Back in September 2020 when supporters of Victorian Premier Dan Andrews were bristling at all the “Dictator Dan” jibes, the cops were dispatched to arrest a pregnant woman for a Facebook post.
The woman, Zoe Buhler, had attracted the authorities’ attention — not for any action, but for proposing a protest on a social media platform, which breached the “incitement” provisions of the Victorian Crimes Act.
You didn’t have to agree with any of Buhler’s views to see this as fairly chilling.
Yesterday, after nearly two years, the charges were dropped. Police said to continue would not be “in the public interest”. Last month incitement charges were also withdrawn against anti-vax and anti-lockdown campaigner Monica Smit. Meanwhile, the organisers of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protest are still facing prosecution.
It’s so redolent of a different time you may barely remember it, but back when the BLM protests were held in June 2020, before Victoria’s new daily cases were breaching triple digits and before Victoria went into stage-four lockdowns, a great deal of effort was put into finding out exactly where any individual case of coronavirus was contracted.
This is worth remembering when you ask yourself if it’s in the public interest to continue to pursue charges against Crystal McKinnon, an Amangu Yamaji woman and Indigenous research fellow at RMIT, and Gunai and Gunditjmara woman and activist Meriki Onus some two years later. Because to this day there is no evidence anyone caught COVID at that protest.
At the time, Victoria Police warned the protest organisers they would be fined if the chief health officer’s directions were not complied with, but that it would not fine people who attended the rally. Again, this was before the brutal stage-four lockdowns that would dominate the rest of the year in Melbourne. At the time, Victorians could leave home for any reason, but the directions in place required people to take reasonable steps to maintain a distance of 1.5 metres from others and restricted gatherings outside to a maximum of 20 people.
The organisers encouraged protesters to adhere to the restrictions. But of course it’s impossible to prove that every one of the thousands who showed up that day did so, and so the organisers were slapped with a $1652 fine.
Consider also that the Victorian government is so relaxed at the prospect of the COVID wave engulfing hundreds of thousands more people than it already has that it is ignoring the its acting chief health officer’s advice to reinstate a mask mandate.
There’s not much weight to the idea that this is a deterrent against future protests during future lockdowns, because it appears future lockdowns aren’t coming.
Victoria’s recent passing of harsh laws aimed specifically at environmentalists — 12 months’ jail or a $21,000 fine for interfering with timber harvesting operations — makes its view of the right to protest pretty clear.
Still, why is the prosecution of the BLM organisers in the public interest if Buhler’s prosecution isn’t?
Should the Victorian government just drop charges against the BLM organisers and move on? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
The Saudi attack on 9/11, organised by Bin Laden, created a welter of new laws which really should be repealed around security. Arriving at the airport 3 hours before departure to be looked at through one-way mirrors while you wonder whether you put your nail scissors in your carry-on bag, is ridiculous. Border force strutting around in black uniforms. Powers the police now have, and shouldn’t. Security cameras on every corner. Facial recognition software, everything recorded and kept forever. I am disgusted we have let it happen. Stalin would have loved it. Hitler would have invented it. The future will use it.
It is the public interest, big time, to censure medial misinformation imo. Dictator Dan rhetoric needed to be shut down imo – straight out of Putin’s propaganda playbook – purposely eschewing reason in order to manipulate emotions that serve one’s agenda. I found it terrifying how quickly triggering ‘You’re being violated! Your freedom is at stake!’ was able to foment protests. Reality is masks etc are covid control measures and we only need compare the rate of deaths during lockdowns with that at present to see this. I agree there is inconsistency re: not following advice to reinstitute masks, and the more so given the hospital crises, but in some measure this may be due to the effectiveness of right wing propaganda having created sufficient resistance to render it both ineffective and a source of social conflict.
I can’t recall name and date but was a VICE piece where a journo attended an anti-vax conference that appeared to be a feeder to right wing politics with presentation names like “freedom”. I’ve read “right to life” was co-opted by the right wing as a means to power and it seems imo to be the same with reframing covid control measures as an assault on “freedom”.
I am very concerned about the freedom to protest and who gets it and who doesn’t. However I have a feeling that in the cases of Ms Smit and Ms Buhler we are dealing with one of those situations where the people involved are known to police and thoroughly disliked by them , the police get fed up, they charge them. It happens all the time, only usually not with this sort of publicity. There are some very revealing comments on some Reddit posts about this matter about Ms Buhler from people who know her in the Bendigo/Ballarat area and it seems she is, as they say, ‘well known to the police’. She and her partner are also, it seems not very well liked or well respected in the area. There is some hilarity about her turning into some sort of political martyr. I’m not saying the police charging people they know and whose crap they are sick of is right, but it happens.
In relation to the BLM protests, yeah, sorry, that got thoroughly up my nose. Police and the government were on a no win situation with that one. Either they charge people in relation to those protests or they will have trouble justifying charging the far right protesters with their ridiculous petty protests. I really hate it when the left get up on their sanctimonious ‘we’re right about everything’ horse. The reasoning behind the American driven BLM protests was that the issue was so important that it outweighed any other issues in the early days of the pandemic. This may have been true in the US, but in terms of immediacy it wasn’t here. The issue of the deaths of indigenous people at the hands of police and in prison is a long standing one, and as the indigenous leaders who were involved pointed out, should have been the focus of protest and anger long before the BLM protests. The Australian left is so overwhelmed with reflected ‘glamour’ and excitement of issues driven by the US left that it just drools and goes along with anything that’s happening there without thinking an awful lot. The BLM protestors here were just embarrassing, and watching them twist and turn to try and justify the protests when the left was broadly in support of lock down measures was painful.
More important and more immediate were the protests about the asylum seekers imprisoned in the Park Hotel and other places. I think their protests were well organised, all being in cars, and I think that any charges there were dropped pretty quickly.
On the contrary VJ, my husband and son are still facing court over the safe in-car Mantra Hotel imprisoned asylum SEEKERS COVID danger protest. Police continue to refuse to drop the charges. Next court date is Oct 11th
VJ – you state you’re very concerned about the right to protest, but then spend the rest of your comment justifying police arresting dissenters. Confusing.
I’d contend that the BLM march timing was perfectly valid. In late May 2020, world news was dominated by the story of George Floyd’s murder by police, which then flowed into June after several more killings of black people. Australia’s indigenous community sensed the angry / aghast / shocked response of Australians and used that upswell in attention to highlight that they’ve been putting up with that kind of treatment, and suffered even higher incarceration rates than Black Americans, for a long time.
Also, as was pointed out in the article, contract tracers were unable to substantiate a single covid case that stemmed from the protest. So why should the organisers be charged??
I didn’t find the BLM protesters embarrassing, and, I fully supported (and still support) their right to protest, even though I’m a massive leftie.
Just like the Australian right anti COVID-19 mitigation ‘freedoms’ protestors waving pro Trump and Confederate flags and towing gallows around.
There is good reason Victoria had the highest internal migration exodus of all states recently.
Much to the detriment of the rest of the country sadly.
Might one reprise Piggy Muldoon (re NZ emigration to OZ) about the raising the average (often omitted which renders it meaningless) IQ of both?
It’s not just BLM. The police are still pursuing the people who did an “in car” protest about refugees imprisoned at Mantra Hotel
That’s horrifying – how ridiculous to pursue them in the first place. Their stated “crime” should never have been a crime in the first place hey?