Figure: Quarterly CPI changes from 2014–2024 (ABS)

🧮 National Inflation Landscape: Australia’s CPI Over Time

Our illustrates quarterly changes in Australia’s All-Groups Consumer Price Index (CPI) between 2014 and 2024. CPI tracks the average price movement for a standard basket of goods and services essentially serving as the official measure of inflation.

Several notable patterns emerge:

• 🔹 2014–2019: Inflation remained relatively stable, with CPI changes fluctuating modestly between 0–0.8% per quarter. This suggests a period of economic predictability and price stability.
• 🔻 2020 COVID-19 Shock: In early 2020, CPI plummeted to nearly –2%, a rare instance of deflation triggered by widespread lockdowns, halted spending, and disrupted supply chains.
• 🔺 2021–2023 Surge: Following the pandemic’s initial shock, inflation surged rapidly. CPI grew by over 2% per quarter during parts of 2022 reflecting rising fuel prices, supply chain bottlenecks, increased consumer demand, and global economic volatility.
• 📉 2023–2024 Decline: Recent quarters show a modest cooling, but CPI remains elevated compared to pre-pandemic levels meaning prices are still rising, albeit more slowly.

🔗 Relevance to Our Hypothesis

“As the cost of living increases, theft-related crimes also increase.”

This national CPI trend sets the economic backdrop for our investigation. The sustained inflation observed between 2021–2023 means households across Australia including in Victoria faced:

• Sharper grocery, fuel, and housing costs
• Increased financial stress, especially in lower-income segments
• Reduced real wages and purchasing power

These economic pressures may influence survival driven behaviours including property related crimes such as theft. While CPI itself doesn’t cause crime, it acts as a proxy for financial strain, which in turn can contribute to crime conducive environments.

This context supports the rationale for examining theft offences in Victoria over the same period, to test whether spikes in inflation temporally align with increases in theft as we explore in upcoming slides.

Figure: CPI changes for Food, Housing, and Transport (Melbourne, 2014–2024)

📍 Melbourne CPI Landscape: Housing, Food, Transport (2014–2024)

This chart presents quarterly CPI changes for Melbourne’s three most essential household cost categories: housing, food, and transport. These are everyday necessities meaning their inflation impacts are felt universally, and most intensely by low-income earners.

• 🏠 Housing CPI: Demonstrates a steady and persistent upward climb across the decade. CPI changes consistently remain positive, especially during 2021–2023, suggesting continued pressure from rising rents and mortgage repayments. For many Victorians, housing affordability became a defining post COVID issue.
• 🥫 Food CPI: Remained relatively modest until 2021, then sharply increased during and after the pandemic. This aligns with global trends in food insecurity, driven by supply chain disruptions, input cost inflation, and supermarket price rises. Elevated food prices disproportionately affect vulnerable groups and may contribute to desperate behaviours, such as food theft.
• 🚗 Transport CPI: Highly volatile throughout the decade. Spikes in 2022 correspond with global fuel price surges, while earlier dips align with COVID-related travel restrictions. This volatility reflects how essential mobility costs (e.g. petrol, fares, servicing) have become increasingly unpredictable squeezing disposable incomes further.

Together, these categories form the core cost of living pressures many households face. The overlapping surges in housing, food, and transport costs between 2021–2023 may represent a “perfect storm” of inflation raising the possibility that economic desperation contributed to increased crime rates, including theft.

🔗 Relevance to Theft-Related Crime

These price trends affect daily survival costs. When multiple necessities rise simultaneously, people on tight budgets face impossible trade-offs.

Would you skip meals to pay rent? Walk to work when fuel prices surge? The cost of living crunch can create conditions where economic desperation makes crime seem like an option.

This makes Melbourne’s CPI composition a critical factor in evaluating potential links between inflation and rising theft offences which we explore next.

Figure: CPI changes for Food, Housing, and Transport (Melbourne, 2014–2024)

📉 Interpretation: When the Trend Breaks the Hypothesis

This chart tracks the total number of recorded theft offences in Victoria from 2014 to 2024 offering a valuable lens into how theft related crime has evolved during a period marked by significant social and economic shifts.

• 🔺 2016 peak: Theft offences surged to a high in 2016, suggesting either increased criminal activity or changes in reporting or policing practices. This predates the pandemic and may reflect broader socioeconomic challenges during that time.
• 🔻 2020–2022 decline: Reported thefts dropped sharply during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. This may reflect reduced opportunities for theft due to lockdowns and restricted movement, rather than improved economic conditions.
• 📈 Post-pandemic resurgence (2023–2024): The most striking trend is the steep rise in 2024 the highest point on the chart. This coincides with a period of elevated inflation and cost of living pressures, as shown in earlier CPI graphs.

While we can’t confirm causality from this chart alone, the data suggests a potential link between financial stress and theft. Periods of inflation and household strain appear to align with rising theft rates especially in the most recent years.

This slide acts as a turning point in our analysis: from observing cost of living trends to directly interrogating whether those pressures might influence desperate behaviour and theft releated crime.

🔄 Pivoting the Narrative

While our original hypothesis proposed a direct relationship that rising cost-of-living pressures (as measured by CPI) would correlate with increases in theft, the data does not support this simplistically. In fact, our comparison reveals little to no consistent alignment between CPI movement and theft offences over the last decade in Victoria.

This does not invalidate the hypothesis outright but rather, it compels us to consider a more complex picture. Human behaviour, especially in response to financial strain, is rarely linear or uniform. Crime trends, too, are shaped by an interplay of social, structural, and policy level influences.

What might be influencing theft rates beyond CPI?

• 🔐 Social safety nets: Access to emergency relief, housing support, and unemployment benefits may cushion the impact of inflation on vulnerable populations.
• 👮‍♀️ Policing and enforcement: Shifts in law enforcement priorities or community policing initiatives may affect the reporting or deterrence of theft offences.
• 🏘️ Localised factors: Suburban or regional economic conditions, public transport access, and community cohesion may play significant roles.
• 📉 Lagged effects: The relationship between economic pressure and crime may not be immediate hardship today may result in criminal behaviour months or even years later.

These considerations suggest that while CPI can be a useful indicator of economic stress, it alone is insufficient to predict crime trends like theft. A more holistic approach is needed, one that integrates socio-economic variables, policy response, and geographic specificity.

Thus, this pivot strengthens our analysis, rather than forcing a conclusion, we acknowledge the limits of our hypothesis and open space for more grounded, evidence-based interpretations.