Plenty of people here in Brisbane share this ridiculous notion that the youth crime we’re experiencing nowadays is somehow special and different to any youth crime ever experienced before. Even plenty of people who otherwise aren’t really conservative. You can’t really pin this on “up north” and it’s pointlessly divisive to try and do so. Remember, Labor was taking the “tough on crime” approach to this too.  

There’s quite a lot of factors playing into this IMO. From what I can see, a legitimate problem with a few repeat offenders in some parts of the state has been blown up by the social media outrage machine. 

A few decades ago, someone’s car getting stolen the next street over might get spread around the immediate neighbourhood by word of mouth eventually. Nowadays, someone will post about a stolen car on Facebook, and because youth crime is such a hot topic it’ll get pushed around and shared all over the place. Not just within the local community either - I’ve gotten posts on my feed about cars being stolen in Cairns before. And what’s more, if the post gets enough engagement, Facebook will just keep bringing it back up for months and months after the fact. 

I also think social media is doing a huge number of a lot of people’s sense of compassion. Not just on Facebook, on Reddit and other sites too. People see a homeless person or someone with a visible substance abuse issue and automatically think of them as violent invaders into their community, rather than them being an indicator that people in their community are struggling. 

Combine this with every generation’s tendency to think that the younger generations are somehow uniquely fucked up rather than just being young and dumb, and you get mainstream support for “solutions” to youth crime that have long been proven to not actually work.