David Penberthy: Australia, please don’t protest during a pandemic
Given the sad state of affairs, it’s no wonder people want to take to the streets and protest. But in doing so during a pandemic, we’re only putting more lives at risk, writes David Penberthy.
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The right to stage peaceful protests is a fundamental freedom in a democracy.
Even Donald Trump said as much the other day, disingenuously, at the same time Washington police were using force to push aside both peaceful and unruly protesters – and a couple of Australian journos – clearing a path so the President could be photographed holding a book he has probably never read, and definitely never lived by.
It was an incongruous image for our times, the man who famously boasted that one of the upsides of being rich and powerful was that you could grab women on the genitals, posing with the Christian Bible.
It is made even more absurd when you watch the hilariously damning interview from a few years ago with Trump on Bloomberg TV, where, when asked about his purported love for the Bible and invited to cite a favourite book or passage, his eyes dart around searchingly as he explains that he loves the whole darned thing, can’t split the Old and New Testaments for quality, and that he regards his knowledge of the scriptures as “a personal thing”.
With this galoot occupying the White House, goading his critics, inflaming already red-hot tensions by using Twitter to egg on the protesters, and threatening to turn the 2020 US into 1970s Latin America by deploying the military against his own people, it is not even remotely surprising that there is such rage.
And, while the violence and looting can never be condoned or excused, the root cause of all that rage remains appalling, with decent people across the world feeling disgusted and angered by the circumstances that have led to the violence that has plagued every major US city.
As such, you can understand why people want to get out and have their say in countries like ours. But now is not the time.
As I said up top, I totally support peaceful protests, and back in my more radical incarnation, I attended plenty, including travelling by bus to Sydney in 1988 with a bunch of like-minded rabblerousers to march from Redfern to Hyde Park in protest against the Bicentennial.
The 20-year-old me would have wanted to be out there this Saturday firing up about the murder of George Floyd and the treatment of black people more generally, including in our own country.
But here’s the thing. We remain in the middle of a global pandemic. Despite the gradual lifting of restrictions, social distancing rules and crowd gathering rules and limits remain in place.
They remain in place for good reasons.
Protest might be regarded as a right, but so too is the right to freedom of association, the right to a proper education, the right to work, and the right to invite people into the privacy of your home as you wish.
I get that there are operational considerations behind the decision not to fine people for attending the protests that are scheduled for this Saturday.
But there appears to be a fair bit of irritating progressive gesturing behind the decision, too, especially in Victoria, where tens of thousands of people are expected to converge in the CBD, and have been told they are free to do so without risk of being fined.
It is bizarre that in Victoria, the Government and police have been threatening to fine people for returning to work, fine people for playing golf, maintained the most draconian and contestable school closures in Australia, and even raided a kid’s birthday party that had 18 guests and fined every one of them, yet is giving the green light to a potentially unruly mass get-together that’s been organised by the Socialist Alliance, a fringe Marxist organisation devoted to the overthrow of capitalism.
The reason we have wound back the above freedoms is that, right now, on the basis of what you could fairly describe in this country as the best medical advice in the world, we decided as a community that our collective survival must take precedent over the freedoms we normally take for granted and exercise at will.
The science still holds that mass gatherings are the riskiest form of human interaction.
We have seen second waves kicked off in countries such as Japan and South Korea on account of people hitting the bars and restaurants en masse.
By attending a protest that asserts that black lives matter, you are effectively asserting that the lives of the over-65s or people with respiratory conditions don’t, as they remain the most at-risk groups from any resurgence of this virus.
It sends a bad signal for the very governments and police forces that have been implementing those restrictions to lift them suddenly for a politically-inspired event, especially one inspired by something that happened on the other side of the world.
The other question – and perhaps this is the jaded statement of a mortgage-paying 51-year-old as opposed to an idealistic 20-year-old – is it hard to see what protesting in Australia about all this would actually achieve.
Donald Trump didn’t seem too fussed when several hundred people almost succeeded in pushing over the fence about 100m from where he sleeps, so I doubt that a few thousand people flouting the social-distancing rules in Federation Square or Victoria Square is going to do much to move the dial inside the Trump mind, to the extent that there is one.
Rage aside, there is a showiness about the desire to attend these rallies, and my fear is that it’s permeated the thinking of those in politics, who would happily arrest people swinging a nine-iron with one other friend, but turn a blind eye to a mass act of social disobedience that’s been organised by people with a track record of causing trouble.