How much of this is officials, and how much of it is a coach?
I'm sure there are coaches who will happily burn the sport to secure a win, I suspect Norp AFLW is doing just that, while many of the other teams are doing the best they can to play a more attractive style. Norp will play attractive when the game is on the terms they accept, but when it isn't going to plan they turn it into a pile of sludge.
Think of the comments over the last season of so from both Voss and Fraser about not just wanting success but also to play an attractive brand. That is what gets +95K to the MCG, not just the chance of a win!
See, Clarkson Sacked!
Which do you think is the AFL and AFL Club priority, 95K watching a potential win or 50k watching a certainty?
Watch the game. You'll get your answer. Its got nothing to do with the coach
Yes, it was poor and inconsistent umpiring that I'm sure both teams found frustrating.
There seemed to be little communication between the umpires ... except when they had a pow wow to determine a lasso free. Something as inconsequential as an out of bounds seems to be more important than whether a player gets taken out of a marking contest or ducks into a tackle
Mandatory reporting in Victoria requires certain professionals like doctors, nurses, teachers, police, etc to report evidence or belief of child physical or sexual abuse to child protection authorities. There's no requirement to report crimes committed by children.
I see.
What happens in Vic when a minor is apprehended in a criminal act and not charged but redirected, who are they referred to?
Where I live they are referred to a specific office, an NGO that is compelled to report minors referred to them as potential abuse or neglect cases, they get a case manager immediately, it's an overwatch mechanism, every single kid that passes through the doors becomes part of the stats even if they are never charged. Whether this is right or wrong isn't the debate, what I'm getting at is how stats can vary region to region, state to state. And the whole reporting infrastructure is handled and managed by the court system.
It's the main reason for the big push Federally to set a standard, because the people I talk to tell me that at the moment quirks of reporting cause bias in the distribution of funds. Oddly, if you report more you are classified as wasting the money, and if you sweep it under the carpet you are doing a good job and get funding to extend the program.
This even applies to other types of funding, for example travel through Sleepy Hollow CBD and you see premise after premise vacant, perhaps 2/3 of premises are empty, for lease or abandoned. They build shopping malls that are state of the art and remain closed at 9:30am or 10am weekdays. Take the same drive on the other side of the bay for the Mornington Peninsula and you have to join a queue to get a premise lease, occupancy is something like 98% at the moment. Off the back of a handful of select projects the Bellarine is reported as a successful example, this is because of what they do not report. The net result is the Bellarine gets roughly 5x to 7x the per capita Federal funding relative to the other side of the bay. How people count numbers matters.
There are two separate programs/organisations. One deals with child protection (children at risk), the other with juvenile justice (children interacting with the justice system). There's bound to be crossover, but I don't believe there's coordination between the two other than at an informal level.
I was in Sleepy Hollow for a medical appointment last week and the place is buzzing; very few vacant buildings, lots of construction, hard to find a car park, and pedestrians everywhere.
CoGG has nearly twice the population of Mornington Shire, a major port, a domestic and international airport, the remnants of a once thriving manufacturing industry, agriculture, viticulture, and tourism, and is the gateway to western Victoria. It has an annual growth rate of 2.21% compared to Victoria's 1.10% and Mornington Shire's 0.80%. Of course the Bellarine is going to get more funding, regardless of which party holds the purse strings.
The perception of a bias possibly exposes a misunderstanding of the generalised mandatory reporting that is in place in Victoria, that is not the same in other states by the way, at least not yet.
I'm happy to be proven wrong, but my understanding the Vic child protection act requires it for all child or youth crime, while and the public assume mandatory reporting only means mandatory reporting of child abuse. That means in Vic the mandatory reporting laws mean mandatory reporting of all children and youths involved in crime as well, they assume a child or youth involved in crime is a victim of some circumstance.
That is not the case in all Australian states, where officers have discretion over reporting in many cases, it's one of the big Federal issues to get it all standardized in the long term. Uniforms laws and reporting across Australia, but it's not there yet.
If you are in doubt, you can always get it clarified by Bec Judd!
You're on the wrong track there LP.
Mandatory reporting in Victoria requires certain professionals like doctors, nurses, teachers, police, etc to report evidence or belief of child physical or sexual abuse to child protection authorities. There's no requirement to report crimes committed by children.
However, there are significant inconsistencies across jurisdictions when it comes to "child crime". For example, the age of criminal responsibility is 10 for Commonwealth offences and in New South Wales, Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia, Northern Territory, and Tasmania, 12 in Victoria, and 14 in the ACT. In all jurisdictions, it's still the prosecution's responsibility to prove that children under 14 could distinguish between right and wrong. From 14 to 17, children are presumed to understand right and wrong, but are subject to milder sanctions than adults.
