Tag Archives: VICTORIA

Conscientious Resignation of Police Officer in Australia

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By Robert J. Burrowes

Following the conscientious resignation of Acting Senior Sergeant Krystle Mitchell of the Victoria Police in Australia, the international network Police for Freedom https://policeforfreedom.org/ has just issued the statement below in support.

Krystle had served Victorians, with distinction, for 16 years as a police officer and has recently resigned over a matter of conscience in relation to policing of the Covid-19 restrictions.

Krystle’s interview:

‘EXCLUSIVE: Ethical Policing in Victoria, Australia’ https://www.bitchute.com/video/yvyEYcFaQICM/

And the Police for Freedom statement:

Police For Freedom International commends Acting Senior Sergeant Krystle Mitchell for standing up and giving a voice to thousands of police in Victoria, Australia right now. Thank you for your courage and integrity, sacrificing your career in the name of truth.

In the current political climate, in which rights and freedoms worldwide are restricted and under further threat, it is the conscience and courage of individuals who capably defend such rights and freedoms, such as Krystle Mitchell, that will be vital if the truth is to ultimately prevail.

These rights include those articulated in the UNESCO Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights, including:

Article 3.1: Human dignity and human rights:

Human dignity, human rights and fundamental freedoms are to be fully respected. The interests and welfare of the individual should have priority over the sole interest of science or society.

Article 6: Consent:

Any preventive, diagnostic and therapeutic medical intervention is only to be carried out with the prior, free and informed consent of the person concerned, based on adequate information. The consent should, where appropriate, be express and may be withdrawn by the person concerned at any time and for any reason without disadvantage or prejudice.

We at Police For Freedom are happy to support each and every serving officer who decides to stand on the right side of history. It is tragic that police are having to lose their jobs for simply raising concerns about where our societies are being taken under the guise of health mandates.

Policing is all about community, and we will do our very best to help police stand together with their people.

Sincerely,
Police For Freedom: www.policeforfreedom.org

The interview with Krystle Mitchell: https://www.bitchute.com/video/yvyEYcFaQICM/

Omnibus Collisions: Coronavirus Policing and Overreach in Victoria

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By Binoy Kampmark

Source: Dissident Voice

In her September 17 speech to parliament, the Attorney General of the Australian state of Victoria, Jill Hennessy, explained various provisions of the COVID-19 Omnibus (Emergency Measures) and Other Acts Amendment Bill.  Of most interest was the proposal that would dramatically inflate the scope of public health power in ostensibly preventing a spread of COVID-19.  “The broader class of persons who may be appointed as authorised officers may include public sector employees from Victoria and other jurisdictions.  For example, health services staff, WorkSafe officers such as Inspectors, Victoria Police members and Protective Service Officers.”

The formulation seemed an odd one: health services staff as designated officers to halt transmission perhaps, but unqualified members of the Victoria Police, along with Protective Service Officers?  The Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services was the proposed appointer; the appointees (“authorised officers”) would be anybody deemed to possess appropriate skills, attributes or experience.  Such elevated, muscularly vested officers would have the power to detain anyone who has tested positive for COVID-19, or anyone who had been in close contact with a positive case, for a period “reasonably necessary to eliminate a serious risk to public health,” provided it was “reasonably believed”  they would fail to comply with a direction of self-quarantine.

Hennessy evaded the severe implications of such a broadly worded provision, arguing for convenience and efficiency, the two traditional hallmarks of the authoritarian mentality. The appointment power would focus upon “individuals with particular attributes, such as connection to particular communities”.  “Contact tracing” would be able to take place in “a culturally safe manner.”  As for any oversight limitations, these appointments would be subject to a “specific instrument” outlining specific authority and limitations authorised by the Secretary and Chief Health Officer.

This was something that did not escape the notice of some members of the Victorian Parliament.  Greens MP Tim Read noted how the Omnibus Bill, in that draft form, gave police, protective services officers and private security guards powers to unilaterally determine who constituted a high risk with little regard to medical expertise.  “Currently only public servants with the relevant skills and experience can make that decision”.  Enforcing directions was a separate function of law enforcement.  “So the bill would allow police to both make health directions on individuals and then to enforce them.”

