Image credit: ABC Online

For eight consecutive nights, Melbourne woke to reports of another suspected arson attack. Cars burned in suburban driveways. Homes and businesses were damaged. A tobacco shop in Fitzroy North was destroyed. Two young people allegedly involved in separate attacks suffered serious burns, including a 13-year-old who was critically injured.

The immediate images are of fire. The deeper problem is a criminal labour market.

Young people are being recruited to carry risk on behalf of adults who remain removed from the scene. The child handles the accelerant, steals the car or attacks the premises. The organiser communicates through an intermediary or an encrypted messaging service, pays a relatively small amount and treats the offender as replaceable.

We should hold young offenders accountable for serious harm. But if the response stops with the child at the scene, it arrests the labour while leaving the employer in business.

Children have become expendable contractors

Victoria Police has publicly warned that organised crime groups are targeting young people for high-risk offending and treating them as disposable. Recent reporting indicates that the 13-year-old injured at Taylors Hill was allegedly recruited through middlemen using WhatsApp.

That arrangement benefits the organiser at every stage. The young person is visible; the adult is insulated. The young person may have no direct relationship with the people who commissioned the job. Instructions can move down a chain, with each participant knowing only the person immediately above or below them.

This is not sophisticated in a technological sense. It is sophisticated in its allocation of risk.

A child may be promised several thousand dollars for a task whose consequences they do not understand. They carry the physical danger, the likelihood of arrest and the criminal charge. If something goes wrong, another young person can be recruited.

The adults purchasing that labour rely on three things: distance, fear and silence.

Why the child may never identify the organiser

There is a common assumption that police can arrest the young person, offer an incentive and work upwards through the network. Sometimes that will succeed. In many cases it will not.

A 13-year-old recruited through WhatsApp may not know who ultimately ordered the attack. They may know only a username, a friend or a middleman. Even if they do know more, the consequences imposed by a court may appear less frightening than what they believe the criminal group could do to them or their family.

That imbalance matters. The state can offer a legal process. The criminal network offers an immediate and personal threat.

It creates a sense of safety—sometimes impunity—for the people directing the offending. They can recruit remotely, compartmentalise the task and assume that the person most likely to be caught either cannot or will not lead police back to them.

That is why solving individual arsons is not enough. Police need intelligence capable of identifying the relationships, money, communications and disputes behind them.

The human-intelligence capability has to be rebuilt

In my experience, human sources remain one of the most effective ways to penetrate organised crime.

Technical surveillance, telecommunications data, financial analysis and forensic evidence are indispensable. But organised criminal groups adapt to them. They change devices, accounts, vehicles and communications platforms. A well-placed human source can explain what the data means: who is trusted, who is in conflict, who commissions the violence and where the organisation is vulnerable.

Human intelligence also disrupts confidence. Once criminals believe someone inside their group may be speaking to police, they cannot be certain whom to trust. That uncertainty creates friction even before an arrest is made. It can slow decisions, fracture relationships and make the organisation less effective.

The Royal Commission into the Management of Police Informants exposed serious and unacceptable failures. It was right to demand lawful, ethical and accountable source handling. But the Royal Commission did not conclude that human sources should be abandoned. It described them as a potent investigative tool capable of providing information essential to preventing and detecting crime. It recommended legislation, dedicated handling teams, centralised decisions, rigorous registration, training, risk assessment and oversight.

From my own experience, and from what I continue to hear from people serving within Victoria Police, my concern is that the pendulum has swung too far. This is a professional assessment, not a published measure of source registrations. The policies, processes and absence of risk appetite appear to have made organised-crime source work so difficult that very little useful human intelligence is coming through.

The answer to unlawful source handling is lawful, professional source handling—not the practical abandonment of the capability.

The tobacco market explains the violence

The firebombings cannot be separated from the economics of illicit tobacco.

