Look back over the reporting from 2026 and one image comes up again and again: the back of a vehicle buried in the front of a building.
A ute reversed into a tobacconist in Melton. A car driven into a tobacco store on Victoria Street, Richmond, and a fire that reached around ten businesses. A white Mercedes rammed into the entrance of a Prahran bar. A tow truck backed into a workshop in Heidelberg West. A stolen RAV4 driven through a Tarneit shopping centre entrance and into a jeweller. A front gate rammed in Brighton. A tractor driven into a cafe at Bundoora Park Farm.
We've written about each of those on this blog, from public reports, with links to the sources. Taken one at a time, each is a local news story. Taken together, they describe a city where using a vehicle to open a building has become an ordinary method, not a rare one.
The law moved
In March, Victoria made ram raiding a form of aggravated burglary, with a maximum of 25 years in jail, and applied it regardless of the offender's age. The government's message was clear: attacks on businesses won't be tolerated.
I think that's a reasonable thing for a government to do. But I'd make one observation. A law operates after a vehicle has gone through a door. It might deter some people over time. It does nothing for the shop owner standing on broken glass at 4am, or for the businesses next door dealing with smoke and water damage.
The buildings didn't
Walk down most Melbourne shopping strips and you'll see the same thing you'd have seen ten years ago: glass shopfronts, roller doors, angled parking pointing straight at them, and nothing in between but a kerb. The same goes for the front of many factories and workshops, where a flat concrete apron runs straight up to a roller door.
None of that was designed with a vehicle attack in mind. It was designed for access, visibility and trade, which is what a shopfront should be designed for. The problem is that the threat has changed and the street hasn't.
Why owners wait for the first hit
I understand why most businesses don't act until something happens. Margins are tight. Security spending is easy to defer when nothing has gone wrong. And there's a natural sense that ram raids happen to other kinds of businesses, in other suburbs.
But look at who was affected this year. Tobacconists and jewellers, yes. Also a bar, a kebab shop, an optometrist next door to a target, a mechanic's workshop, a council farm, and families whose cars were sitting on their driveways. The neighbours of targets carried a lot of the cost, and they hadn't done anything to attract it.
Waiting for the first hit means paying for the repairs, the lost trading days and the insurance claim, and then paying for the protection anyway. It's the most expensive order to do things in.
What I'd like to see
I'll be upfront that I work for a company that installs bollards, so weigh this accordingly. Still, I think a few things would make a real difference:
- Strip-level thinking. When one shop in a strip is a target, every shop in it is exposed. Landlords, tenants and councils looking at a whole frontage together will get a better result, and a cheaper one per business, than each tenant acting alone.
- Councils engaging early. Most strip footpaths are council land. Traders who want protection out the front need a clear, quick way to ask for it, and a council that treats the request as safety, not streetscape.
- Honest products. Not every site needs an impact-rated barrier, and not every bollard is one. Buyers deserve plain answers about what they're getting, and what it will and won't stop.
- Protection that gets used. Removable bollards that sit unused against a wall protect nothing. Anything installed has to fit the way the business actually opens and closes.
What bollards won't do
I want to be clear about the limits, because overselling helps nobody. A bollard won't stop someone walking up and throwing something through a window. It won't stop an armed robbery during trading hours. It won't end the tobacco war or the alleged extortion behind some of these attacks. Those are for police and governments.
What it will do is take away the vehicle as the fast, easy way in. On the evidence of this year, that's a large part of the problem. Making Melbourne's shopfronts, workshops and driveways a little harder to drive into seems like an achievable thing to aim for in 2027.