The Omnibus Bill also saw various legal advocates spring into action. Michael Borsky QC went for understatement in claiming that detaining someone for hypothetical future conduct was a “very unusual legal construct”.  The provision was “open to abuse”.  Nor did impress the legal heads at the Victorian Bar, where there was much head shaking.  The proposed criteria for appointing such officers was deemed too “broad and generic”.  Their lack of precision “potentially opened the door for those who are not trained as health professionals to be appointed ‘authorised officers’.”

Granting such individuals unilateral powers of detention against individuals not abiding by a public health direction was another point of concern. An officer’s “reasonable belief” was a “standard of validation” vast and subjective.  The Victorian Bar also suggested some measure of accountability: that decisions made by such authorised officers be “reviewed by the Chief Health Officer (or senior delegate) within a short, stipulated period (preferably not longer than 24 hours).”

The talents of Victorian policing have already been found wanting during one of the most extreme lockdown measures in the developed world.  Reem Mussa, humanitarian advisor on forced migration to Médicins Sans Frontières, remembered the terror caused by the appearance of five hundred police “on housing estates [in Melbourne], trapping residents inside with no coherent health strategy or plans to keep them safe, fed or with access to medication and essentials.”  23 confirmed cases of COVID-19 had been found on the estates in July.  Panic coursed through the various administrative arms of government.

In September, a very public display of policing mismanagement took place with the arrest of Ballarat resident Zoe Buhler, a pregnant mother apprehended in front of her children and husband in their home for a Facebook post inciting protest against the lockdown rules.  No police officer thought it necessary to explain the offence of incitement, nor accept her offer to remove the offending post.  It was such conduct that prompted Greg Barns of the Australian Lawyers Alliance to argue for limits on police powers when linked to pandemic controls.

The Police Accountability Project, based at the Flemington & Kensington Community Legal Centre in Melbourne, has also been alarmed by the aggressive, untutored policing formula pursued in the state.  “The policing we have seen in Victoria to date and the scale of the policing we have seen [on July 4] and today in Flemington & North Melbourne, has caused and continues to do harm.”

Over the course of the lockdown, the PAP project has noted ten concerns about how harsh Stage 4 restrictions have been enforced.  A few are worth noting.  Police, for instance, were ill trained to make complex assessments about exemptions requiring health expertise.  “Police ignored genuine health based exemptions and continually resorted to lock-down responses because it more closely aligned with their training.”  They had failed to comprehend the public health impacts of their work, and that most pressing of points that policing “undermines public health responses.”  The policing of curfews had been “applied in a discriminatory, abusive and harmful manner.”  With such a stunning resume of faults and blunders, it is a wonder how the drafters in the Attorney-General’s department took leave of their senses.

On October 8, the Victorian government quietly trimmed parts of the proposed bill dealing with detention.  Finding themselves in retreat, a flutter of qualifications were made.  “We have always said we would negotiate in good faith,” claimed a less than chastened Hennessy.  Giving little away, the Attorney-General claims to have made such amendments that will continue “to deliver the temporary, necessary changes we need to respond to the challenges the pandemic presents”.

According to Guardian Australia, the proposed table of changes will still preserve the power to appoint police and protective services officers as authorised officers, but with fewer powers.  They will still be able to exercise considerable discretion in, for instance, searching property without a warrant if “necessary for the purpose of investigation, eliminating or reducing the risk to public health”.  The daft dangers of making police and security personnel pseudo-health officers remain.

From Blue Shirts to Brown

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By Alan Hamilton

Source: Off-Guardian

On at least 3 or 4 occasions in the past week we’ve had to smash the windows of people in cars and pull them out of there so they could provide their details – because they weren’t telling us where they were going; they weren’t adhering to the chief health officer’s guidelines, they weren’t providing their name and their address.”
Shane Patton, Victorian Chief Police Officer 04/08/2020

On Saturday 5th of September a national day of protest occurred in cities around Australia against the unnecessary and draconian lockdowns that have been occurring across the country and which are still occurring in Victoria. Similar protests have occurred in cities around the world, most especially in Europe.

These protests are a legitimate and rational response to despotic and often unconstitutional laws that unscientifically characterize every member of society as a bio-security risk to everyone else. They are also a protest against law enforcement bureaucracies that identify responsible, civic-minded citizens as criminals if they dare to question such laws or even worse, step out of their homes in defiance of the lockdown to register their dissent.

