Colleen Harkin on The Rita Panahi Show Sky News Australia – 25 August 2025

In this interview, Colleen Harkin appeared on The Rita Panahi Show – Sky News Australia to discuss the IPA’s research on Criminal Justice.

All media appearances posted onto the IPA website are directly related to the promotion and dissemination of IPA research.

Below is a transcript of the interview.

Rita Panahi:

Joining me now for more on this is News Corp Senior Writer, Patrick Carlyon, and research fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs, Colleen Harkin. Patrick, it’s almost as if we need more than just these machete bins.

Patrick Carlyon:

Yes. They’re a joke, aren’t they, really? They’re going to cost a fortune. They’re not going to stop one of these things happening. They’re happening almost every day at the moment. You had that poor bloke last week in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne. He was stabbed 11 times in his own house, and there were grandparents and children in the house. You had five armed robberies where five kids just went from shop to shop, basically, with machetes. Two of them were on bail the next day, I think.

Rita Panahi:

Of course.

Patrick Carlyon:

How the hell does that happen? This has been happening for years. Why hasn’t anything changed? We are afraid.

Rita Panahi:

We are. And I think Andrew Rule made that point, Colleen, that ordinary people are now afraid. I know you live Bayside. How bad is it? Because we’ve had these home invasions, aggravated burglaries. We’ve got 17 a day. I mean, that’s incredible.

Colleen Harkin:

Correct. People are genuinely living in fear. Victoria’s crime rate has increased 20% just in the last 12 months. And the age bracket of 10 to 17 year olds, although they’re responsible for 13% of the crimes, they’re two-thirds responsible for robberies, about half responsible for aggravated burglaries, and about a quarter of car thefts.

So this is our people who are underage; they’re not mature-age people. It’s not petty crime; it is crime that is really putting people fearful of having a quiet suburban life in their suburbs. And the government’s response is to spend $13 million on machete bins thinking that people will comply. I’m sure the police would have loved that $13 million for a few extra police on the road.

Rita Panahi:

It seems mad. And Patrick, one of the reactions from the left seems to be, “Well, let’s lower the age of criminal responsibility. Let’s make it a non-crime for these kids to be inflicting this on society.” I just feel like in this state, it’s not just the current government, it’s not just the police hierarchy, it’s the entire machinery; the entire bureaucracy in the justice system that has just got it so wrong.

Patrick Carlyon:

And look, it’s moved beyond that. I think, as Andrew Rule made the point, we’re afraid. It is actually, it’s not about whether bail is the right thing for a 15-year-old for the 10th time in a row who goes and does it again. It’s about the fact that people are unsafe. And I really do fear that somebody is going to get killed at some point, and all this do-good, feel-good ways of trying to handle this problem are going to look so ridiculous, and we’re going to look at that death and we’re going to say, “This should never have happened.”

Rita Panahi:

Well, there is just this philosophy, Colleen, that if you wrap your arms around these youth offenders, even ones who aren’t youth offenders, that’s the way to rehabilitate them and have them as lawful members of society. But we’ve seen elsewhere, look at Singapore for example. When you have a hard law and order philosophy where people are properly punished, then they are less likely to commit crimes.

Colleen Harkin:

There’s also a very big difference between a young kid doing something stupid and a kid who’s breaking into a home with a machete and stabbing someone.

Rita Panahi:

Yeah, they know that’s wrong.

Colleen Harkin:

They know that is wrong. There is no wrapping your arms around a person like that and saying, “Kumbaya, I hope you’re okay.” We have to actually get serious about, irrelevant of their age, you do know what you’re doing is wrong when you’re stabbing someone and breaking into their home.

Rita Panahi:

Now, people who are old enough to know better were all over the country protesting over the weekend. We saw what’s been described as the largest national rally for Palestine yet; tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people across Australia’s capital cities. Cities were brought to a standstill. Some of these protesters, I’m sure are well-meaning, but a lot of them are saying some terrible things, including denying what happened on October 7.

Channel 7 News Host:

Similar rallies took place around the country demanding the Albanese government sanction Israel. Some activists today calling the October 7 attack a hoax.

Channel 7 Journalist:

In every corner of our country, pro-Palestine protesters shut down city streets in what they say was their largest national action yet. Melbourne lived up to its reputation as the protest capital of Australia, with thousands blocking cars, trams, and pedestrians on what’s now become a regular Sunday afternoon in our CBD.

Protest Bystander:

We’ve come down to go to the bank and we’ve just seen all the commotion, and we were just like, “What’s going on here?”

Protestor Speaker:

I can guarantee you, every single Palestinian standing today does not recognise the statehood that the Albanese government has called for. It is a Palestine from the river to the sea.

Rita Panahi:

From the river to the sea. We know what that means. And activists at the Sydney march were treated to this diatribe from former Australian of the Year, Grace Tame.

