The Comment
Legitimate protesters shouldn’t be hunted down, but violent fruit loops should

Saturday’s large protest marches in Sydney and Melbourne attracted thousands of people. Most of them were ordinary Australians, trying to find their way through the WuFlu minefield but, out of pent-up frustration, wanted their voices heard against the seemingly endless imposition of lockdowns and other restrictions on normal human intercourse.

We were going to attempt to explain why such people were determined to defy government stay-at-home orders. But James Macpherson’s coruscating piece in Flat White today sums it up deftly, brutally and powerfully. Please read it.

But listening to NSW and Victorian government leaders yesterday, you’d think that there has been a mass prison break of convicted murderers, endangering the entire community.

‘I am utterly disgusted by the illegal protesters in the city today whose selfish actions have compromised the safety of all of us’, declared NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian.

‘Anyone who thinks they can get away with this will be chased by the law to the full extent’, warned her deputy police commissioner.

‘We don’t want to see people out and about selfishly putting their point of view ahead of the health and wellbeing of others’, pontificated Victorian premier Daniel Andrews, in breathtakingly pompous hypocrisy given Andrews turned a deliberately blind eye a year ago to people doing just that in a much bigger, uglier and very violent Black Lives Matter riot because those anti-social people were ‘his’ Left activists, pushing a cause he enthusiastically supports.

Now the authorities want to hunt down ordinary people like dogs.
But Berejiklian, Andrews and others should look at Macpherson’s Litany of Shame and understand why people defied them in the streets on Saturday. Macpherson says it all.

Then they should drop their pursuit of otherwise law-abiding but frustrated citizens merely struggling to be heard when authorities are refusing to listen.

Instead, those authorities should be targeting those relatively few thugs, idiots and fruit loops who in Sydney subverted the protests for their own fringe-dweller ends, or who unleashed violence on the streets and deliberately sought to injure and maim not only policemen and media doing their jobs, but police horses.

The organisers and promoters of the march should cooperate with the authorities to root out and bring these thugs to justice. Not only because those who commit such violence need to be punished, but because their despicable acts besmirch the vast majority who came out to protest peacefully and cooperatively. The thugs’ actions made yesterday’s mud thrown at all the protesters by Berejiklian and Andrews stick so much easier.

Those organisers and promoters, including former Liberal heavy turned Liberal Democrat candidate John Ruddick who attended and live-tweeted the protest without mentioning or acknowledging the violence, must call out the perpetrators, denounce them, and help bring them to account.

If they don’t, these protests will continue to be exploited cynically by authoritarian leaders, now even – shockingly – including Liberal premiers and ministers, who are so shrilly denouncing their ordinary fellow citizens in language more redolent of 1930s totalitarian Italy, Germany and Russia than Australia in the 2020s.