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This morning in Melbourne, Chief Police Commissioner Shane Patton shared with 3AW, Victoria’s top-rated radio station, his thoughts on the unrest that has gripped what is no longer a comfortably overgrown country town masquerading as an international city. He could hardly have found a friendlier forum, as hosts from dawn to midnight have been scathing in their contempt for “rednecks”, “fools”, “thugs”, “tinfoil hatters”, “conspiracy theorists”, “violent nutters” “nongs”, “crybabies afraid to get a little jab” and even — gasp! — “libertarians”. 3AW, just by the way, is the Nine station that will not let callers utter the word ‘ivermectin’.
You can hear the Patton interview in full here — and listen in particular for Premier Daniel Andrews’ chief policeman saying this of his officers and their conduct:
“They have been brilliant. I couldn’t be prouder of them.”
Really, Commissioner, proud of the incidents captured below?
Unfortunately Quadrant Online’s publishing system allows only so many embedded videos per page. Were that not the case there would be scores of examples of the actions that are puffing up the Commissioner’s chest inside that black shirt.
Warning: Sensitive readers might wish to skip the first clip, which shows a man being grabbed from behind by a senior officer on the concourse at Flinders Street Station, then flung to the ground with a violence that, had it happened at the MCG, would have earned an AFL player a rest-of-season suspension. The sound of the victim’s head striking the pavement is sickening. — rf
It shows how tenuous is freedom. How close a police state. The commissioner of Victorian police is aptly attired in a blackshirt. Il Duce Dan by his side. Of course, if we had any leaders of merit in the federal parliament they would condemn what’s happening, and without mealy-mouthed qualifications. There are none. Maybe the only hope is with trade unions. Lech Walesa comes to mind.
Sickening indeed. I hope we learn how these victims of Victorian police brutality are doing. Let those officers be named and be held to account. George Floyd’s treatment by cop Derek Chauvin looks like fairy floss compared to this footage.
Live streaming for hours on end by a couple of independent Journos such as Real Rukshan put the MSM to shame. Victorians are turning to the independents for unedited, truthful accounts.
The last few Vic protests I watched were peaceful marchers for hours on end. Towards the end a few hotheads lost their cool and that’s what the MSM are after. That’s what the politicians’ watch and then ignorantly sound off about all the violence. Victoria an out of control police State.
This is from the people who think they can control global climate by putting certain pieces of household rubbish in bins with lids of particular colors. They think you can control a virus by rubber-bulleting the general public. They are addicted to magical thinking and they are dangerous. What they have imposed on Victoria is ludicrously irrelevant to public health. It is lacking in anything even remotely approaching intellectual credibility, common sense or human decency. If there is ever to be another ‘state of emergency’ (which God forbid) it would be a good idea to find somebody competent to take charge. It is a big mistake to put people who have mastered nothing but the art of rising up through a bureaucratic hierarchy in positions where they can ruin the lives of millions.
The Victorian Police and Judiciary have been writing their own rules for years. This is more of the same. There will come a time when large numbers of decent Victorians will say we have had enough. Let’s hope these decent people don’t resort to the same disgusting tactics that the Premier’s hit squad have employed.
I have two observations: where was similar force when the public was threatened by unruly gangs of young thugs? Why was the marxist BLM march treated with kid gloves when none of their rhetoric was factual? I know, of course, but don’t get me started on the new look ‘selective policing of political convenience’.
The worry is, and police at the moment may not be worried, but I’m concerned that police will cease to be well regarded in the community and that will change Australian policing. For police. At the moment police are appreciated and respected. I can’t imagine being a cop knowing that I’m hated and despised and a target rather than a hero.
So far we know of at least 2 people who have received head injuries. No investigations, no journalists interested (except Yemeni). The way he has been treated over the past 12 months is a tale unto itself.
But Peter Smith I’m surprised at you. Trade unions are one of the core platforms for western socialism. I don’t know much about Poland but I assume that Walesa’s trade union was some sort of weird aberration and actually nothing of its kind.
What is most intriguing about this past week is that socialism’s useful idiots, the selfish builders who thought the union was looking after their interests by inflating their wages, have had some sort of epiphany. Suddenly the socialists have treated them as the cannon fodder they really are, and they don’t like that very much.
