Vikki Campion: Massive Canberra rally not good enough for one of Labor's crusades

It appears Labor empathy only applies to certain crusades because when thousands took part in a massive rally in Canberra last weekend, Albo just told them to “go home,” Vikki Campion writes.

You can glue yourself to the road here in protest against a lack of action over climate change, and Albo won’t tell you to go home.

As long as they agree with what you say, you can yell it into a loud hailer across manicured lawns to empathetic ears.

Your crusade can block the foyer and chant, you can light doors and prams on fire, splash paint everywhere, and Labor and their comrades won’t tell you to go home.

But Labor’s crusade comes with caveats. Last week the wrong army turned up outside parliament.

Last year Anthony Albanese went to the women’s March4Justice rally, made up of many studio-ready faces and or, those on a $281 a night government travel allowances, and attacked those who didn’t attend for “not listening to the women of Australia”.

Yet when thousands of mums and dads who drove for days with their kids on outback roads came Albo said: “Go home.”

It’s far easier to dismiss people as crazy, to question their mental health and disregard them, than to understand how they got so desperate that more than 10,000 rallied at Parliament House last weekend.

Anthony Albanese told protesters in Canberra last weekend to go home. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Gary Ramage

Was it because they drove in dusty trucks instead of flying business class, staying in $22 a night campsites instead of posh hotels?

I saw intolerance scream at them from coffee shop windows, “shut up, shut up, just f**k off,” but the crowd kept building.

Even when they weren’t carrying flags, utes parked outside Woolworths stood out besides shiny ACT-registered Porches, where my family watched a Karen scrawl “assholes” in the dust with her finger on the back window of a Convoy van.

When they moved campsites to Cotter Dam, they were targeted by Antifa-types in the night, throwing rocks and bottles at them.

Separately a negligent driving fine was given to 26-year-old OnlyFans performer Chantal Fox, captured on film hitting and crushing a Convoy vehicle shouting “Get out of Canberra you bogan sl*t”.

Violence was directed at them, not by them.

It was a peaceful contrast to violent union riots on the same grounds 26 years ago that injured 120 federal police, shattering the doors to parliament, causing $188,000 of damage, with containers of acid, urine, paint and blunt picket signs used as weapons.

Federal Police Commissioner Reece Kershaw confirmed that it was the largest protest seen in Canberra since the 1980s and well behaved, with many families and children in attendance. Not all those protesting were saintly. One aggressively clipped the shoulder of my friend, a well-known politician, as we walked through the crowd, but still were not as aggressive as the March4Justice women who shouted “c**t” in their faces.

Thousands of demonstrators marched to Parliament House in Canberra on February 12. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Martin Ollman

And it’s easier to fascinate yourselves at caustic dinner parties screeching about the rednecks whose profanity echoed around your sacred city than to acknowledge they were simply venting their unheard anger which has grown icier over two long years of neglect.

Some were vaccinated because they were told it would end the lockdowns, some did so they could open their business again, only to be told they couldn’t, and nurses, police, teachers, tradies and early childhood workers lost their jobs because they chose not to.

Some had experienced terrible side effects from the vaccine or lost their incomes, and were shamed when they talked about it.

Those we heard from felt ignored, dismissed as their livelihoods, that took decades of dedication to build was mandate by mandate stripped away.

There were more than 267,113 Australian deaths registered by the ABS between January 2020 and January 2022.

In total, 2639 died with or from Covid-19, making it our 38th biggest killer, after cancer, heart disease, diabetes and dementia, but our most potent when it comes to government regulation.

The horn-honking, flag-waving mums and dads I watched on Saturday were told they couldn’t sing, dance, cross state borders, or go to church or school or playgrounds.

They couldn’t grieve at funerals or celebrate birthdays or see their loved ones before they died alone in hospital.

The massive rally was largely peaceful. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Martin Ollman

Unlike other protests, they had no slick PR campaign, no political help, no real organisation, no perfect blow dries and TV make-up.

People without much spare cash were ignored by the national broadcaster, giggled at by the Canberra press gallery on television and told to go home by Labor politicians.

It dwarfed every other rally of late – women’s equality, anti-coal, climate change — those which are so popular with our political class they don’t just welcome them to parliament, they attend themselves.

When Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese told demonstrators to “go home” the Member for Canberra Alicia Payne said calling out their “bad behaviour” was what made him a real leader.

Ms Payne forgets that Canberra, before it became the seat of government, with largesse delivered by taxpayer-funded bureaucracies, was dotted sheep stations.

It was an organic and angry response rather than an organised group, with a minor extremist element that set their cause back by making it easier to paint them all with one brush.

But Labor empathy or the empathy from the enlightened in Canberra, only applied for certain crusades from certain parts of the world, only for the appropriate armies.

Not the “cookers”, not the women in wheelchairs who drove for days, they are only to be rolled out when the story is one they agree with.

When the story isn’t theirs, they scream at them to go home.

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