The motor vehicle theft rate of around 700 per 100,000 is about a third of that of the burglary rate. It's a lot less than it was in the late 1980s, but more than a year ago. Very simply, car makers have made new cars a lot harder to steal. Robbery varies around the States too. Bank robbery has gone down.
Robbery is the taking of property by force or the threat of force - mugging.
New South Wales and South Australia stand out well above the national average, with Victoria and Tasmania with rates about one quarter of those in New South Wales and South Australia. While the rates are much higher than 20 years ago, burglary rates and motor vehicle theft rates as well down on what they were five years ago. The interpretation of crime statistics is much more difficult than the interpretation of most other statistics. Trends aren't always easy to discern, and even though they may seem fairly obvious people experience crime and report it in different ways. The data that I've been reporting are police data, aggregated and worked by the ABS into uniform national crime statistics.