Free haircuts for all

One of my friends has been making merry with newspaper photos of 'gang members', typically with impressive beards and/or the 'bald as a bandicoot' haircut affected by your author. On reading the latest announcement in The War on Crime (or merely on 'Gangs' or 'Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs'), this time from Opposition Leader Tony Abbott, I wondered whether someone will suggest that we solve the OMG problem by simply offering free trims to the dangerous desperadoes.

Mr Abbott is reported as promising to invest $10 million on headquarters for his Anti Gang Squad, to be built in Western Sydney (a location where there are marginal voters even if there aren't that many OMG members ... who might of course get on their steeds of steel - sorry, I'm channelling Barnaby Joyce - and move to another location).

While visiting small businesses in the marginal seat of Greenway, he said the west is an appropriate place for the national headquarters of a gang-fighting squad.

He pledged $10 million to set up the headquarters.

"Sydney has historically been the gang crime capital of Australia," he said.

"Gang crime certainly is not confined to Sydney. We've seen recent evidence of gang crime in Melbourne. Gang crime is obviously very serious in Adelaide.

"But the bikie gangs in particular have long been headquartered in Sydney and that's why western Sydney is an appropriate place for our national violent gang squad."

Is gang crime so very obviously very serious in Adelaide? Do we indeed need new laws and new squads, with or without expensive real estate among the Westies?

My cynicism may be forgiven when the same ABC report notes that -

His western Sydney blitz also included an announcement of $5 million to upgrade local soccer fields in the marginal electorate of Lindsay.

Throw in an extra million and we can lease a Delilah, a recording of Tom Jones, a few shearers and a Kojak lollypop or two to make the crime go away.

The ABC notes Mr Abbott's injunction: "And I say to the people of western Sydney, don't be conned again." The spirit of leadership in an election that has been largely devoid of substantive policies was demonstrated in the report that -

Mr Abbott's day was scripted and tightly controlled, so much so that he cancelled a peak-hour train ride when a bus load of young Labor members also turned up

... a cancellation redolent of complaints by South Australian ALP Attorney-General Atkinson - responsible for that state's problematical anti-OMG statute - that he was being assailed by big bad computer gamers. As Edmund Wilson said in a cogent review of Tolkien, "ooh, those awful orcs", or spotty emos in black tshirts fretting about World of Warcraft and similar online childminding mechanisms. John Curtin, Bob Menzies, Paul Hasluck or Billy Hughes might have been somewhat braver.