First they came for the Socialists,
and I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists,
and I did not speak out
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak for me.
by Martin Niemoller
This video ends when the Victorian police officer took the phone which was recording live on Facebook. The arrest and search warrant apparently gave the police the right to confiscate all electronic devices in that home, including that mobile phone.
For more context, you can read the article online at The Australian newspaper by Janet Albrechtsen, it begins:
The state of Victoria is unfathomable. The duly elected leader, a Labor Premier, has armed police with brute powers to enter and search the Ballarat home of a young pregnant woman, her partner and children, arrest and handcuff her and seize all phones and laptops, regardless of who owns them.
Why? Here’s the fascist part.
Twenty-eight-year-old Zoe Buhler posted about “Freedom Day Ballarat” on Facebook. She wrote this: “PEACEFUL PROTEST! All social distancing measures are to be followed so we don’t get arrested please. Please wear a mask unless you have a medical reason not to. As some of you have seen, the government has gone to extreme measures and are using scare tactics through the media to prevent the Melbourne protests.
I’m speaking out, including through this weblog that is usually reserved for my natural history.
I worked out how to download the video from Facebook, and upload to a new Vimeo channel that I’ve just setup through Climate Lab. You are most welcome to share.
****
The image at the top of this blog post is of course about a character in George Orwell’s novel called ‘Animal Farm’. And I copied the image from here: https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/animal-farm/boxer-horse
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
There’s another version of this but the above goes to the heart of the matter.
What has happened in VicDaniStan has angered me intensely. Notice how the VicStapo has used their blackshirt muscle on women, particularly; such brave souls they are – NOT.
Zoe has my support through the IPA; all true freedom fighters should now unite, but it’s very telling how the SFF (socialist freedom fighters) are stone deaf silent.
Is there a written transcript, I cannot understand much of the spoken words.
Very sad indeed. In effect the same has been done to you & Peter Ridd.
Jennifer, come November l firmly believe the nonsense we have been experiencing will come to a sudden end, but not without pain between now and then.
Thank you for your courage, and for standing up when it counted. Others are waking up in their droves. Hang in there. Soon we will have our Australia back.
Cheers
Mike
Hi Herman,
The following note from John Roskam sent out to member of the IPA on Friday provides some more context and some direct quotes:
” … it’s been a busy afternoon here at the IPA as we’ve been helping support Zoe Lee Buhler after what happened to her on Wednesday afternoon.
What dozens and dozens of IPA members have texted me and emailed me to say over the last two days is something I’m starting to think too. I’m not sure I recognise this country anymore.
In Australia you should not have to risk imprisonment to express an opinion. (And for that matter it shouldn’t be unlawful to offend someone either.)
On Wednesday afternoon, after Zoe Lee Buhler put on her Facebook page an advertisement for a protest meeting on Saturday against Daniel Andrews’ lockdown laws, officers from the Victoria Police came to her home, executed a search warrant, searched for and removed electronic devices, and then handcuffed and arrested her for the crime under the Victorian Crimes Act of ‘incitement’ to commit an offence. In this context ‘incitement’ involves a person doing something to ‘command, request, propose, advise, encourage, or authorise’ another person to break Victoria’s lockdown rules which in this case prohibited people gathering in one place.
In her Facebook post Zoe wrote this about the protest:
PEACEFUL PROTEST
All social distancing measures are to be followed so we don’t get arrested please. Please wear a mask unless you have a medical reason not to. September 5th is FREEDOM DAY!
As some of you may have seen the government has gone to extreme measures and are using scare tactics through the media to prevent the Melbourne protest. Here in Ballarat we can be a voice for those in stage 4 lockdowns. We can be seen and heard and hopefully make a difference.
END LOCKDOWNS. STAND FOR HUMAN RIGHTS. WE LIVE IN A ‘FREE’ COUNTRY.
And then she provided the details of the time and place of the protest. Zoe thought the protest was lawful because Ballarat was only under a ‘Stage 3 lockdown’ while Melbourne was under a ‘Stage 4 lockdown’.
For that post Zoe was arrested. Presumably the police are monitoring Facebook posts about lockdown protests, saw this, identified Zoe and her address and the rest was captured on video as Zoe turned on ‘Facebook Live’ on her mobile phone when the police entered her home.
Over the last few days the IPA, together with Craig Kelly MP and many others have been able to support Zoe, and her legal team now includes Stuart Wood QC, Ruth Shann, and Stephen Andrianakis.
There are far too many aspects of what’s occurred to be covered here now, and as I said I’ll be writing to you more about this in the coming days. For the moment I’ll just quote from today’s The Australian editorial which sums up exactly how I feel.
All the hallmarks of a police state: Victoria.
Covid has brought an incremental erosion of civil liberties and suddenly Victorians are living a dystopian nightmare.
It’s a gruesome scenario most of us know only from films. Just a few people in Australia who have lived under the Nazis, the Stasi or China’s national security laws know the reality.
