Melbourne anti-lockdown protest 'most violent' in the city in 20 years: Police Commissioner

The Chief Commissioner of Victoria Police said yesterday's anti-lockdown protests in Melbourne's CBD were among the most violent he has seen in two decades. Chief Commissioner Shane Patton described the rally, which attracted thousands of people, as "disgraceful".

"What we saw yesterday was probably one of the most violent protests we've seen in nearly 20 years. That is astonishing," Mr Patton said.

"The protest was held under the banner of a 'freedom rally'. It was anything but.

"All I can say is … it was tremendously disappointing. The risk that those people have posed to the rest of the community is disgraceful and selfish."

Victoria has endured one of the longest and harshest lockdowns in the world. With very low case numbers by world standards.

This is largely down to our socialist state premier, Daniel Andrews. He is an old style socialist and an authoritarian and, unfortunately, because our constitution only really limits the federal government, not the state governments, he’s able to get away with a lot legally.

A lot of people (not me) think he’s doing a great job. He’s managed to convince a lot of people that somehow he’s saved them from huge numbers of deaths. This is despite the fact that decisions he took last year lead to the worst outbreak Australia has faced in terms of deaths - but somehow he engineered a judicial inquiry that found nobody was to blame for that decision - in fact, it failed to properly identify who actually made it.

The thing is - while lockdowns seemed to be working, he got away with a lot. What has changed now is despite him putting us back into a heavy lockdown over two weeks ago, the numbers keep going up. It’s clear that what he’s ordered isn’t working anymore, if it ever did, so even a lot of his supporters are now questioning it. And that’s what we’re starting to see on the streets here.

Personally, I think we do need some limited restrictions - we don’t want things to get out of control as they have in other countries. We’ve still had less than 1,000 deaths from COVID across the entire country and that is a good thing. But the restrictions need to be proportionate to the danger, and in Victoria, that just hasn’t been the case. With very low numbers, we’ve had some of the strictest restrictions in the world.

And it is mostly down to this one man. He broke his back at the start of this year and was out of action on medical leave for months, leaving his deputy in charge as Acting Premier. During that period, things were running a lot more smoothly and reasonably. But as soon as Dan came back...

Trouble is, our state opposition (conservative Liberal/National) is utterly hopeless - so Dan is still likely to win the next state election (late next year) and as long as he remains popular enough to lead Labor to victory, they probably won’t replace him.

In a lot of ways, Victoria is the least democratic state in Austalia. Labor governments have gradually eroded a lot of the traditional controls on governments exceeding their authority and the left-leaning media and judiciary have let them.

...because our constitution only really limits the federal government, not the state governments, he's able to get away with a lot legally.

Our Constitution does,on paper at least,guarantee *all* citizens certain rights. It's for that reason that I'm truly astounded by what some of our Governors and Mayors have gotten away with in recent months.Assuming that your Federal Constitution closely resembles Britain's (a safe assumption?) one would think that it wouldn't matter where you lived in Australia.

As Henry Kissinger once observed..."power is the ultimate aphrodisiac". Maybe that explains a lot of what's going on here...and in Australia.

It’s down to history. The Australian Constitution came into effect in 1901 when Australia federated as a single nation.

But Victoria has its own constitution dating from 1855 - it’s often not appreciated outside Australia (indeed, a lot of Australians probably don’t really understand it) but Britain’s six Australian ‘colonies’ were actually largely independent nations before Australia came into being. Britain had learned from their experience in America that when colonies a long way away started asking for more independence, it was wise to listen if you didn’t want to lose them altogether (at least if they were populated by white people - it took more than a century before this principle started being extended to other colonies). Basically, well before 1900, Victoria had responsibility for all aspects of its own government except defence policy and foreign affairs which were still handled from London. When the Australasian colonies (which included New Zealand) were discussing the idea of federation in the 1880s and 1890s, none of the colonies wanted to give up too much power to a federal government, so the Australian Constitution was written to preserve a lot of the individual colonies’ powers over their own government - in 1901, the federal government was only given powers in a limited range of areas, most importantly at the time taxation and international trade - it eventually also took over defence policy and foreign affairs policy from the UK but that actually was a gradual process that took until the start of World War II - Australia’s first overseas embassy was to the United States and was only set up in 1940 - before that, Australia just helped staff British embassies.

So Victoria still has its own constitution and unlike the Australian constitution, which is difficult to amend (requiring referendums), the Victorian constitution can be amended by the state Parliament.

At a national level, Australia doesn’t have anything like the US Bill of Rights. Quite deliberately. Our rights are protected by our inheritance of English Common Law. Now, while the Common Law certainly isn’t perfect, once you write down a Bill of Rights you can actually limit your rights as well as enhance them.

And that is what happened in Victoria. Between 2005 and 2008, the Labor government of the time (under Premier Steve Bracks) put in place a new law they called the Victorian Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities. They managed to convince people that this would ‘improve’ our rights. In fact, what it did was limit them. Unless a right is specifically laid out in the charter, it is now weakened by its exclusion.

The Commonwealth government is very limited in its ability to intervene. The High Court of Australia would need to find a ‘head of power’ in the Australian Constitution to overrule Victoria’s Charter.

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