3 days ago
Victoria and WA's surging crime stats expose The Conversation expert's claim that Australia is becoming less violent
The term 'gaslighting' was born in the arts, but it found its true home in academia.
And today, nowhere is the practice more pervasive than in Australia's universities.
As readers know all too well, these institutions have become safe havens for left-leaning gaslighters, skilled at persuading the public that what they see and hear can't be trusted.
It's a culture built on denial, where tidy theories and carefully scrubbed statistics are paraded out to wash away the fears, frustrations, and daily struggles of ordinary Australians.
The latest example comes courtesy of Griffith University's Samara McPhedran, who confidently informs the nation that violent crime isn't rising.
Such a claim presents a very narrow-minded version of reality.
It's the kind of contrived intellectual thought that can only survive in the stale, insulated air of a lecture theatre, far from the streets where the damage is actually done.
Perhaps Dr. McPhedran should speak with the families in Victoria watching their state's crime rate surge by 15 percent in a single year, each percentage point measured in stolen cars, broken bones, and lives violently knocked off course.
Or she should consider the lengths the Victorian Allan government have gone to recently in an attempt to reduce violent crime, including the bizarre move to place more than 40 bins at police stations across the state so machete-wielding gangsters can safely dispose of their weaponry.
She might then visit the residents of Perth's suburbs, where more than 25 suburbs have endured crime surges topping 30 percent in just 12 months.
Perhaps she should speak with the parents who bolt their doors before the sun slips behind the rooftops, with the shopkeepers sweeping glass from their doorways for the twentieth time this year, with the pensioners who have abandoned the short walk to the corner shop because the risk now outweighs the reward.
Instead, she remains sealed inside a bubble, an elitist echo chamber utterly detached from the realities and hardships of the people whose lives her theories claim to explain.
If McPhedran's analysis reads like a masterclass in sidestepping the obvious, that's because it is.
She leans on decades-old datasets, sanding down the jagged spikes of recent surges with long-term averages that bury the scale of the problem and don't engage with other aspects, such as recent rises in crime rates generally.
In Victoria alone, police logged 627,268 criminal offences over a single twelve-month stretch (a shocking 17.1 per cent jump).
Youth offenders now dominate robbery figures.
In the 12 months to March 2025, according to the Crime Statistics Agency a range of theft offences were up significantly: motor vehicle theft was up 39.3 per cent, theft of number plates up 49.6 per cent and retail theft up 38.6 per cent.
Cost-of-living pressures have driven this type of crime to levels that are breaking small businesses.
Knife attacks have cut through once-secure communities, turning quiet shopping strips into places where tension lingers with every step.
Yet McPhedran waves it away, insisting that reliable statistics aren't always available and that violent crime rates have fallen when compared to decades ago.
When the evidence refuses to fit, she doesn't grapple with it.
Unlike the principal research fellow, the public doesn't have the luxury of retreating into a spreadsheet.
They live with the fallout of policy failure every day.
They watch as the Albanese government's soft-on-crime stance emboldens offenders who know that the most likely consequence of repeat theft or assault is a token caution, not a meaningful sentence.
They see state governments trial diversion programs that sound virtuous in a seminar room but collapse in the chaos of real streets with real victims.
And while those failures multiply, academics step forward to supply the intellectual alibi for political leaders more intent on shielding their ideology than shielding their citizens.
This is the point where the insulated arrogance of modern academia ceases to be an oddity and becomes a political weapon.
Theories that clash with lived experience might remain harmless curiosities if they stayed buried in dusty journals, but they never do.
They seep into ministerial speeches and bureaucratic talking points; they harden into legislative proposals.
They turn genuine public concern into a 'perception problem' to be managed, not solved.
Once that narrative takes root, the facts are bent until they break.
The modern university system is built to protect that narrative.
Scholars who dare to challenge progressive orthodoxy on crime, immigration, or public order find themselves quietly cut off from funding, promotions, and platforms.
Those who repeat it are crowned as 'independent experts,' their words treated as gospel by journalists eager to paint public dissent as nothing more than hysteria.
The result is a closed loop in which those most insulated from the damage their ideas cause are the very ones most empowered to write the laws everyone else must live under.
Over time, this drip-feed of denial trains the public to second-guess themselves—until eventually, we begin to gaslight ourselves.
Mention the knife-wielding teenagers roaming your streets, and you'll be branded a paranoid provocateur.
Point to the boarded-up shopfronts in your town, and you'll be told you're cherry-picking.
Describe a loved one's assault on public transport, and you'll get a lecture about 'isolated incidents.'
The aim is not to convince you you're wrong; it's to make you doubt you were ever right.
This gaslighting reaches far beyond crime statistics; it's now woven into the reflexes of Australia's academic and political class.
The unspoken assumption is always that ordinary people misread reality, while they alone hold a higher, purer truth.
In a university setting, that arrogance is tedious – but in the halls of power, it's lethal.
Crime policy leaves no margin for theoretical blunders; every wrong assumption is paid for in screaming sirens, scared citizens, and suburbs drained of trust.
Australians deserve far more than ivory-tower ignorance.
They deserve leaders willing to face brutal truths—men and women prepared to say plainly that crime is climbing and the nation is hurting.
They also deserve to know that the truth on their streets outweighs the fairy tales pushed by officials whose paychecks depend on avoiding inconvenient facts.
And they deserve academics who leave the seminar room for the suburbs, who speak with business owners, walk with police, and listen—really listen—to victims.
Because only then can their theories carry the weight of the world they claim to explain.
John Mac Ghlionn is a researcher and essayist who writes on psychology and social relations. He has a keen interest in social dysfunction and media manipulation.