How come when it comes to overseas politics, we are happy to discuss back and forth information/quotes from everywhere and anywhere from the other side of the world all without distinction yet in our own backyard and under our own noses unless it ticks all the boxes its dismissed.
And when it does tick all the boxes there is crickets.......
Whys that i wonder.
There's a couple of rather obvious reasons; our bozoes aren't starting wars, disrupting world trade, sending the price of fuel (and everything else) skyrocketing, or threatening to invade former allies, and, most importantly, they don't control a nuclear arsenal.
And we get to vote our bozoes in or out every three or four years.
And they don't lie about being carried away from Ground Zero by two big firemen
Then there's the fact that this thread is specifically about the senile malignant narcissist in the White House and there are other threads about local politics.
When using the ABS statistics, or those from the Victorian Crime Statistics Agency, etc, it’s worth drilling down to see what limitations there are. The States and Territories don’t necessarily collect the same data or in the same way.
With that qualification, the ABS data shows a downward trend for most crimes across all jurisdictions.
But then there’s vile crimes like child sex abuse that aren’t reported and remain at appallingly high levels.
I wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that Victoria has more cars and more people than all of the other States except NSW. In fact, Queensland has a higher per capita rate of car thefts.
It's probably best to rely on ABS statistics than data provided by vested interests.
so the stats are fake are they because they are not from ABS.
ok
Yes, that's spot on. There are good reasons why most people don't trust insurance companies.
Another unwanted record under this incompetent trainwreck of a government.
I wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that Victoria has more cars and more people than all of the other States except NSW. In fact, Queensland has a higher per capita rate of car thefts.
It's probably best to rely on ABS statistics than data provided by vested interests.
I listened to an interesting if depressing discussion of child sex abuse on the wireless this morning. Some of the key points:
One in four children experience sexual abuse.
One in ten adult men admit to having sexual feelings about children.
While most abused children don’t go on to commit sex crimes, the rate of sex crime offending was 11% higher among confirmed abused children than a control group without sexual abuse.
Programs to raise awareness of child sexual abuse are being condemned as “woke” by some politicians.
Only a relatively small percentage of child sex abuse occurs in institutions; most is committed within families or by close friends. While working with children checks may help to reduce institutional child sex abuse, they do nothing to prevent the vast majority of cases.
That typifies the problem, and is relevant to other crime; there’s a limited bucket of money with competing demands, and governments often choose the more obvious but less effective options.
Obviously, the justice system can’t deal with one in ten adult males, so how do we ensure that they don’t go on to offend?
Two men found guilty of murdering three men after a fight outside the Salt nightclub in South Yarra in Melbourne three years ago, have each been sentenced to 30 years in jail.
Five other men will serve lesser sentences for the murder of one of the men in the fight.
The seven men were found guilty of murdering 19-year-old James Huynh, who died after being attacked with samurai swords and machetes.
Cuong Quoc Lam, 26 and Hung Tu Van, 29, were also found guilty of the murders of Mr Huynh's two cousins, who drowned after jumping into the Yarra River to escape that attack.
They have been sentenced to 30 years in jail with a 23-year non-parole period.
Be interested to see what makes up those stats. "The number of criminal incidents recorded by Victoria Police in the year to 31 March 2026 was 468,711, down 1.0% from 473,518 incidents recorded in the same period last year."
June 2025: 15,909 police officers (Total workforce: 21,332) June 2024: 16,059 police officers (Total workforce: 21,715) June 2023: 15,842 police officers (Total workforce: 21,326)
I found estimates of 15,600 police this year.
Those numbers are 'whats recorded'. The number of police officers available to record these crimes are going the opposite way to the number of crimes. I suspect that a large part of the 'drop in crime' is simply things are not being recorded.
I suspect if there was 0 police officers around to record things, crimes recorded would magically disappear too.
My son has the office next to the head of the Crime Statistics Agency but I'm not sure that he'd be willing to ask her for clarification. He has told me about in-house presentations she's given and she does appear on the wireless from time to time.
Only those crimes that are the subject of formal reports by victims or incidents attended by VicPol are included in the stats so yes, fewer police = less reports logged. However, back in the day you were more likely to get a crack with a baton or a punch in the guts than be charged. Topless "waitresses" definitely wouldn't have reported sexual assault by VFL footballers back then either.
One of the big differences between the "good old days" and now is that we only had the Truth newspaper to tell us how bad things were. Now we have the Murdoch papers, Sky News, shock jocks and influencers all banging on about how bad things are.
