Rita Panahi: What Assistant Commissioner Luke Cornelius failed to call out in his tirade
He played up to an adoring media pack and made headlines by slamming members of the “tinfoil hat-wearing brigade”. But Assistant Commissioner Luke Cornelius’s police force was weak when our state needed it the most, writes Rita Panahi.
Rita Panahi
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Victoria Police’s heavy-handed tactics may be popular among the media’s Karen contingent but that won’t change the fact that when it mattered most the thin blue line was weak or missing.
The Hotel Quarantine inquiry has heard Victoria Police command declined to play an active role in the program and pushed for private security guards to oversee returned travellers.
A day after the disturbing revelations, Assistant Commissioner Luke Cornelius played up to an adoring media pack and casually conflated COVID-19 conspiracy theorists with those who have legitimate concerns about draconian lockdown measures, including mandatory curfews.
In all the criticism I have seen about Victoria’s ham-fisted pandemic response, there hasn’t been a word about insane 5G conspiracies but then I’m not seeking out a handful of bizarro pages on Facebook.
What I have seen is concern from small business owners, the newly unemployed and underemployed about losing their life’s work, concern from a range of medical and economic experts warning of the dire unintended consequences of the lockdown and questioning the flawed reasoning behind absurd bans on golf and fishing, or the requirement to wear a mask even when walking alone in an empty park.
But to listen to Cornelius, whose salary remains intact, the only folk not blindly embracing every restriction, no matter how illogical, are “batsh-t crazy” and members of the “tinfoil hat-wearing brigade”.
Does that include Professor Duncan Maskell, an expert in infectious diseases and University of Melbourne’s vice-chancellor who has argued the “lockdown mindset” may be a case of the cure being worse than the disease. He has warned of “increased morbidity and mortality in society” and serious damage to the lives of young people due to lockdown-induced poverty.
“At what point do the measures that we take to suppress the infectious disease rate actually start to do more damage than the disease itself?” Prof Maskell said.
And does Cornelius include the chair of the National COVID-19 Commission, Nev Power, as a member of the tinfoil brigade given he has been an outspoken critic of harsh policies such as border closures, likening them to a “sledgehammer squashing an ant”.
Is the assistant commissioner suggesting leading Melbourne doctors, including professors, surgeons and psychiatrists, who have written a letter to Premier Daniel Andrews about the damage wreaked by COVID-19 restrictions are “batshit crazy”?
The medical experts wrote that the stage four lockdown policy has caused unprecedented negative economic, social and health outcomes and called for greater transparency and “an alternative medical response”. The doctors are also critical of the selective data used, failure to protect vulnerable members of the community and the lack of “scientific reason” behind stage three and four lockdowns for the whole community.
Those whose livelihoods have not been affected by restrictions can afford to be cavalier about recession, joblessness and economic despair. If you’re a public servant sitting at home on a full salary with no fear of losing your job your state of disaster experience is very different to those with skin in the game.
Cornelius, quite wisely, warned those contemplating attending a lockdown protest they would face the full force.
“Why on earth would we be wanting to see an activity, a protest, undertaken which would exacerbate this risk?” he said.
“You can expect that we, your police, will be looking to hold you to account. We will be arresting them, their feet won’t touch the ground.”
But where was this tough talk from the assistant commissioner back in June when he all but rolled out the red carpet for Black Lives Matter protesters?
Not only did Victoria Police, together with the Andrews government, display a permissive attitude to the BLM protest but they guaranteed a bumper turnout of 10,000 by declaring before the march protesters would not be fined.
Indeed, Cornelius was at pains to express solidarity with the protesters though he preferred they delayed the mass gathering.
“We absolutely understand the sentiment and the anger that lies behind that and we are very keen to support the community in giving a voice to their concerns,” Cornelius said.
“We do respect the right everyone has to protest peacefully and lawfully.”
He didn’t call out the bats--- crazy lies pushed by activists, nor the idiocy of marching in the midst of a pandemic, all in the name of a group that is virulently anti-police.
Throughout this pandemic Victoria Police has fined more people than any other police force. Even before the second wave lockdown, Victorians had received 10 times the fines of people in NSW. That has done nothing to stop the spread of the virus with Victoria responsible for 99 per cent of all COVID-19 deaths in the country since June 1.
— Rita Panahi is a Herald Sun columnist