When the taxpayer-funded Marxist propaganda collective ABC wails to ‘tone it down’ after the alleged attack on MP Helen Haines, what they really mean is ‘bury any news of leftist violence’. Because that’s how it looks from here. And, boy, have they got their work cut out for them.
When the news of the horrific attack on Haines broke, the ABC fell over itself to trumpet unfounded claims casting blame on the ‘far-right’ and the ‘manosphere’. That narrative fell apart in less than a day, as independent journalists exposed attacker Brendan Nugent’s track record of vocal far-left environmental and ‘pro-Palestine’ activism.
The ABC’s double-standard on left-wing violence becomes quadruple when it comes to violence against One Nation as it surges in the polls leading up to the Victorian election. On Sunday, the ABC’s big story was that a ON candidate made some off-colour jokes and said mean things about Muslims, years ago.
Only buried 27 paragraphs deep in the story, where the ABC knows its audience will never scroll, is a brief mention of the latest in the long litany of left-wing violence targeting One Nation in Victoria. In sleepy rural Ballarat, the feral left vandalised a pub and several cars, after the publican had the temerity to support the second-most popular political party in the state. The vandalism occurred hours before One Nation leader Warren Pickering addressed a Melbourne rally against mass migration.
Yet, the ABC’s “In Short” summary at the head of the page doesn’t even mention it at all.
Ironically, that very same Sunday evening, a One Nation volunteer was brutally bashed in another Victorian town. The attack was so horrific that not even the ABC could ignore it: the story ran on Tuesday with, for once, little attempt at minimising the grotesque facts.
Pickering responded to the Ballarat vandalism with appropriate gravity. The damage to private property, he said, “will not be condoned”, adding that vandalism in Bass, Hastings and other locations had gone “far too far”. Local ON candidate Paul Ballinger, contesting Eureka against Labor’s Michaela Settle, called the attack “an attack on democracy” and “cowardly behaviour”. He has shown rather more resilience than the criminals might have hoped, posting images of One Nation supporters laughing beside the ruined posters.
“They can graffiti our signs call us names but they can’t break our spirit or sense of humour,” Ballinger wrote.
The pattern is neither isolated nor confined to the One Nation campaign. John Barnes’ signs in Essendon have been decorated with devil horns and the word fascist. In Bass, candidate Nikole Schellekens’s billboard was torn apart and Liberal candidate Rochelle Halstead’s was decorated with blacked out teeth, an eye-patch and a moustache. In the Mornington Peninsula, Ashli Beards and Peter Angelico received false facial hair and a homophobic slur. In Mernda, Liberal candidate Amanda Dow’s husband was taken to hospital with facial injuries. He was allegedly assaulted while trying to get her signs back from a man removing them. A 59-year-old man has been charged.
“We can disagree without destroying each other’s property. Surely we’re better than this,” Schellekens said.
Yet Labor has spent months cultivating precisely this climate of hostility. Assistant Immigration Minister Matt Thistlethwaite branded One Nation “dangerous” and “a direct threat to our country”, even while Anthony Albanese two-facedly preached about lowering the political temperature after Haines was attacked. The moral clarity has been rather convenient for those doing the shouting. There is no shortage of hostility – there is merely selective disapproval of it.
The damage extends beyond election signage. On Anzac Day, vandals sprayed “death to the ADF” and “kill the troops” across the Reservoir RSL. Two women were charged over graffiti at the Heidelberg RSL, while the Answering the Call memorial in Port Melbourne was covered in red paint and inscribed with “no war 4 aus”. Earlier, vandals pulled down the Pioneer Monument in Flagstaff Gardens and marked with “death to ‘Australia’”. These attacks occurred while OnePath, an outlet funded with $308,000 by Tony Burke’s department, broadcast Taliban representatives calling Australian soldiers terrorists. Only after a public backlash did the government move to revoke that grant.
Victoria’s Graffiti Prevention Act already makes unauthorised marking of visible property an offence carrying up to two years’ imprisonment. While political commentary enjoys protection against the separate charge of offensive graffiti, vandalism of businesses, vehicles and campaign material enjoys no such sanctuary. Just don’t hold your breath waiting for stiff sentences.
One Nation proposes making offenders clean up their damage, enforcing maximum penalties and removing illegal graffiti from public property within 48 hours. As ever, Labor’s preferred solution is to denounce crime while declining to enforce the law. Perhaps the ABC might mention that, instead of burying it.
Ha, ha, ha, who am I kidding...