I well remember the local policeman visiting my primary school in the 60’s and saying “The policeman is your friend”. I do not think police management realise how much trust they have lost through their performance over the last few years.
Maybe if the police had just “taken the knee” and supported #vaxxedlivesmatter none of this violence would have eventuated.
I meant #unvaxxedlivesmatter
Tough job being in the police – the media focusses on the organization’s failings, not the good achieved by the hard work done by the quiet majority. The problem in Victoria starts at the top. True leadership would not sweep such appalling behavior by a few under the carpet, but insist on a proper investigation with serious sanctions for those who have abused their power. Unfortunately this is not possible in the corrupt, incompetent, politicised legal system set up by Chairman Dan in Victoria. Consequently those who do the right thing are sidelined by the “whatever it takes” brigade. Still you get the government you deserve, and as long as Victorians keep voting for Dan it will only get worse.
Ian MacKenzie, for the past many years Victorians haven’t been presented with much of an alternative. Seriously, how hard could it be to set up an opposition to Andrews?
For the me the only way out of Australia’s political malaise is to create more states and smaller local governments. The current state structure simply no longer works, with the cities dominating rural seats in all states. This is in nobody’s best interests. New boundaries need to be drawn around densely populated areas so that a more balanced range of views presides in parliament.
The Aus Federation is shown to be a ghost train.
Vic Parliament is closed. Andrews will again be given extended emergency powers by the Upper House dribblers, ensuring the Parliament remains closed. I have read that the State Governor’s dismissal power is now removed by Act of (closed) Parliament so all Andrews needs is a bare majority every 4 years.
VicPol has been untouchable for years. See the LawyerX saga – no repercussions at all for VicPol. The Vic Supreme Court has been metaphorically sliced up by the High Court on the Pell saga – no repercussions at all for the members of the Supreme Court. An Inquiry into the responsibility for the Aged Care disaster last year turned up nothing – because the Inquiry simply refused to subpoena relevant evidence such as phone call logs etc.
All of that takes care of the Separation of Powers notion.
The situation is beyond retrieval.
pgang, the Solidarity movement in Poland created it’s own independent trade union which was separate from the legal existing trade unions under the Soviet system. What’s happened in Victoria is a disgrace but it adds evidence to my theory that protests don’t work. The government and the media just use it as evidence that the protesters are violent thugs who deserve their treatment.
The only way to be really effective is to work from a powerbase that threatens to bring the whole system down. That is a bit hard when most workers are mortgaged to the hilt and baby boomers are scared of losing their superannuation piles of money. In my opinion, it is the Baby Boomers who should be standing up right now as most of them do not have jobs to lose and they lived under the greatest freedoms of any generation. They should be willing to fight the government on behalf of the kids and grandkids. But we all know they won’t.
We are nowhere near the stage where people are willing to fight back en-mass. In Poland it took 40 years from the end of WWII until a drought caused food prices to rise for the Solidarity movement to work and it worked because the West wanted to bring an end to the Soviet Union. Who wants our society to end? China?
andrew2 I commented elsewhere that these unionists were the last group of people left in Australia with any political influence, and that they might just turn the tables. It was optimism, but I still think this has a long way to play out given that the CFMEU goes right to the heart of power in Australia, and especially in Melbourne.
pgang, I think it is the workers that have the power not the unions. The unions are corrupt like any other long standing institution. The workers do have the power to bring the economy to its knees but the Baby Boomers are still the biggest voting block in the country. I can’t believe that they will act with any kind of bravery in this situation, given that they are in the targeted demographic for the virus. Yes, I myself can’t believe how much contempt I have for the Baby Boomers, but it is what it is. The people who proclaimed for the last 50 years how the marched against Vietnam are cowering in their homes or going out to parks in their groups of 5 just like the government tells them to.
The only violent thugs in these protests are in uniform, with all the paraphernalia of battle and armed with clubs, shields and weaponry.
Can there be scenes more reminiscent of Solzhenitsyn’s chronicles of life in a Police State?
This is not the “Rule of Law” we read about in the writing of F.A. Hayek.
“In Hayek’s mind the rule of law has two equally important parts. Like most writers on the subject he argued that the rule of law requires everyone, including those who wield government powers, to be bound by the same set of rules. He called this principle “isonomia” (Greek for “equal law”).
This bears no more resemblance of a Liberal Democracy than the authoritarian behaviour of SS chief Heinrich Himmler or the Gulag Archipelago.
