It took two Labor leaders to help produce Monday night’s violence in Sydney, proving Labor is not immune to a touch of the Trumps, writes Michael Pascoe.
NSW Premier Chris Minns would have you believe he doesn’t know one end of Sydney from the other. The protesters wanted to march away from where Herzog was. That’s not the impression Minns gave.
It adds to his Trump-like obfuscation and denial of the violence he helped cause at the anti-Herzog demonstration in Sydney on Monday night.
Also Trump-like, he suggested the public should perhaps not believe the video evidence they saw of a man with his hands raised being repeatedly punched by police.
I’m waiting for the Labor Premier to endorse Tony Abbott’s sentiments, as reported by the SMH:
“Former prime minister Tony Abbott has suggested police who punched protesters yesterday should receive a commendation, and officers at future demonstrations should be armed with tear gas and rubber bullets to safeguard against the pro-terrorist protests we’ve seen too often.”
Minns’ litany of failures
The NSW police hierarchy failed spectacularly in November by allowing a neo-Nazi rally to go ahead outside Parliament House.
The hierarchy failed tragically ($), dreadfully, on December 14 by dismissing requests for extra police at the Bondi Beach Hanukkah celebration in December despite being advised it was “high-risk based on its size, location and profile”.
The couple of junior officers on the usual patrol at Bondi and those who rapidly responded from further afield performed bravely and well, a credit to the force, to selfless policing, but Premier Minns is responsible for the hierarchy, not the ranks.
It’s more than a bit late for Minns and said hierarchy to try to make up for their failures by acting tough, going the biff, against pro-Palestinian protesters
as the local Israeli lobby has wanted them to.
A geography lesson
To spell it out for those, like Minns, who don’t know the geography of Sydney’s CBD, the Premier has claimed police had to keep the Town Hall protesters separate from the 7000 people attending a Herzog event at the International Convention Centre at Darling Harbour.
To achieve that, according to Minns, police had to stop protesters going ahead with their march to Parliament House, a march forbidden under Minns’ anti-protest laws enacted for the Herzog visit.
The ICC is 700 metres west of Town Hall. Parliament House is 1,100 metres north-east of Town Hall.
Marching to Parliament House would have put the protesters further away from the ICC, 1,800 metres according to Google Maps, a 27-minute walk.
So the police, acting under orders, charged and pepper-sprayed and punched and trampled the protesters to force them south to Central Station.
Minns’ view of the subsequent violence was summed up by his reaction to the clear video evidence of the not-young, not-strongly-built man with raised hands being brutally assaulted by police, “I just want to urge everybody to not look at a 10-second clip without the full context of the circumstances relating to those clashes yesterday evening.”
Why stop there?
Why not go the full Kristi Noem and claim he was a terrorist?
The Premier was heading in that direction on Wednesday in State Parliament, labelling those punched and pushed and trampled “agitators”, not protesters.
Presumably, that included 76-year-old James Ricketson, who was caught up ($) in the police cordon while on his way to the Town Hall railway station. Instead, bruised and assaulted, he spent five hours in custody before being released without charge.
It was all good police work, according to Premier Minns, his police minister and commissioner.
Poor mainstream media coverage
Media coverage of the violence was poor at the time, beyond images and, soon enough, predictably partisan by the usual suspects.
For the main non-Murdoch Sydney newspaper, initial coverage was largely reporting the various claims of police, politicians and protesters, failing the journalism dictum: “If someone says it’s raining and another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both.
It’s your job to look out the window and find out which is true.
By early Tuesday afternoon, though, the SMH ($) managed to get its act together, reporting what its reporters saw.
What is notable is that, with the exception of one protestor biting a policeman’s thumb and subsequently being well-punched for his trouble, the reporters actually reporting did not see violence against police but plenty of police violence against protesters.
Not that Chris Minns would care. There might be a raw onion somewhere waiting to be eaten.
Albanese’s role
In fairness, Minns’ performance is an afterthought, a mere second-rate reaction to events only partially of his making.
Every punch, every protest, every insult and offence taken, every outraged headline one way or the other over these several days,
is solely the responsibility of one person: Anthony Albanese.
It was his decision and his alone to grant Herzog a state visit. To hear him in Federal Parliament say it was the doing of the Governor-General insults the intelligence of Sky News commentators.
It is hard to imagine anyone stupid enough not to imagine the inevitable results of such an invitation to appease a small but powerful lobby group that sees only upside in any means of denigrating Israel’s critics. On that basis, they’re on a winner with most press coverage.
So is Albanese that stupid, or does he not care?
My suspicion, on no scientific grounds, is that most of the Australian Labor Party regards the Herzog state visit as a very regrettable mistake.
That’s irrelevant as “ALP” now seems to stand for the Albanese Labor Party.