We expects thugs like Daniel Andrews to behave like thugs. What we do not expect is that members of a party and a government with "liberal" in their names will take to abusing citizens, locking people up for dissent and imposing house arrest on its people.
The Deep State of New South Wales is getting deeper by the day. And it seems that those in power in what we all should now be calling the Covid State – new number plates are clearly needed between the Murray and the Tweed – are not even trying to hide it, but are tightening the screws and turning up the dial.
The Premier cleverly keeps all the bad cop stuff at a healthy distance. The Photios Industrial Complex is nothing if not rat-cunning.
In three days, we have hurtled past mere lockdown and promised house arrest – oops, I mean isolation – for those innocents who live in regional New South Wales and seek to return home there. Now we have arrests, fines, threats, nudging, promised techo-dictatorship through QR codes at every venue we can find and fit out, politicians hurling insults at their citizens, doubling down on mask mandate lunacy, and, with the help of our supine man in Canberra, vaccine passports. There is no freedom the Liberals will not threaten, no rights they will not remove, no small business they will not bankrupt, no young female they will not use their cops to intimidate.
Classic Stasi strategies and tactics have been employed by the Covid State with alarming dexterity – use politicians as salesmen for the elites; identify and scapegoat culprits; isolate, abuse and physically intimidate dissidents; let the thuggish police loose; weaponise the mainstream media (like the Murdoch pro-vaxxers) as attack dogs armed with insults rather than analysis; lie about “the science” that relates to lockdowns and masks (to name merely two examples); call countering a middling virus a “war”, as George W Bush similarly did with terrorism, or as many leaders have with drugs. Both the low information voter – recently identified by James Allan as the real problem with CovidMania – and the salivating curtain twitchers are lapping it all up.
The gauleiters who run New South Wales have learned well from their southern counterparts, such that now there isn’t a sliver of tenjugo (the thinnest paper in the world) between them. We can stop picking on the notorious VicPol and start examining our own cops a little more closely. Victoria single handedly made Australia an international embarrassment in 2020. The Premier State has seamlessly picked up the baton.
Just look at the tactics.
First, like the Shepparton “super-spreader”, who was tracked mercilessly across the southern State last year, with daily updates on his movements in the Peking Daily (aka The Age), we had the limousine driver as our very own scapegoat. Oops. We got that wrong. The Daily Mail blamed him for Sydney’s “nightmare outbreak”. No hyperbole there, journos. Will the Premier issue an apology? No, just like the thug on the Yarra who fell down the steps. The Dear Leader. Never apologise. Not when there is a “war” to be prosecuted.
Second, VicPol took out a patent on police thuggery and intimidation of innocent citizens. Now we could reasonably stage a state of origin contest in police brutality. Overweight, clearly under-employed coppers in blue face nappies harassing we-the-people, and ministers threatening that more is to come for those who step an inch out of line.
Third, insult those who dissent. VicPol, which used to be known affectionately as Ashton’s Circus under its previous tsar, wheeled out senior officers – Assistant Commissioner level – to hurl the insults. New South Wales has Brad Hazzard to enthusiastically take on this task. He who is still fresh from his glee over what Tony Abbott deftly referred to as “infanticide-on-demand” legislation, drafted by the Greens and steered through parliament by many Liberals and all-but-two Nationals. (Little wonder there is no room at the Nats’ Inn for John Anderson any more). Now a virus, rather than the innocent unborn, is the enemy.
If you are going to spit out insults, please get your story right, though. Brad takes issue with those who hold “whacko ideas” like lockdowns don’t work and masks are useless. Do try to keep up, Brad. You know, follow the science. Heard of that one? Look at forty plus years of science spouted by, of all people, the World Health Organisation. You are entitled to your own opinions, as Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of the once great US Democratic Party once said, but you are not entitled to your own facts.
Fourth, endlessly repeat the messaging, with daily press conferences featuring overweening health officials of clearly moderate ability. Premiers simply love this. They were born for this moment. They all saw Anna Bligh using the strategy masterfully and tirelessly during the Brisbane floods a decade ago – floods, it might well be argued, that were unleashed at least partly through the incompetence and ideology of her own government – and they all saw how well it worked. And crises like this almost entirely manufactured one don’t come along very often. The electoral rewards have been immense for those who beat the dictatorial drum. Witness Jacindarella across the Ditch, Mark McGowan across the Nullabor and Annastacia across the Tweed. This is proving to be a winning formula, this bullying of citizens and removing their freedom, their jobs, their mental health and their dignity. Go figure.
The scenes witnessed of police intimidating young women in otherwise empty train carriages, of stealing their property, of flagrantly breaking their own rules which, clearly, they either do not know or simply ignore, of throwing shop owners on the ground and into paddy wagons, and of rounding up people and dragging them off to the cop shop, should shame us all. Clearly, they don’t. Now CrimeStoppers has received 350 or so calls from “concerned citizens” reporting breaches of public health orders. Signs that advertise brave, thoughtful protests like the Stand in the Park initiative are quickly removed from public places. Two of my own family members have been on the receiving end of mask-mandate petty thuggery.
This should be unnerving, even humiliating, to say the least, for politicians that claim to be liberal, caring and rational. But they realise there is no moral hazard – pun fully intended – in their grotesquely errant, faux-leaderly behaviour. They have weapons of mass humiliation to play with – the media, the Karens, the police, the limp opposition parties and the cowed citizenry.
Makes you just proud to be Australian.