The Australian protests occurred peacefully and without incident in most places, including Brisbane where I participated. But it was not the case in Victoria where a State of Disaster has been declared due to the ‘extraordinarily high’ number of active Covid cases there.

On the eve of the nationwide protests, mainstream news reported on the harrowing state of affairs in Victoria which was suffering from hundreds of active cases but, as it turns out, had only 20 people in intensive care suffering from covid-related illnesses. This is in a state of 6.35 million people that has 58 metropolitan hospitals and 69 rural hospitals and District Health services.

Despite the ‘extraordinarily low’ incidence of people who were actually sick from Covid 19, the Victorian Premier decided that new case numbers (>100 per day) were just too high to tolerate anyone leaving their homes for any reason other than the four exemptions provided by the government.

What he neglected to mention when insisting on preserving his lockdown was that most new cases are occurring in the under-30 age bracket: a demographic that is almost always asymptomatic to SARS CoV-2 and which has more chance of dying in a motor vehicle accident than of Covid19.

Undeterred by inconvenient truths like this, the Premier announced he had to protect the public from the potentially catastrophic medical emergency that would doubtless result from masked people walking down St Kilda Road to the Cenotaph in a socially distanced manner, so he banned all participation in the national day of protest.

Just days earlier the Assistant Police Commissioner for the North West Metro Region, Luke Cornelius, warned everyone in Victoria against participating in the Saturday protests. He referred to people who planned to protest against lockdowns as “boof heads”, calling them an “anti-vax, anti-mask, tinfoil hat-wearing brigade who were batshit crazy”.

This oddly extreme language from one of the State’s most senior police officers is not accidental. It serves a specific purpose.

In order to get ordinary well-adjusted police officers – who may have joined the force out of a desire to be of public service – to brutalize a population whose only crime is that they object to being locked in their homes for 23 hrs a day for months on end, you need to demonize dissent. If your officers on the ground can identify in any way with the people they are being told to terrorize, they might not follow orders.

This is a perennial problem for martial leaders everywhere. It’s particularly problematic when the rules being enforced are arbitrary or unjust. Hence the need to malign.

As Saturday rolled around, the police were out in force across Victoria on horseback with cuffs, batons, tasers and guns ready to intimidate, arrest and fine anyone unfortunate enough to attract their attention within the vicinity of a protest in any town in the State – even those towns where not a single case of Covid-19 has been recorded.

And here we get to the crux of the SARS-CoV-2 scam. Sure, there’s a virus out there. It’s real and it certainly kills people but we know enough about it now to know that the draconian response taken by Premier Danial Andrews is scientifically indefensible. So why is he persisting with the lockdowns?

My personal opinion is that the global program of lockdowns is a mechanism for reorganizing societies around the world along the lines of the World Economic Forum’s ‘Great Reset” agenda and all that this entails. It seems Daniel Andrews is fully on board with this agenda. But make no mistake, its coming to your state and country next.

I believe that sustained lockdowns are a “Stanley Milgram-style” experiment designed to see just how far bureaucrats in authority will exceed the moral limits of their power and how much abuse the Australian public will tolerate before they push back.

As part of this experiment, the algorithms that once monitored every nuance of our social media interactions to make frighteningly accurate predictions about us have been extended to track and predict our off-line experience as well. It should come as no surprise that both the Azure and AWS cloud eco-systems have expanded by 50% since the beginning of the pandemic.

The purpose of all this surveillance is not to better understand us as potential marketing targets (the standard explanation) but rather to better control us as victims in a system of profound inequality. Such a system is already in place across much of the world and under the guise of a health pandemic, it is rapidly being expanded to developed countries as well.

So far as I can see the whole experiment is going spectacularly well for the globalists, billionaires, and authoritarians, and very poorly for free citizens everywhere: mostly due to the effectiveness of media propaganda in driving public passivity.

A SCIENTIFIC DICTATORSHIP

Many medical practitioners are aware that Victoria’s management of the SARS CoV-2 pandemic is based on highly selective medical advice which doesn’t stand up to serious scientific scrutiny.

