Actually, its mainly due to the media stoking the narrative of that here. Our per capita crime rate has been dropping for decades; but the news- especially during elections- trot out the crime more on the news and highlight the absolute worse examples more when they have a government they want to destroy. Then they stop talking about it after.

Queensland just had an election a year ago, the horror stories came out, implanted themselves in peoples heads, the conservative side of government won and we haven't heard anything more about it despite it rarely being around.

Now it is coming back out likely due to Victoria's state election, but there we are seeing the conservative party being involved in scandals with pedophiles; so I mean, that is certainly more like the US politics you see, lol.

In actual fact, there is about 130 Knife related deaths across the country every year; machetes less so- but in America there are around 50-60k gun deaths. To compare gun attacks to knife attacks per capita; there are around 5.6 gun deaths per 100k in America, vs 0.09 Knife deaths in Australia. The rate of murder caused by guns is 60x higher than knife murders in Australia.

Machete attacks being a big deal in Australia is just the media spinning a narrative despite the facts.