Grace Tame:

If we can get 300,000 people to block the bridge, we can get 3 million. We can get more.

Rita Panahi:

Well, Colleen, how do you see this? I know there’s a lot of Australians who just hate to see these overseas conflicts brought here, and those sorts of ancient hatreds. But there’s no doubt that amongst the left, they are very much activated by this issue.

Colleen Harkin:

For sure. To me, this is visual evidence of the failure of multiculturalism in Australia, because Australia’s been built on thousands of people coming from all different countries, all different religions, and putting their past problems behind them in order for us to move forward and living together. And what we’re seeing now imported onto our streets is images of people marching behind Iranian dictators, the burning of our own flag, aligning themselves with people who don’t appreciate or value our freedoms, our equality of women in particular, and homosexuality. And they’re lining up, effectively recognising and supporting terrorism, and it’s on our streets. It’s very worrying for what’s happening to the divisiveness of our own culture and the undermining of our own values.

Rita Panahi:

But it’s not just imported hatreds, because as we saw there with Grace Tame, and there were plenty of others at these marches across the country, Patrick, there’s plenty of university students, born and bred in Australia, generations of heritage in Australia who also hate this country, who think we are built on stolen land, that we should be ashamed of modern Australia, and they share those sentiments as well.

Patrick Carlyon:

Look, it comes from the extreme left. It’s been allowed to fester for too long, hasn’t it, really? We saw a Hamas flag in Brisbane at that rally on the weekend. I mean, how are these things being, I’m not saying they’re allowed, but they’re not being put down the way that they ought to be in a reflexive way. We can’t have this sort of chatter. We can’t have people behind the microphone saying, “Israel should be made extinct. Let’s make it extinct tomorrow.” What about the Jewish community? They’ve been suffering this really badly for more than 18 months now. How safe do they feel? We’ve pandered to these extreme elements in a way that has allowed those elements to get bolder, I think.

Rita Panahi:

I spoke to a leader in the Jewish community recently and they said they’ve never seen the environment like this, and so many people within the Jewish community are now looking at a plan B, looking at moving away.

Colleen Harkin:

Yeah, to leave Australia.

Rita Panahi:

Which is really quite shameful. Now to a disturbing report from ABC, and they deserve praise for the investigative work they’ve done here in revealing the manner in which some activists are being radicalised, and that these rallies have been attended by a convicted ISIS recruiter and a radical Muslim preacher. Have a look.

ABC Journalist:

This is the moment a protester came face to face with a convicted terrorist on the Sydney Harbour Bridge. ABC investigations has revealed how supporters of the Islamic State terrorist group, or ISIS, are exploiting the anti-war movement to radicalise young Australians. This man is convicted ISIS recruiter, Youssef Uweinat. He was jailed for encouraging teenagers to launch attacks. Uweinat walked free less than two years ago without any restrictions after he convinced a judge he’d de-radicalised. But at the Gaza War protest, he posed on the bridge with this flag. It’s a common Islamic symbol called the Shahada, which has been appropriated by ISIS and al-Qaeda. He was at the protest with a notorious preacher, Wisam Haddad.

Wisam Haddad:

If you attack Allah, then you are going to be met with men who love death more than you love life.

Rita Panahi:

Patrick, we are seeing some virulent anti-Semitism at some of these rallies. We are seeing anti-vest propaganda. We are hearing about people being radicalised. This is going to be a lasting problem. This isn’t going to go away once this conflict is finished.

Patrick Carlyon:

It’s scary. And look, I agree with you. That’s a great piece of journalism there. My fear is, they’ve got one example here where these radicals are coming into protests where very extreme language is being used as it is, are there a dozen other sets of radicals actually seeking the same sorts of things at the moment? It does make you really scared, because they could do something. They could actually blow up something. They could maim dozens of people. And this is happening here in Australia today. And as we were saying, the fever is getting hotter.

Rita Panahi:

Yeah, absolutely. And Colleen, we saw that during the caliphate, the number of Australians who went over to join the caliphate and to fight with Islamic State. So we know that element exists already.

Colleen Harkin:

Yeah. And Rita, you can only live in peace if your enemy lets you. And so what’s happening here is that we’re allowing this enemy-fighting thing to continue. It’s not being shut down, to Patrick’s point earlier. That we’re allowing it to fester in our own suburbs, in our own streets, and we’ve got these people radicalising our young people, pretending that it’s a pathway to some kind of… We just heard him say prefer death to life. I mean, that’s extraordinary to allow that sort of conversation and that tenement, that narrative, to be part of Australian story at the moment.

Rita Panahi:

Absolutely. Colleen Harkin, Patrick Carlyon, thanks for your time.

This transcript with Colleen Harkin talkin on The Rita Panahi Show – Sky News Australia 25 August 2025 has been edited for clarity.