Recently a group of doctors wrote an excellent letter to the Premier advocating an alternative response to disease management, noting that more than 41,000 people die every year in Victoria, roughly 10,000 each from cardiovascular disease and cancer, yet in 7 months of a supposed pandemic less than 600 Victorians have died of Covid-19: 90% of them over 65 years of age and most with multiple co-morbidities.

The problem with the doctor’s alternative advice is that it assumes the government is merely mistaken or misinformed in its policymaking and implementation. The idea that the exercise of political power in Victoria has become pathological never seems to occur to them – despite a wealth of evidence supporting such a notion.

When governments pass laws that are extreme or unjust or which by-pass constitutional constraints, it is rarely by accident. As doctors they ought to be the first to appreciate what a pathological exercise of power means to the cultural and institutional bonds that hold a society together:

  • As bio-security increasingly substitutes for health care, doctors will find that the personal confidences of their patients are no longer inviolate and that the Hippocratic obligations they once held so dear can be easily compromised by legal mandates to force-medicate people regardless of need or consequence.
  • When politicians rule by executive decree the police force morphs from a public service comprised of citizens in uniform to the enforcement arm of a political clique. When this happens, public trust in the police is lost and this loss of legitimacy results in a loss of respect. Eventually this loss of respect becomes mutual and the police start to despise the people they victimize and abuse the power they have. The opening quote being a perfect example.
  • Similarly with the military: when the exercise of our democratic rights is pathologized by those in power, our servicemen and women eventually find they’re being asked to apply, at home, the counter-insurgency training and urban warfare tactics they learned for battlefields abroad. This is something that has occurred since the time of Thucydides and it’s happening again.
  • Even the tools we use to make sense of the world, such as the scientific method, cease to function properly when our governments become toxic. Once everyone in a society has been force-vaccinated by government decree, it will become legally impossible to prove a link between mandated vaccines and any potential vaccine-related injury. Not because the manufacturers will have immunity from liability (they will), but because there will no longer be a non-vaccinated control group left against which randomized double-blind control studies can be conducted.

Not one of these developments is accidental. All of them are known, predictable outcomes of policy decisions being taken today. And these policy decisions rob everyone of their integrity; health workers, academics, the police and the military.

When those in power have a pathological relationship to the people they rule, you know you are on a road to perdition. We can see such a pathology evolving among our politicians most clearly in Victoria with its home invasions, curfews and lock downs but it is also evident in the overreach of governments around the country.

Western Australia’s recent dispute with mining magnate, Clive Palmer, over the State’s Covid border closure is a case in point. According to the WA Law Society the Government’s anti-Palmer legislation violates several of the fundamental legal principles that underpin the rule of law in a civilized society. Such overreach is also apparent in the ASIO Amendment Act 2020, introduced into Federal Parliament by Peter Dutton in May this year – right at the height of the Covid panic while most members were not even in Canberra.

This legislation is the latest in a succession of Bills that have been passed by our Federal government since 9/11 (85 and counting) which have vastly expanded the powers of law enforcement and security agencies in Australia while limiting public oversight. The legislation effectively criminalizes the free exercise of our basic democratic freedoms.

The Dutton amendment extends powers normally applied to terrorists, to any group or person engaged in any kind of civil disobedience or protest that could possibly result in ‘politically motivated violence’. That would include the anti-lock down protests that I participated in last week.

Among a raft of frightening provisions this bill allows police and intelligence agencies to track, apprehend and question children as young as 14 yrs of age as though they were terrorists. It suspends the rules of habeas corpus and allows the State to arbitrarily restrict a defendant’s access to legal representation.

This is the sort of legislation you’d expect to find in China or Saudi Arabia, not Australia.

The permanent changes to our society that are now in place in Australia following the SARS CoV-2 pandemic mean we qualify as proto-fascist State by any measure of political freedom. This thought is anathema to most Australians and would be vociferously denied by paid-off mainstream media pundits – but probably not constitutional lawyers – because the legislative reality is that we are now much closer to full-blooded fascism than we are to the liberal democracy that existed when I was born in 1963. And we are a very far cry from the nation our diggers returned to in 1945.

The only way we will arrest and/or reverse this trend is if we all take direct, non-violent, physical (not digital) action to exercise our civic and democratic rights at every opportunity we can. The time to speak up and stand up is now. It will be too late tomorrow.