Behind the Sparkle

A lot has changed in the jewellery industry since diamonds were a girl's best friend. Maria Cobden investigates.

Smash and grabs are one thing, but when a group of armed robbers break through electronically locked doors on a Sunday morning while there are customers in the shop and people on the footpath outside, that's another thing entirely to deal with.

The surge of violent robberies is one of the most important factors affecting the jewellery industry today.

During the 18 months until August 2002 as many as 15 robberies have taken place in the Sydney CBD and the suburb of Chatswood. At least $500,000 worth of stock has been taken from each store, sometimes more than $1 million, according to Jewellery Association of Australia CEO John Howie.

"We are not concerned only from the point of view that these are large losses and that makes insurance in today's climate very difficult to get, not only for the people that have been hit but for everybody else. But also that these are robberies with violence - the most recent one was in George Street in the city [in Sydney] on a Sunday morning."

He says the robbers broke through the electronically locked doors with sledgehammers and crowbars while customers were inside the shop.

"Sometime, somebody ought to be arrested, and that's our problem. That they aren't, there is no result. There is no result to any of these crimes."

Howie believes the best way to catch these criminals would be to find out how they are disposing of the jewellery after the robbery.

"There is a self-evident thing to me, and that is that if a convenience store is robbed in the middle of the night, they are not taking the tea and the coffee, they are taking the money out of the till ... In the case of the jewellery industry, they are taking things which should not be so easy to dispose of as they are."

"If you stop where [the jewellery] is going to, nobody is going to want to rob the stores because it will be too hard to get rid of."