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Remember when Australian police attempted to bill conservative commentator Milo Yiannopoulos for the privilege of not being torn to pieces by a violent leftist mob? The police claimed that simply doing their job of keeping public order amounted to ‘providing security’ for an event, which sounded to most reasonable people as more like a protection racket.
Reasonable people might also ask that if the cops can try and stiff a single conservative speaking event for hundreds of thousands of dollars, where’s the multi-million-dollar bill for the ‘pro-Palestine’ mobs who’ve been bellowing anti-Semitic hate in Australian cities week in, week out, for a year, now? Why haven’t the thugs who’ve locked the prime minister out of his own office been billed, let alone moved along?
Police could soon have the power to reject protests that stretch over months, as a clearly frustrated NSW Premier Chris Minns decried the more than $5m spent on controlling pro-Palestine rallies and attacked the leader of the protest movement as a “professional demonstrator” […]
The Premier hit out at Josh Lees, a leading member of the Palestine Action Group who has lodged weekly applications for the past year to march in Sydney since the October 7 Hamas atrocities in Israel, agreeing with the description of the activist as a “professional protester”.
I’m sure you’ll be surprised as I was to learn that Lees is a far-left extremist.
Mr Lees writes for Red Flag, the outlet of Socialist Alternative, which declares itself “Australia’s largest Marxist group”, and regularly calls for the overthrow of capitalism.
He was also a leader of the Lockdown to Zero movement, demanding that the then-Berejiklian government maintain strict Covid-19 lockdowns and branding the loosening of restrictions as “an offensive against the working class” by “the rich and powerful”.
Mr Lees has also been spokesperson for the Refugee Action Coalition, organising protests at the 2011 ALP National Conference against then-prime minister Julia Gillard’s asylum-seeker policies.
The former University of Sydney tutor was arrested during the “Occupy Sydney” movement that camped outside the Reserve Bank in Martin Place in 2011.
Boy, he’s a jack-off of all trades, isn’t he? If only he would learn a trade and earn an honest living and contribute something useful to society.
Mr Minns emphasised he was not seeking changes that would affect union protests or industrial disputes, but police should be in a position to deny repeat applications for marches through Sydney if they didn’t have the resources to deal with it.
“If you were putting on a rock concert on the weekend, you would have to pay NSW police to keep the public safe – this all comes from NSW taxpayers’ back pockets.”
NSW Opposition Leader Mark Speakman called on Mr Minns to immediately implement a user-pays system for serial protesters, with a general rule against authorisation if organisers of repeat protests failed to meet the costs.
This, then, is entirely different to trying to stand over a single, entirely lawful, speaking event.
“The cost is huge… so I’m going to have a review into the resourcing that police put into these marches, and it’s my view that police should be able to deny a request for a march due to stretched police resourcing,” [Minns] said.
Police were burnt out and tired, he added, and other important work had had to be sidelined.
“I think taxpayers should be in a position to say we would prefer that money spent on roadside breath testing, domestic violence investigations, knife crimes, rather than the huge resources that’s going into the city and the community.”
“Our resources are being stretched; it costs millions of dollars to police and marshal these protests and it’s completely reasonable for the police to take that into consideration when Form 1 applications are lodged with the courts,” Mr Minns said.
“Ultimately, this is a huge drain on the public purse”.
“Huge drain on the public purse” seems to be Josh Lees’ entire life plan.
