Steve Price: Police leniency over BLM protest breathtaking
Amid a global pandemic, in the state which had been hardest hit, our top cop thought not upsetting protesters was more important than not spreading COVID-19.
Opinion
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On Wednesday this week the respected Victorian Police Commissioner Shane Patton revealed he had allowed Melbourne’s Black Lives Matter rally to go ahead back in June because he feared riots.
Commissioner Patton had been watching a lot of TV out of the U.S. where protesters had set fire to their local communities and somehow thought it acceptable to smash the windows of retail stores and loot merchandise of choice – usually runners and athletics gear and flat screen TV’s.
At those protests police were attacked, and in some cities the National Guard was called out. Commissioner Patton told the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee inquiry “we’ve seen cities damaged we’d had arson, we’d seen looting, we had seen assaults.”
He said he wanted to avoid similar scenes in Melbourne so allowed the June protest which he thought would attract up to 20,000 marchers to go ahead.
That was June 6 and by the end of that month COVID-19 cases in Melbourne had started to surge. Premier Daniel Andrews on June 29 locked down ten postcodes in response to 64 cases.
No-one has linked that march to the fresh COVID-19 spread – that we now know exploded out of the poorly managed hotel quarantine – but the operational decision to allow the loud voices of the copycat Victorian version of the Black Lives Matter movement says a lot about modern Australia.
Simply put in the middle of a global pandemic, in the state which had been hardest hit in terms of death and economic damage, our most senior police officer thought the risk of upsetting protesters and risking a riot was greater that spreading COVID-19.
And remember this was at a time when people were being fined for not wearing masks and gathering in parks.
Commissioner Patton’s fears of U.S. style riots in Melbourne are fanciful. The “let them march” narrative was a convenient way to avoid an argument with, not just the protesters, but the Labor Government he serves.
Australia is not the U.S.A. and Melbourne is not Portland, Oregon, where tent cities, violent protests and a virtual siege turned that city into a war zone. That June 6 rally should have been banned because at that time ordinary Victorians were in – and headed for – the most extreme virus lockdown seen anywhere in the world.
There should not have been one rule for noisy demonstrators and another for law abiding Melburnians especially given those same police under Patton’s control were issuing more than 40,000 fines for COVID-19 breaches.
On that, the Commissioner also revealed this week that only 2806 of those fines have actually been paid and thousands more have been cancelled. What a joke.
The inconsistency of police policy on June 6 was breathtaking.
It goes to a feeling among ordinary law-abiding Victorians that if you shout loud enough and attach your noise to a cause that is seen as socially progressive then you can get away with anything.
For Commissioner Patton to seriously suggest Melbourne streets would be filled with rock throwing protesters tackling riot shield wielding police over the BLM concerns is hard to believe.
Protests have been a normal way of life in Melbourne forever. The most violent were 20 years ago when the World Economic Forum gathered at Crown Casino and six years later in November 2006 when the G20 met here.
Police horses back then were kicked by protesters and eggs, bottles and steel rods thrown at police. The ANZ bank headquarters and the big Nike store in the city were targeted but no-one got in and stole anything.
Australians do not protest like American looters and don’t use the cover of political protest to rob people.
Commissioner Patton took a gamble back in June and luckily for him it paid off with the fears of a COVID-19 spread not being realised.
His decision though has set the dangerous precedent that if you make enough noise and issue enough threats you will be allowed to hijack the streets.
The silent majority don’t like that and would prefer police treat everyone equally. At a time when fines were being issued to two people innocently gathering on a park bench without a mask it was a terrible look.
This cave into the BLM organisers – only three fines were ever issued over that rally for $1652 each – plays to the narrative that there is one law for them and another for average people.
A survey of 1000 Australians released just this week confirms that feeling. Sixty-five per cent of those surveyed believe cancel culture activists are silencing the views of ordinary people.
That same survey revealed that people under the age of 25 were most likely to self-censor opinions due to the rise of cancel culture.
Sadly, that survey suggests that a majority of Australians struggle to be honestly authentic and self-censor over issues like the BLM protests, racial equality and social issues surrounding sexuality.
It’s areas like this where people are afraid to express honestly held opinions and it happens to all of us. If on The Project or here in these pages I have a crack at the cultural elite all hell breaks loose.
Calling a fellow panellist on the ABC’s Q&A hysterical a few years back caused the studio audience to audibly gasp. Suggesting to commentator Jamila Rizvi on live TV that it was people like her with a lecturing and hectoring attitude that saw Donald Trump get elected saw me shut down by other panel members over my tone.
So, it’s OK to be loud and to take over the streets and wave banners and gather in illegal numbers, but it seems in modern Australia you can only do that if you are singing from a certain songbook.
The rest of us just have to cop it.
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