Australia has used tobacco excise successfully as a public-health measure for decades. But tax policy does not operate in isolation. When a legal product becomes dramatically more expensive while an illegal substitute remains cheap and readily available, the price difference creates a criminal opportunity.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics’ experimental estimates should end any suggestion that falling legal sales necessarily mean nicotine demand has disappeared. The ABS found that total nicotine consumption increased by almost 40 per cent between 2017 and 2025, while legal tobacco consumption fell to less than one-third of its 2017 level. Its central experimental estimate put illicit sources at 80 per cent of nicotine consumption in 2025, although the ABS notes that the estimate is method-dependent and broader than some other studies.

The central point is difficult to avoid: much of the demand did not vanish. It changed suppliers.

Organised crime did not create nicotine dependence, but it has industrialised the response to it. Cheap cigarettes and vapes provide recurring demand, high margins and a wide retail network. Violence becomes a commercial tool: intimidate a retailer, enforce territory, punish non-compliance or remove a competitor.

Queensland’s 55 per cent increase was not a smoking boom

Queensland provides a useful real-world test.

After stronger powers were introduced to close illicit retailers, legal tobacco sales increased by 55 per cent in the first month. They remained 40 to 45 per cent above previous levels for the following six months. Quitline calls also more than doubled immediately after major enforcement operations.

That does not mean Queenslanders suddenly started smoking 55 per cent more. It indicates that, when illegal supply was interrupted, existing consumers moved back into the legal market—and some considered quitting.

The lesson is not that demand is irrelevant. Public-health education, prevention and cessation support remain essential. The lesson is that the immediate criminal-market problem is supply.

You cannot stop an active illicit market by addressing demand alone while the illegal product remains cheap, abundant and easy to buy. Equally, closing a handful of shops will not solve the problem if importers, distributors and replacement retailers can rapidly restore supply.

The Australian Medical Association opposes reducing tobacco excise, warning that cheaper legal cigarettes could increase smoking, particularly among young people and disadvantaged communities. That risk deserves serious consideration. But preserving the existing tax settings does not remove the obligation to confront the criminal market those settings now help make extraordinarily profitable.

This should not be reduced to a false choice between health policy and law enforcement. Government must be able to do both.

What an effective response would target

The people lighting the fires must be identified and prosecuted. But the performance measure should not be the number of children arrested or shops temporarily closed. It should be whether the criminal enterprise has lost capacity.

That requires a coordinated strategy focused on:

  1. importation and wholesale supply, including stronger border intelligence and joint investigations;
  2. money flows, unexplained wealth and the laundering of tobacco profits;
  3. the adults and intermediaries recruiting young people for violent tasks;
  4. rapid action against retailers, landlords and facilitators who knowingly support the market;
  5. safe, lawful and properly resourced human-source operations; and
  6. protection and exit pathways for young people who can provide intelligence or are at risk of further recruitment.

Success should be visible in sustained shortages, increased illicit prices, reduced retailer replacement, disrupted cash flows, fewer commissioned attacks and the prosecution of organisers—not only the arrest of disposable offenders.

Arrest the labour, and the business recruits again

Melbourne’s firebombings are not simply a youth-crime story or a tobacco story. They are an organised-crime business model.

The illicit market supplies the profit. Remote tasking supplies distance. Children supply cheap and replaceable labour. Weak human intelligence allows organisers to remain confident that the network above the offender will stay concealed.

If government responds only at the point where the child is caught, the criminal enterprise will recruit another child. If it closes one shop without disrupting supply, another outlet will appear. If it relies on demand reduction while illegal products remain cheap and available, the market will continue to reward organised crime.

The question is not only who lit the fire.

It is who bought the child’s labour—and what we are doing to make that business impossible.

This is the second article in an Integrity Solve series examining youth crime, illicit markets and organised-crime capability in Victoria. The first article, Youth crime in Victoria: diversion is a tool, not a strategy, explains why low-risk diversion and serious networked offending require different responses.

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