Numbers were down, ratings were poor. Rather than shift the battlelines to Covid vaccinations for children, which seemed the logical next step, anti-vaxxers have jumped the shark, embracing the sovereign citizen movement on the basis that if you don’t like the laws of the state, you can simply make up your own.
A mob assembled outside the National Press Club on Tuesday, briefly blocking the Prime Minister’s access to the venue. The PM’s speech went ahead and afterwards, the crowd was kept away with a strident few charging Comm Car One and giving the PM a gob full through the passenger window.
The mob in Canberra who tried to block the Prime Minister’s access to the National Press Club on Tuesday have been invariably called anti-vaxxers in the media but this is only half true. It’s a human potpourri of grievance based on the gamut of conspiracy theories, Woodstock for Q-cooked middle-aged saddos who spent much of Monday afternoon in the nation’s capital, shouting at an empty building.
If this was a protest about vaccine mandates it would make sense, but nothing makes sense about this mob. Take a look at any one of their interminable ‘lives’ and it will not take long before the word ‘paedophile’ is not just uttered but shrieked, along with gnarled accusatory fingers pointed at the windows of the parliament.
Stay watching the footage for long enough and you’ll hear blubbering about satanic rituals, and the torture of children which only they can see. Police preventing them from storming public buildings are labelled with spit-speckled vehemence, “paedophile protectors.”
This is not Q-Anon although it retains the cult’s broad bizarre claims. It is Q-Anon Australian-style, replete with the red ensign waving while the blue ensign appears alongside it, upside down, the international semaphoric symbol of distress. Q-Australia’s adherents don’t babble about the Clintons or the Obamas. Rather they impute Scott Morrison, Greg Hunt, and Dan Andrews.
The organiser of what’s become known as the Canberra freedom convoy calls himself Ironbark Thunderbolt. Not content with the admittedly impressive sobriquet, Mr Thunderbolt was running around last year serving fake legal documents on Prime Minister Scott Morrison, signing them as “Post-Master General-Commander-in-Chief, Terra Australis-New Holland-and Surrounding Waters, known commonly as Australia.”
His real name is the not-quite-so-exciting James Edward Greer.
Those who have become used to sov-cit legal mumbo jumbo which turns out to be just about everyone from the Governor-General to a 16-year-old girl working a shift at the local pharmacy accused of treason, will recognise the gibberish:
“Notice to agent is notice to principal. Notice to principal is notice to agent.”
The Canberra assembly began as a lazy pinch of Canada’s truck convoy to Ottawa. For a little while the Australian protest even appropriated the Canadian moniker for protesters – “Yellow Vests” which in turn had been swiped from the French – but the colour coding doesn’t quite cut it in Australia where the preferred nomenclature is fluoro.
While the Canadian truck convoy blocked streets and briefly caused mayhem in the Canadian capital last weekend, in Australia, the parliamentary lawns have become home to just a handful of trucks and at least one of those went only for a sneaky peek and then took off to Melbourne. It turns out truck drivers have jobs, things to do, better places to be. This forced a quick rebranding of the Truck Convoy to Canberra to now become the Convoy for Freedom.
One of the predictable solicitations for cash was a Go Fund Me which had raised more than $100,000 as of Sunday. I watched as convoy members en route asked for help with petrol money from the fundraiser and found their comments were subsequently removed and their social media identities blocked from making further comment. The fund drive has now been frozen by Go Fund Me until such a time as the drive’s organisers can provide a proper accounting of how they will disperse the donated funds.
As the non-articulated vehicles began to gather at the nation’s capital on Monday, an even more motley group descended on Sydney’s Surry Hills Police Station. They had flagged their visit on social media and like clockwork turned up at the assigned hour – ten o’clock in the morning, and began muttering about paedophiles outside the cop shop. Sov-cits are unerringly punctual.
Before long an acting sergeant and a young constable appeared. The leader of the protest, Steve Sukkar, announced to the cops that his group was heading to the NSW Parliament to affect the arrests of Premier Dom Perrotet and Health Minister Brad Hazzard and with them in irons, they would be moving on to arrest Gladys Berejiklian at her home.
The two cops shrugged their shoulders which Sukkar et al took as permission to go forth and apprehend the ne’er-do-wells. They marched to the parliament only to find themselves locked out with a small contingent of police lining Macquarie Street. Foiled, Sukkar and his mob earnestly went from police officer to police officer, most of them young cops not long out of the academy, sticking smartphones in their faces, issuing fake arrest warrants, telling them in sov-cit legal babble that every cop present was “guilty of aiding and abetting a criminal enterprise.” For those wondering, Sukkar is a hairdresser.
The protesters lacked the will and the athleticism to scale the two-metre-high fence outside the New South Wales Parliament. No arrests were made and a new government of hairdressers by hairdressers for hairdressers was not installed.
The protesters among these mobs who may still have some tenuous connection to reality must surely be uncomfortable having to reconcile the endless calls for donations and the utterance of mad conspiracies, like the one put about by an elderly woman in Canberra on Monday who smugly pronounced Covid vaccines and Covid tests were dastardly means of subcutaneously placing nano tracking devices into the general populace.
“The technology is something we’ve never seen before,” she said, with the certainty of someone who’d been given unfettered access to Elon Musk’s man cave, “Then they start controlling our thoughts through 5G waves.”
The mob at Canberra will continue to grow for now, with their ragbag collection of gripes and dispersal of sov-cit paper terrorism. They can call it freedom, they can make casual allusions to apartheid and Nazi Germany, and they almost always do but the fact remains what they continue to try and persuade people to do is casually discard the rights of the elderly, those with chronic illness and the immunocompromised and hurl them all onto the pandemic scrap heap.
Pull the conspiracist’s veil from it and it is eugenics by indifference, and they are all guilty of it. Every single one of them.
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