Where is the commonwealth attorney-general when it is time to enforce the existing laws that restrain this demonic authoritarian activity?
I have just downloaded three random photos of Australian police taken in about 1970:
– a policeman on traffic duty in Melbourne
– several arresting demonstrators in Adelaide
– dozens of police lining a Brisbane street in anticipation of a protest
Not one of them carries any kind of weapon.
The news is not all bad; I just saw today that Monica Smit (of Reignite Democracy Australia) is OUT of prison, without having to follow the original onerous bail conditions that basically forbade her from continuing her work for freedom. Thank the Lord!
I have to think that the Victorian authorities were trying to scare her and that, after three weeks, they realised that she was not going to be the one to bend. Thank God for that, too. I wonder how many of us would have had that fortitude?
This message was just posted on Twitter by Robert W. Malone, inventor of the mRNA vaccine technology:
“This is now about the rights of the individual versus collectivism. Vax mandates and lockdowns are not supported by facts. They are irrational. Make your choice and take a stand. This is a defining moment.”
Rebekah, yes great news about Monica. I watched the hearing and the judge clearly had a problem with the conditions put on the bail.
Several years ago following a particularly aggressive Vic police response to a crowd of demonstrators I wrote a letter to The Age drawing attention to the a salient quote in my reading of the English national character which illustrated it by contrasting the difference between English and Continental policing styles it being that in England the police are the extension of the community but on the Continent they are agents of the state. I wrote that Victoria (a creating of the English) was in danger of losing its cultural inheritance. It would seem now that the English enlightened community approach has be forsaken and now it is all in the mode of agents of the state. (I suspect too that the English have gone over to the Continental status.) It is also very disturbing that the hideously attired police are firing projectiles at their own citizens who are only exercising their perceived right to assembly and protest.
I’m impressed that “Sicktoria”, your category for this article (see header above), has become a thing. Now there is somewhere for:
Politicised legal system – no Red Shirts prosecutions
Politicised legal system – Pell Case – advertising for complainants
Corrupt legal system – Lawyer X
Incompetent legal system – Pell Case – misunderstanding “reasonable doubt”
Highest state debt per capita
$1Bn compensation for East-West Link cancellation
Replacement project years behind schedule and billions over budget
Failing health system after 15 years of Chairman Dan’s oversight as Minister or Premier
4,000 ICU beds promised but not delivered, no explanation where the $1.3Bn has gone
Unfit for purpose track and trace system
No clear roadmap out of lockdown
Approaching a world record for most days in lockdown
Gender fluidity propaganda taught in Safe Schools
Sign-up to Belt and Road debt-trap agreement giving Chinese construction firms preference
Premier’s office with 70% more staff than the Prime Minister’s office
Politicisation of the Public Service – Work Safe Victoria, so no prosecutions over hotel quarantine deaths
Politicisation of the Public Service – assistant commissioner of Victoria Police – so…….see above
Selective policing – BLM vs anti lockdown response
Abusive policing – see article above
In a true democracy, power grows from the people; in Danistan, power grows from the barrel of a gun.
I like what ianl had to say. I see it from that angle. It’s our whole political structure being eroded and it needs that structure protected by those who understand it well and are capable of it. Specialists.
Where are they?
And the people. Of course. In the end, in the beginning, it’s us, the people.
And the problem we have here is the people I believe are bewildered, in doubt, playing it by instinct, playing it safe, incredulous that it really could be as it is so choose to believe it is as govt says – and they haven’t grasped the democratic duty: if we’ve got a system of govt. for the people by the people of the people etc. then it’s not good enough to elect your own party every four years and then turn your back; go fishing.
We have to be watching and participating all the time. You should know at least as much about your pollie and what he’s doing as you do about your butcher.
The rising wave of protest to the pollies throughout this country should have swamped them and had them running in fear of losing their seats for life, if not even perhaps losing their very lives…. but what’s the truth? There’s been no ‘wave’ of protest.
Instead there’s been clamorous calls in places such as these comments threads for ‘something to be done’ and for ‘protests’ and ‘take to the streets’.
All of which are effectively turnings away from the control machinery of our own democracy, a refusal to grasp the levers of control, a failure to do our bit.
So yes, we need the specialists to rush in and correct the framework, the structure and we need the people to wake up.