The knock on the door, the fear and shock as police arrest someone in the home for a supposed crime against the state — often expressing a view contrary to the diktats of the ruling elite.
This time last year, the idea that any Australian police force would arrest and handcuff a pregnant woman at home in her pyjamas, in front of her children, in a provincial city, for a Facebook post, would have defied credulity.
The pandemic, however, has brought an incremental erosion of civil liberties, especially in Victoria. The heat has been turned up gradually, to the point Victorians are living a dystopian nightmare. House arrest for 23 hours a day, working (if they still have job) at home while they homeschool children; an 8pm curfew; isolation if they live alone; no visiting friends or family. Many people, understandably, are too fraught to add another worry — the encroaching police state — to their burdens.
Apart from the Aussie accent, the only moment in the exchange with police at the Ballarat home of Zoe Buhler, 28, that felt remotely Australian was her partner, James Timmins, 21, appealing to police: “This is a bit unfair, come on, mate. What about she just doesn’t do the event?”
In a supposedly liberal democracy, the slide into authoritarianism is intolerable. Such a crude show of force suggests authorities are tone deaf to the public mood, or indifferent to it. The lack of an apology from Victoria Police or the government is telling.
The Institute of Public Affairs, supporting Ms Buhler, says Victoria is a “police state”. Assistant Commissioner Luke Cornelius did little to disavow the public of that notion. He defended the arrest but, with astounding understatement, admitted the “optics” were “never going to look good”.
Now the video of an expectant mum in handcuffs has ricocheted around the world, adding to the impression of a power-crazed regime.
The part that struck me. It used to be the Australian way:
‘This is a bit unfair, come on, mate’
is an eloquent appeal to reason and justice and our innate common-sense. All of which seems now to have disappeared in Victoria…
End of quote from email from JR.
So well done , Jen.
The head of the WHO has already tied this all up to “climate”, so you are about to be “come for”.
Greenmed and another organisation went through CDC’s site and found they’d downgraded true causal covid deaths , by something like 90%.
Donald Trump tweeted the info and Twitter removed his post, ( that’s a very big thing, surely).
THEN Greenmed got deplatformed, this is a very big battle mate.
Is this what you are looking for?
https://fromrome.info/2020/08/31/us-government-admits-that-91-of-corona-deaths-stats-were-faked/
Cheers
Mike
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?
Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?…
The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
Aleksandr Solzhenytsyn, from: The Gulag Archipelago.
There is no excuse for this Gestapo like behaviour of the Victorian police.I hope Andrews gets his reward at the ballot box .Vote him out Victoria.
Trouble is, there are people out there completely brainwashed who believe thousands will die if we dont stay home, incredible that they cant tthinkor understand that through the basic measures implememted in other states, community transmission of the virus was all but eliminated. Mostly they threatened fines for contravention of the rules. Apart from the subject case, I now see Vic cops smashing a door open, gang tackling people who are resisting the rules etc. The brainwashed are on social media cheering Andrews and the cops on. The propaganda has worked on the sheeple. It was the inept government that triggered this outbreak by utilising uneducated security guards and worse, did not protect the vulnerable in the first instance. I hold no hope for the immediate future. Lunatics in charge of the asylum..
Hi Bruce, need a “like” button. But as Aleksandr said, the people owning the media would still censor facts.
Cheers, Ian.
from @martynlloydiles
Here is a list, in no particular order, of the problems with Zoe Lee’s arrest.
1. She probably did not commit the crime of incitement. It requires first, intent, and second, for the crime incited to have actually happened. (See Crimes Act 1958 (Vic) s 321G). She was probably falsely arrested.
2. Daniel Andrews claimed, when questioned the following day (today), that he had not seen the video. This is either a lie, or he specifically told his staff not to show it to him so that he could say he had not seen it.
3. The Assistant Police Commissioner (APC) distinguished her event from BLM because hers was during stage 4 lockdown, and BLM was during stage 3. Wilfully deceptive. Ballarat – the location of Zoe’s event – is in stage 3 lockdown.
4. The APC distinguished her event from BLM on the basis that BLM encouraged social distancing and mask wearing. So did her event, very specifically… I quote, “All social distancing measures are to be followed so we don’t get arrested please. Please wear a mask unless you have a medical reason not to.” Again, wilfully deceptive.
5. The APC said, “While this deadly virus doesn’t discriminate, we won’t discriminate and we can’t discriminate, in holding people to account.” – err, Black Lives Matter, anyone??? This made me snort my coffee out my nose. VicPol are not enforcing a righteous standard, but a political one. Agree with their politics, they lie to defend you. Disagree, they lie to falsely arrest you.
6. The police simply do not have to handcuff a person, do not have to arrest a person, and do not have to execute a search warrant under these circumstances. Doing do is unusual on all three counts. The doing of all three, in front of her family, whilst pregnant and compliant, is nothing short of intimidation tactics. (Not to mention she committed no crime, see point 1).
