcomes. Thirteen million dollars later, we’re melting the evidence and calling it progress.
And there’s the insult: the government talks like this was a neutral pilot that “ran its course.” No. It ran our patience. It wasted scarce money in a cost-of-living crunch and called it toughness. It swapped the hard, boring graft of prevention and enforcement for a giant theatre prop and a string of hi-vis photo ops where ministers carefully didn’t touch the product they were selling. Every hesitant answer about “inconclusive data” and “positive momentum” is an admission that there was never a performance target beyond the press gallery’s camera count.
If you want a body count of what $13 million could have bought, here it is: dozens of full-time youth mentors with names and caseloads; targeted police operations that actually seize weapons from the people who use them; basic urban fixes—lighting, cameras, security screens—where the risk is real; court capacity so victims get justice this decade. Instead, we got a statewide art installation for pigeons, and now a scrap-metal line item to tidy the embarrassment.
Jacinta Allan’s leadership on this has been all headline, no spine. The Premier gazed at a serious problem and reached for a prop. When it flopped, we got the familiar repertoire: call it a pilot, invoke community, throw in “holistic” and “trauma-informed,” and walk briskly past the price tag. It’s government as mood board—soft language, hard bill, nothing in the middle that reduces harm.
Spare us the sustainability PR. Melting down a bad idea doesn’t make it good. It just converts sunk costs into slag. The only circular economy here is the spin cycle: crisis → announcement → photo op → silence → scrap heap → next announcement. Meanwhile, shopkeepers still lock up early, workers still cross the car park with keys between their fingers, and police still do the dangerous, unphotogenic work that never gets a ribbon cutting.
What should have happened is what always works and is always less glamorous: start small, measure hard, scale only what reduces offences. Publish the numbers monthly—items seized, incidents down, hotspots cooled—and let the public see the line move. Fund humans before hardware. Put the money at the corner where the offence happens, not the podium where the quote lands. And if you absolutely must unveil a bin, make it a Budget Honesty Bin: no press release leaves Spring Street until a minister deposits one concrete metric they’ll be audited on in six months’ time.
This is not about dunking on symbolism. It’s about refusing substitutes for substance. When government reaches for props, it’s telling you it has run out of answers or courage. The machete bins were not naïve; they were evasive. They bought time, headlines and nothing else. Now they’re gone, and the danger they were meant to tame hasn’t noticed.
The Hollow Centre verdict: Jacinta Allan didn’t just scrap the bins—she scrapped $13 million and whatever trust remained that this government can distinguish between announcements and action. No more set dressing. No more mailbox miracles. Put resources where harm occurs, publish outcomes that can’t be spun, and treat safety like a duty, not a backdrop. Until then, the only thing those bins disarmed was accountability.
– By The Hollow Centre