7. From her interview the following day: “Sorry about my bimbo moment, but I didn’t realise I wasn’t allowed to. I wanted to protest in Melbourne but obviously realised I wasn’t allowed to do that… so I just wanted to feel like I was doing something, you know standing up for human rights, and you know I am just a passionate person and I am sick of the lockdowns, I am sick of hearing about suicides, I personally lost my job, and I am just sick of watching the economy collapse. It got to the point where I just wanted to peacefully protest.” Okay, so she is not some sort of anti-lockdown fanatic, or serial protester, or any such thing… and she intended no harm. This accords with the phrasing of her event – among other words, she said, “Here in Ballarat we can be a voice for those in stage 4 lockdowns.”
8. Despite point 7, above, the APC implied very heavily in his press conference that she probably had a history of negative police interactions which led to her handcuffing. Rather unfair conjecture.
9. Even if she did seem to breach the Crimes Act, the Act is not allowed to be applied in a way that infringes on her freedom to politically communicate. This is a well known constitutional law doctrine in Australia, and state law is limited on this basis.
10. Even if she did seem to breach the Crimes Act, she has a further protection. The Victorian Police are not allowed to carry out their duties in a manner that breaches the Victorian Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities which includes the rights to “peaceful assembly and freedom of association” and “freedom of expression”
11. The APC called it “That serious offence of inciting a protest” – actually, what she did (well, didn’t do – see point 1) is the most utterly benign, low level crimes. Their actions were outrageously disproportionate.
12. The arresting officers later told Zoe they didn’t want to do it. If this is true, then it’s as I suspected – politicised leaders in the police force (a change of government usually changes that – hint, hint Victoria).
Summary: Andrews lied, the Assistant Police Commissioner lied, the media didn’t bother holding them to account. The bored, Facebook-surfing police went digging to find an offence which they could use to “teach her a lesson” based on the fact they disagreed with her politics… and misread the offence, or hoped nobody would read it, thereby booking her for something she did not do, in handcuffs, in front of her children, and made off with her devices and searched her home.
This is the latest in a long line of incidents of VicPol persecuting those with political differences. See my earlier posts.
Somebody wake me up already. I don’t like this dream.
The police officer reminds Zoe that she has the right to communicate with a legal practitioner, then confiscates all means of communication (except pen & paper) in the house!
Freedom of speech is the greatest threat to the Socialist way of control and Hitler, as a National socialist wrote guides to what was acceptable and what was forbidden. Today’s politicians from the left are copying the worst aspects of Hitler’s deranged ideas because they see that is a way to justify their fascist views.
Daniel Andrews has been given total control through the State of emergency. Anything that he cares to proclaim is the law and therefore, Victoria transfers from a democracy to a dictatorship. By refusing to accept Federal help when all other States accepted it , has resulted in the bungled hotel quarantine and over 500 consequential deaths. Compounded by setting, an impossible no-new-cases target that is so unrealistic that it means forever in lock-down.
The Victorian population has been placed in an unbelievable state, with potentially horrific consequences that are yet to be revealed.
The answer to the tragedy of the Victorian government and police is to use the Law as a weapon. Overwhelm the politicians and police with legal actions, from personal malfeasance of office to breaching our rights under Common Law.
Rather than blogs and editorials we need good legal minds to undertake a full attack on Victorian politicians and police.
Law if society’s option to violence against the oppression of our self appointed masters.
As of today Ballarat has no new cases.
https://www.thecourier.com.au/story/6862965/regional-victoria-drops-below-14-day-average-case-threshold/
This police action is clearly overreach.There is no medical reason to justify such extreme force.
Victoria seems to have too many mentally ill people shot while resisting arrest.
Their track record on Pell and Lawyer X is dismal.
Both the NSW and Commonwealth police forces have been carefully trained in community relations.
Moves to retrain Victorian police could not come too soon.
When is the Victorian WorkSafe/WorkCover Authority would step up, do their job, and require Andrews to comply with the Occupational Health & Safety Act 2004.
Andrews, as an employer has numerous obligations under the Act, he has failed in his “Duty of Care” (s20) and there is the serious potential that he can be charged with multiple (hundreds of) counts of his much lauded (by himself) s39A “Industrial Manslaughter”.
There is a small indie new organization, Rebel News.
Their Australia correspondent, Avi Yemeni, was tackle arrested in Melbourne in the last week or do, then visited after release by the stasi to be told he is on a list.
The Canadian correspondent within a few days of the same time had basically the same experience in Canada.
There is an apocryphal story about how normal police can be turned into accomplished effective torturers in just a few months.
In reflecting on that story in light of the madness and hunger of the fanatic’s leading major issues in the public square, and I think it really time to be very concerned.
Freedom of speech, thought, travel, religion, privacy, are all under severe assault by a large coalition of powerful, corrupt and committed players.
Another Solzhenetsyn proverb worth thinking about : “To do a great evil, one must be convinced they are doing a great good.”